As I’ve spoken about in the past, as a kid I didn’t really have much interest in monster movies. They were more the fascination of my younger brother Ken, and so they would wind up on television whenever the 4:30 Movie would run their yearly week-long marathon, or they’d show up on some other channel. Consequently, Marvel’s ongoing GODZILLA title was of no real interest to be, despite the fact…
These panels from Incredible Hulk #176 contain maybe the only rack focus match cut in comics.
Books like Watchmen famously use match cuts between panels brilliantly, but I've never seen a comic use an out of focus middle panel to simulate the transition.
It was momentum, pure and simple, that kept me purchasing DEFENDERS each and every month through this period. As it was a Marvel team title, on some level I felt as though i “had to” buy it or risk missing something important. Which is crazy, but also a part of the key to Marvel’s success in those days. The pervading sell that everything that happened in the Marvel Universe was contributing to a…
Godzilla towering over the Golden Gate Bridge in issue #3 of Marvel Comics' Godzilla, King of the Monsters (October, 1977). Art by Herb Trimpe and Tony Dezuniga, colors byDon Warfield.
Godzilla's size fluctuated greatly during this comic book series, and that's before Henry (Yellowjacket) Pym shrunk him down to the size of a rat!
The top of the Golden Gate Bridge's towers is 746 feet above water. The depth of San Francisco Bay about where Godzilla is depicted standing is around 370 feet. Godzilla's height in the Showa era films is approximately 150 feet.
Even if you assume Godzilla is somehow treading water with his feet and tail (which is what I assume every time he "stands" in a body of water that is deeper than he is tall), he would be well over 800 feet tall in this drawing. And that's taking into account that later panels show Godzilla walking around the bridge with the water barely covering his feet. Were Godzilla truly standing on the floor of the bay and towering over the bridge, he would be over 1,000 feet tall.
In this same issue Godzilla is depicted as closed to his film size when Hercules has to hold up the kaiju's foot to keep it from trampling the Angel.
Of course, this problem wasn't limited to the comic book series. Godzilla (2014) had the same problem of scale when the Big G attacked the Golden Gate in that film.