Tag Archives: the great gatsby

Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre #1 is a delight for your inner snob and your inner child

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Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre #1

Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre #1 reminds me of quickly flipping between educational cartoons on PBS and something more brainless and action-packed on the major networks. (I grew up in an era of Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Boomerang, and more so cartoons were never just for Saturday.) Cartoonist Tom Scioli weds literature and good old monster stomping in a high drama, high destruction comic book. The book opens with a straight adaptation of The Great Gatsby with Nick Carraway’s omniscient narration and Jay Gatsby throwing a huge flapper-filled party. However, Gatsby isn’t present and spends his time pining across the bay for Daisy Buchanan. Then, Godzilla shows up and wreaks havoc on multiple continents leading to a slew of fictional and non-fictional guest stars appearing to try to stop him. But Gatsby still only has eyes for Daisy.

The whole concept of Godzilla Monsterpiece Theatre is a tribute to Scioli’s versatility as a cartoonist. He gets to play with different genres aka proverbial toys in the sandbox and has a blast while pairing the over-the-top images with direct quotes from The Great Gatsby or Fitzgerald-esque prose. Some genres are familiar to readers of Tom Scioli’s work. Jay Gatsby and the G-Force is totally Transformers vs. G.I. Joe. But, Scioli goes a step beyond and mars his pink and yellow palette with black diagonal lines showing the inevitability of nature as Godzilla treads on the G-Force’s Thomas Edison-designed tanks and weaponry with the care of your four year old sibling walking all over your immaculately constructed Lego set.

Another engaging part of Godzilla Monsterpiece Theatre is its (At times, dark) sense of humor. From his first appearance in the middle of a Charleston contest at Gatsby’s mansion, Godzilla is a walking sight gag inserting his B-movie eyes, teeth, claws, and of course, nuclear breath (Because Godzilla 1998, this is not.) into the world of American high school required reading. A set of two pages that made me guffaw was when Godzilla flees the United States and comes upon an ocean liner resembling an ocean liner, and of course, there’s a reference to an iceberg followed by total annihilation and life boats spilling out on the dark Atlantic. Also, this book is full of puns and silly quips like Sherlock Holmes saying “The game is afoot” while examining a giant Godzilla footprint in his country home in Ipswich. When it comes to dialogue and character interactions, Tom Scioli has a free-flowing, wink-at-the-audience style that matches his playful visuals and use of color.

When Scioli draws large structures like boats, buildings, and houses, his work reminds me a lot of the cutaway tours of different superhero headquarters in old issues of Avengers or Fantastic Four comics. There’s an attention to detail and exquisite world-building that again gives the comic a feel of well-made toys being played with by a master player. I wouldn’t be surprised if tours of Gatsby’s mansion, Cyborg Jules Verne’s sub, and other delightful venues ended up in the backmatter of this series. This kind of storytelling architecture also makes everything easy to follow and helps you not lose sight of how jarring Godzilla is in this world as Tom Scioli serves up pages of him chomping on New York City bridges, double-decker buses, and even splashes of him swatting World War I biplanes like flies.

Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre #1 is a delight for your inner snob and your inner child. It’s truly a marvelous piece of sequential storytelling, old sport!

Story/Art: Tom Scioli
Story: 8.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 8.5 Recommendation: Buy

IDW provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

Purchase: Zeus Comics – Kindle

Exclusive: Original Art Pages added to Clover Press’ The Great Gatsby campaign

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The Great Gatsby has captivated readers for generations and serves as a testament to the power of literature to transport us to another time and place and capture the essence of the human experience. F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s classic is being brought to life in a whole new way with The Great Gatsby: The Essential Graphic Novel Adaptation. Writer Ted Adams and artist Jorge Coelho have created a faithful graphic novel adaptation that captures all of the beauty and power of the original work, with stunning illustrations and compelling storytelling sure to delight fans of the book and newcomers alike. Being published by Clover Press, it’s currently funding on Kickstarter and blown past its goal.

Now, you can get an even more unique reward as original art pages are being offered as add-ons in the campaign. Once you pick your initial reward, you’ll be able to choose a one-of-a kind piece of art used to create the graphic novel. Each is ink on paper, 11″ x 17″. Hurry and don’t miss out this original art!

Check out the beautiful art below!

Kent Williams, Jim Woodring, The Balbusso Twins, and Beehive Books Present Illustrated Editions of Classic Books on Kickstarter

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Award-winning painter Kent Williams, legendary Frank cartoonist Jim Woodring, and the renowned Italian illustrators known as the Balbusso Twins are collaborating with Beehive Books to create lush, new illustrated editions of literary classics and forgotten gems. Having previously released six award-winning volumes with acclaimed artists Rebekka Dunlap, Brecht Evens, Dave McKean, Paul Pope, Yuko Shimizu, and Bill Sienkiewicz, Beehive Books is returning to Kickstarter with a new campaign to crowdfund three new volumes of Illuminated Editions, the company’s distinctive line of book art editions of literary classics.   

Beehive Books’s Illuminated Editions features some of the finest talents in contemporary art, singular design sensibilities, the highest production values, and a special emphasis on comics and graphic art. Each Illuminated Edition  also features original essays from luminaries of literature, art and film, including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham 

The three new titles run the gamut: one beloved classic Roaring Twenties tale of extravagance and excess, one chilling compendium of spectral Japanese folktales, and one unjustly obscure work of mind bending visionary science fiction.

The new books in the Illuminated Editions line are:

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by the Balbusso Twins
Featuring an introduction by Nathan Robinson.

The Italian illustrators known as the Balbusso Twins are taking on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY, bringing out the richness and satire and sorrow that suffuses this saga of wealth and corruption and decadence and love. Their modern illustration style highlights the incredible relevance of Fitzgerald’s story, which has only seemed to increase over time. Their illustrations bring us into Gatsby’s world ― but they also bring Gatsby into ours. 

KWAIDAN & SHADOWINGS by Lafcadio Hearn, illustrated by Kent Williams
Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, a foreword by writer Kyoko Yoshida, and an essay by Bon Koizumi.

The great painter and multimedia artist Kent Williams is depicting the supernatural Japanese stories of Lafcadio Hearn, originally published in his books KWAIDAN and SHADOWINGS. These books are full of ghost stories, nightmares and strange tales ― of possessed forests, of monks tormented by demons and ghosts, of corpse brides, man-eating goblins, and undead samurai. 

KWAIDAN & SHADOWINGS

 A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, illustrated by Jim Woodring
Featuring an introduction by Alan Moore.

Visionary cartoonist Jim Woodring has chosen to illustrate an unclassifiable 1920 novel by the legendary British writer David Lindsay. A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is a baffling amalgam of mysticism, science fiction, sexual politics, and outrageous fantasy, and stands as one of the greatest works of sustained, untrammeled imagination ever achieved. Woodring’s drawings capture the writhing currents of interacting forces that lie beneath the wonderfully arcane prose. 

The Illuminated Editions books come in three print editions: a slipcase hardcover, a signed and numbered edition, and a sketched and lettered edition. All nine titles in this series are available through the latest campaign and each title also comes as a DRM-free digital PDF, which is included along with every print edition.

The standard Illuminated Editions is an oversize 9×12″ hardcover, bound in sewn signatures, and housed in an elaborately embossed and debossed die-cut slipcase, silk-screened or foil-stamped with artwork. The interior is printed on creamy, acid-free heavy-weight 140gsm uncoated paper with a fine tooth, and each edition includes a minimum of ten full page illustrations, along with numerous spot drawings, illuminated letters, and special design pieces. The entire package is designed by Maëlle Doliveux with a restrained graphic boldness, and an unparalleled eye for beauty, clarity and readability. These editions have been honored with a number of awards and prizes, winning multiple Communication Arts Design Competitions, several Bronze and Silver Cubes from the Art Director’s Club, and three nominations for the Locus Awards.