Summer of Kaiju: Kill All Monsters!

As a kid, I spent summers watching old Godzilla VHS tapes from the local Blockbuster. Since then, I've associated the sweltering season with giant monsters flattening cities into rubble. In that spirit, I'm doing a series of kaiju-themed posts for the dog days of June and July...

"Kill All Monsters!" is a comic written by Michael May and illustrated by Jason Copland. It's set in a bleak post-apocalyptic world, one where towering mutants (inadvertently created by nuclear weapon tests in the '50s) have already destroyed Earth's cities and driven mankind underground. The only hope for destroying these mutants is the Kill Team, a group of (what else?) giant robots with all-too-human pilots.

"Kill All Monsters!" wears its influences on its sleeve (one of the robots even has a Voltron-like cat head), but it never resorts to regurgitating cliches. There's a surprising amount of character work and plot twists to accompany the battle scenes, which gives them more narrative heft than something like "Pacific Rim." Don't worry, though - there are still lots of knock-down, drag-out fights, with clean cartoonish art that's reminiscent of Jeff Smith's work in "Bone" and "Shazam."

The first volume of "Kill All Monsters!" was Kickstarted into print some years ago and then picked up by Dark Horse in a handsome Omnibus edition. I highly recommend getting your hands on it if you're a kaiju fan.