You dig giant monsters!
I dig giant monsters!
We dig giant monsters!
Chicks dig giant monsters!
Kaiju have always been a favorite of nerd culture, and with Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim on the way, now is a good time to be a fan of the massive beasts. If you want some kaiju comics to go with your kaiju movies, though, Josh Finney, Michael Colbert, and Patrick McEvoy (referring to themselves as Team Kaiju) have a Kickstarter project for you.
“World War Kaiju” follows a journalist and a CIA agent as they attempt to find out what caused the birth of the behemoths that ravage the major cities of the world. Was it merely an irresponsible accident, or a deliberate action for someone’s profit? As fun as it is to just see giant reptiles, bugs, and apes beat the snot out of each other, the kaiju genre thrives when it’s at ground level, from the perspective of the little man (of course, the little man is anyone compared to Godzilla-sized titans). When the scale is massive, kaiju are average — when we are mostly restricted to human perspectives, though, the sheer size of the monsters is able to instill a sense of awe. If you have to choose between primarily man-scaled and secondarily monster scaled or primarily monster-scaled and secondarily man-scaled, the former is, in my opinion, the best choice, and that seems to be where Team Kaiju are taking this.
A big draw to this title is McEvoy’s finely rendered art. McEvoy has done a handful of comic art in the past, such as the intereriors to Archaia’s “Starkweather: Immortal” and the covers to Boom’s “Fall of Cthulhu,” as well as assorted fanasy/sci-fi illustration for the likes of Fantasy Flight Games (swoon), Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, and Blizzard. The problem with many comic artists with stylistic similarities to McEvoy, is that their smooth, detailed art comes at the cost of static motion. From the preview pages available on the Kickstarter page, we can see that isn’t the case with McEvoy’s work in “World War Kaiju.”The preview pages are gorgeous, and enough to put money on down without any knowledge what the project is about. Thankfully, we already know, so that seals the deal.
Right now, the target goal is $15,000 to make an eighty-page landscape graphic novel, but among the many stretch goals (seriously, there are a bunch) are the $25,000 and $35,000 goals, which double and triple the length, respectively. $10.00 is enough to get you a DRM-free copy of the graphic novel, but if you bump it up to $25.00 you get the printed book itself, plus the digital copy and other digital doodads. At $35.00, you get a poster of your choice, of a coffee mug, with the book, but if you upgrade that to $55.00, you get all of the posters, a mini-comic, and a post card set. Aside from the $400.00 retailer incentive, with 20 copies of the book, all other incentives beyond the $55.00 one include the same rewards as an addition to their own, such as the $150.00 inked commission or the $200.00 chance to have your face in the book.
So far, the book has raised about $2,500.00, but you still have 56 days left to ponder whether or not you dig giant monsters (hint: you do). Once you’ve realized that’s an easy choice to make, head over to their Kickstarter page and get donating.
