In 123 AD, a disgraced Roman war hero is sent to defend a Roman garrison stationed in remote Scotland from a spate of mysterious killings. The hero reclaims his rightful warrior status by uniting with the local Druids and vanquishing a terrifying supernatural beast.
JOHNNY MONSTER #1 (of 3) story JOSHUA WILLIAMSON art & cover J.C. GRANDE
Johnny Monster is the world’s foremost super-star monster hunter, but what the world doesn’t know is that he was raised by the same monsters he’s “hunting”! Now, in order to save his adoptive family…he must fight them! From the acclaimed writer of DEAR DRACULA and Necessary Evil, Johnny Monster mixes Tom Strong with Godzilla movies by way of Tarzan and the Phantom to create a compelling and different monster mash!
FEBUARY 18 – 32 PAGES – FC – $3.50
(There’s actually a lot of cool stuff coming from Image in February, but I’ll save the other interesting ones to talk about next week.)
The Day the Earth Stopped
The Asylum is at it again, this time ripping off The Day the Earth Stood Still, but the alien invaders are a bunch of giant robots. You can’t say that The Asylum has bad ideas; it’s just the cheap execution of them that sucks.
I don’t know what I’m doing putting this way down here when clearly it needs a post all its own, but I thought maybe you’d like to see some art from Kill All Monsters! by me and Jason Copland.
Monsters vs. Aliens
What’s the world coming to when you have to send out giant monsters to fight giant robots?
Something’s been bugging me since I turned over the Awesome List to Newsarama and that’s that I know some of you reading this are interested in those news bits but aren’t going to start reading the whole Newsarama blog for them. So rather than just drop the feature here completely, I think I’m going to start doing a recap, not only of the Newsarama Awesome List, but any other items from that blog that especially catch my attention. You’ll be getting the items a day later than Newsarama readers will, but you’ll be getting them.
For the sake of completeness I’m going to go back to when I stopped doing the feature here, so some of this will be old news until I get caught up.
Red 5’s Afterburn heads to Hollywood. It’s a cool comic – at least as far as I can tell so far – but the real exciting part about this news is that it makes an Atomic Robo movie that much more possible.
Whoops! I didn’t mean to take Friday off; it just sort of worked out that way. Spent the day crowd-watching at the Mall with my family and then celebrating my Dad’s birthday (he was out of the country on the actual day) that night. We had a great weekend though. Hope you all did too.
This week’s monster killer is Voltron as seen by Dave Perillo. Dave’s got a wonderful blog full of his whimsical interpretations of popular characters. It’s well worth checking out, especially for the series of slasher flick icons he did in October.
I’m not a big fan of AMC because they interrupt their movies with commercials and I remember when they didn’t. They used to be what Turner Classic Movies is now and it’s a shame they’ve become more like TNT. But their blog has been especially good lately with posts about a new Godzilla DVD collection and old Godzilla toys.
The Daily Dollop has a great post about a very serious matter: The Intergovernmental Panel on Monster Attacks’ summary of its upcoming report, “Current Status of Global Preparations for Giant Monster Attacks.” Required reading for those concerned about such things, as we all should be.
I meant to share this picture with you earlier. It was given to me at FallCon by an artist pal of mine, Charles Raymond. Actually, Charles gave it to me to give to my son because Charles knows how into Godzilla David is. I love that he included a giant Robbie the Robot for Godzilla to fight.
My five-year-old son David is a total Godzilla nerd now. On Wednesdays, I pick him up from school and we immediately head to the comic book store. I also pick him up on Mondays and he always asks me, “Are we going to the comic book store?”
“No, that’s on Wednesday.”
So, on Wednesdays, when I say, “Yep! Today’s the day!,” he’s all, “Yay! Comic book store! Comic book store!”
Only he’s not necessarily looking for comics when he goes. He’s looking for Godzilla stuff.
Godzilla comics are okay (we picked up Art Adams’ Creature Featuresa couple of weeks ago), but he’d be just as happy with a toy or a movie if I was willing to shell out that much. One of the employees at the store is also a Godzilla fan and he and David talk Fire Rodan, King Ghidorah, and the origins of Black Mothra and White Mothra as I stand by and realize what my friends and I sound like to my wife whenever the topic of Hellboy comes up.
A little while ago we found a couple of DVDs from the Hanna Barbera Godzillacartoon. I’d forgotten how much I liked that show as a kid. Godzilla has a cool fight with a different giant-monster each week, the human characters are all likable and pretty smart, and it’s amazing that I actually, really like Godzooky. I usually hate the tiny-version-of-the-hero sidekicks, but Godzooky manages to be funny and endearing instead of annoying.
In other giant monster news, Quick Stop Entertainment’s “DVD Late Show” reviews some “B” movie DVDs, including Space Amoeba, which I now really have to see.
Last night, I watched Curse of the Komodoand Komodo vs. Cobra. TiVo had picked them up because of the Jungle Island Filled with Giant Monsters angle, but they had way more in common than just that. Curse was filmed in 2004; KvC was made a year later by the same director, many of the same actors, shot at the same location, and featuring the exact same plot with much of the same dialogue. The only difference in the plot was that Curse had a group of thieves stranded on the island with the scientists and monsters, and KvC turned them into environmental activists. And added a giant cobra. (Which is cool, but then KvC lost points for actually making the komodo look worse than it did in the first one. No small feat.) They’re in no way “good,” but if you have any kind of affection for bad “B” movies, they have their points.
