Giant monsters have made a real comeback in recent years. Though Godzilla and his various enemies and allies have become a staple of pop culture, Pacific Rim really helped to reignite the kaiju-love. But what happens when all those monsters are defeated? What happens when they’re not stomping cities, but confined to a small island somewhere? Well, it turns out it’s a lot like any other prison, just with a lot more fire-breath and guards that have to be a little bigger. And that’s the whole premise behind Zander Cannon’s “Kaijumax”, published by Oni Press.
Read on as we chat with Cannon about “Kaijumax”, a different version of Monster Island, Ultraman, kaiju sland, prison tattoos, and whole lot more. “Kaijumax” #1 hits shops 4/8 and FOC is today. Pre-order it with code FEB151522
Your new series from Oni Press, “Kaijumax” is like Godzilla meets Orange Is The New Black. What led to the idea of using the trope of Monster Island not as a birthplace or home of the monsters, but as the place they’re imprisoned once they’re beaten?
Zander Cannon: I always liked the idea of a Monster Island, since it just conjured up in my head a bunch of stupid stuff about what the monsters would do there when there wasn’t a city to crush or an army to fight. They’d battle and do all the stuff they do in the movies, but of course I always like to add a little bit of silliness to it, and then a little pathos as well, so I figure they’d talk and argue and form alliances and ostracize each other, etc. When I was casting about for a conceptual hook and a for story structure for the series, that’s when I settled on the idea of a prison. Prison dramas are pretty interesting in that they’re constrained by their small area and so everything relies on the interpersonal relationships: power and respect and who has what reputation and who has leverage over whom. I thought that dovetailed nicely with these monsters and creatures and kaiju who are always going toe to toe to see who’s the biggest and toughest. And there’s such a lyrical flow to prison dramas with all the slang and the menace and the harsh violence and so forth, so then peppering it with kaiju movie tropes just makes it all funny.
“Kaijumax” seems to center around Electrogor, a giant bug kaiju brought to the prison in the beginning of this first issue and who desperately wants to get back to his children. While Electrogor seems to be the center and the character meant to be relatable to the reader, it seems like the larger cast will play nearly as large a role. Is this pretty accurate?
ZC: The book is definitely an ensemble drama; everyone’s got their own part to play and their own time to take the spotlight. My goal is to make each issue a more-or-less self-contained story that you could pick up cold, but continue the threads of each character throughout. I don’t like books where there is a ton of continuity that you need to remember; there are just a few key things that carry over between issues and between seasons and all that will be on the inside front cover. Electrogor is a pretty classic prison-movie viewpoint character, and very useful for guiding us through the ins and outs of the prison, but while we follow him a great deal, we’ll be checking in with all of the characters along the way. I wanted to have each main character that we follow have a particular arc: Someone who’s amassing power, someone who’s trying to become a better person, someone who’s battling addiction, someone who’s being manipulated, etc. All the classic prison stories and character archetypes, all with a kaiju movie twist.
Even with a premise seemingly ridiculous as “kaiju prison”, “Kaijumax” actually plays things pretty straight. The dialogue is pretty authentic and would fit in with most prison dramas. How do you manage to keep the balance between the prison movie story and the monster battle gags that are there for use?
ZC: Tone is pretty crucial in a book like this one. If I make it too silly, it loses its heft, but if it’s too serious, it would kind of betray the fundamental high concept of the book. Everything has to have both the over-the-top monster ridiculousness and the prison grit, and if there’s any plot element that’s exclusively one or the other, it gets chucked. It’s hard, because I’m constantly reading prison novels and narratives and watching monster movies, and they all give me great ideas for stories, but I have to check myself and make sure I’m not just setting up a story that would really fit better in a different comic.
Continued belowI do like to play the drama pretty straight, and rely on the mismatch and the monster tropes for the humor. I think it reinforces that things are serious for the characters, and that all the actions have a context as well as a consequence, and isn’t just there to be a funny gag. Gags can only get you so far before they just become a list of funny jokes; I like to have readers anticipate what’s going to happen and have that either pay off or surprise them.
I think a small thing that helps to give the world just another added touch of depth is all the slang that the kaiju use. From the more reptilian kaiju calling each other “my ‘lizza”, to cursing each other with “megafauna”, you have a lot of good ones, though I think my favorite is “Oh my Goj” which I can only hope is a reference to Godzilla’s original name of Gojira. How much fun have you had coming up with all the different slang terms for the kaiju?
ZC: It was totally fun, but there’s a compulsive side to it, too, in that I feel like every substantial swear word or slang term has to be a monster-related gag. Little details like that can sometimes grind the writing process to a halt as I just sit there staring at the ceiling, thinking of what word would be funniest. I’m sure it looks agonizing, me with my feet on the desk just sitting there, chewing on a pencil for an hour, just to call someone a ‘mothra-redking goat-sucker’.
I kind of worried that some of this stuff would be too arcane or hard to figure out, but I thought as long as it gave the dialogue the right cadence, readers would skim right over it and then come back later if they really wanted to decode it.
Not to just focus on the kaiju, you also have some Ultraman-type characters thrown in with the prison guards, led by Warden Kang, who’s infamous among the monsters. What else can you tell us about Kang and his fellow guards?
ZC: Kang is meant to be how I figure monsters would view Ultraman: completely invincible, indestructible, and sadistic. There are even a few episodes of Ultraman where they touch on this. It’s also fun to try to make this bright-colored space superhero into a malicious presence.
I’ve always liked that the name Kang is simultaneously a sinister, comic-booky name (like Kang the Conqueror) and also a completely ordinary Korean name. So it’s cool to have this name spoken of in hushed tones, then switch! have it turn out to just be an ordinary guy, and then switch again! have him turn out to be a terrifying giant warrior.
The implication is that all the guards have these science-magic badges and use them when things get real in the prison. Designing the various Ultra-versions of all the guards was a lot of fun, as well, trying to make them all distinct as well as making references to existing Ultraman characters and their imitators. Ultraman was how I got into the tokusatsu movies and shows, moreso than Godzilla, so I really wanted to make that aspect very complex and get into the heads of these characters
Even with Electrogor being the lead, I think the character that really steals the show is Hellmoth, a Mothman type kaiju complete with prison tattoos referencing the Point Pleasant accidents of 1966. Tell me we’re going to see more of him?
ZC: I love that so many people like the Hellmoth. Everyone who’s told me they have a favorite names him. And I thought the tattoos were a bit more obscure than they actually are — I was obviously aware of all the Mothman stuff, but I had to look up the dates and location, so I’m impressed that you know all that.
What’s funny about him is that when I wrote the script ages ago, I wrote in the panel description to go crazy on the tattoo designs because he was never going to be seen again. So much for that! Once people started telling me they liked him, I rewrote a whole section so that he would show up again and play a big part. So yes, he’s going to be back around, hopefully in a way people won’t expect.
Continued belowSome of the monsters are a little more familiar in design, while others seem to just be pieces and parts of others thrown together. What goes into designing each monster on the island?
ZC: Initially I did a lot of in-depth designing and adapting animals, but I found that while they might have been okay designs if I were doing an original monster series, they looked a little inauthentic as homages to existing monsters, so after a certain point I did a lot more lifting of specific parts of movie monsters so that they gave a sense of what archetype they were meant to refer to.
Also, and this is kind of my little comic book artist trick, I really just like each monster to have one element that stands out. A certain horn, a certain shape of arm or ridge of plates on its back, because that ends up being the thing I can build around each time. You don’t realize how complicated monsters get until you have to draw them a hundred times, but then you start seeing what’s important and interesting and distinctive about each monster and what’s just more stuff to have to draw.
You’ve already touched a little on the gangs that formed in the prison. In the first issue we see the Nation of Mecha, the Cryps (cryptids), and others. What’s the rest of the political landscape of the prison like? Which groups can we expect to see?
ZC: The gangs are my favorite part. While they don’t all directly correspond to real-life gangs, I like to take certain characteristics of real gangs and apply them to the kaiju gangs. Things like the power plays and the specific tattoos of the Cryptids are meant to emulate the Aryan Brotherhood, whereas the feeble hold that the Japanese Kaiju (or J-Pops, as the others refer to them) have on the power structure is meant to mirror the slide of the Yakuza or the Mafia into irrelevance. We’ll see a fair amount of another Japanese group, the Maketo gang, and their leader “The Don”, which more or less are representations of newer, younger gangs as well as newer, younger pop culture. We’re going to see a lot more of the various alien gangs, as well as the fierce rivalry on the outside (specifically, on the moon) between mob boss Victoria Von Vilestra and the native Lagos gang. And there’s always the small groups of ‘corner mons’ who run their little drug hustles (smog, dioxin, electricity, or even uranium) both on the outside and on the island.
And, as all prison literature likes to remind us, the guards are a gang as well. While some of them try to stick to the letter of the law, any time a kaiju crosses one of them, you can expect the rest to come down on him and the rest of his ‘homezillas’.
