A Monster Mash(-Up): On “Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre”
A review of Tom Scioli's "Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre," which is probably the strangest adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" you'll read this year.
Originally this series of pieces on comic book adaptations of novels was set to be four installments long. Then IDW sent over a review copy of Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre, from writer/artist Tom Scioli. I’ve read a couple of his other projects over the years, many of which involve him applying a style I’d call “absurdist Kirbytech” to various company-owned characters, from Transformers vs G.I. Joe to surreal riffs on DC Comics superheroes in Super Powers.
For my money, the most interesting Godzilla comics have been those where a creator gets to apply their own style to the project — James Stokoe’s Godzilla: The Half-Century War being a prime example. Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre begins with a fairly straightforward sequence of events set in the early 20th century, in which star-crossed lovers Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan are separated by war before jumping ahead in time to the 1920s. If you’ve ever wondered what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby would be like with more giant monsters, wonder no more.
These opening pages suggest that if Scioli had simply wanted to go the Classics Illustrated route, this would still be worth a read. There’s a great full-page image of Gatsby’s parties, followed immediately by a panel of a melancholy Gatsby staring into the distance, thinking of his lost love. And then a giant reptile shows up at Gatsby’s estate, Gatsby and Nick Carraway hop in a speedboat to check in on Daisy, and she and her husband join them in escaping Godzilla’s wrath.
All of this lets Scioli use the novel’s final sentence — “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — in the most literal way possible, accompanying a panel of the heroes retreating from Godzilla’s devastation by boat.
Things get weirder from there. Gatsby’s efforts to find Daisy — lost in the escape — and defeat Godzilla lead to him enlisting the assistance of (among others) Thomas Edison, Sherlock Holmes, and Count Dracula. There’s something decidedly off about the use of Jay Gatsby — morally conflicted Jay Gatsby, tragic antihero Jay Gatsby — in the role of square-jawed pulp hero, and that tension gives the book a strange humor that runs throughout its pages. The same is true for Nick Carraway, who at one point literally saves a cat from the monster’s rampage.
Alongside the absurdist humor and winking literary parody, there are also some moments of genuine terror. One page features Godzilla in shadow looming over a busy New York street; it’s a genuinely ominous image, and there’s a memorable dissonance between the image and the Fitzgerald pastiche in the narration accompanying it.
It’s notable that Nick Carraway is absent for a large portion of this narrative; instead, the boorish Tom Buchanan acts as Gatsby’s sidekick in this particular story. Curiously, Scioli isn’t the first writer to put Tom — a generally loathsome figure in Fitzgerald’s novel — in a more adventure-based context. In a 2010 review of Eric Rauchway’s novel Banana Republican, Joe Queenan noted that that novel’s version of Tom Buchanan was “more like Flashman in George MacDonald Fraser’s clever novels, a bounder who always lands on his feet but is by no means an imbecile.”
There’s a gloriously strange quality to this narrative; it’s a lovingly crafted yet deeply irreverent work. I’d say it’s the best simultaneous homage to and parody of The Great Gatsby since Kate Beaton’s series of comics inspired by the book; it’s also the best League of Extraordinary Gentlemen story not written by Alan Moore since this truly inspired work. Will this give you new insights into The Great Gatsby? Maybe not, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
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