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Review: Godzilla: Oblivion #5

I wasn’t that big a fan of the character art for this series.  The cartoonish look that seemed to be rough pencil sketches felt more like storyboards than comic book panels.  The one illustration of Gino-Godzilla looked like he was constipated and trying hard to relieve himself.  But the image of King Caesar sitting atop broken buildings as though they were forming a throne redeemed the entire issue for me. The other way the art betrayed the nature of the book is at the conclusion to the series.  I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what the hell happened at the climax.  I have reread the damn thing five times and still cannot make out what the ending to the Oblivion storyline.  The humans made a very GODZILLAOBLIVION_05_coverAdrastic decision to their kaiju problem, which made for a great WTF moment that I thoroughly enjoyed.   But the last five panels were so damn cryptic (and not in the Stanley Kubrick/Christopher Nolan kind of way) that I left the book unsure of the definitive story.

Let me say this: Joshua Fialakov took a big risk with making the end to this series so amazing in its severity.  I liked the pacing in the last issue and the build up to this final issue.  However, for the grim nature of such a book, more defined artwork would have added gravitas and tone to its ending.  The art was great, and the story was great.  But the two did not work together for the sake of this series.

I believe the ending lead into the next series Godzilla: Rage Across Time, but I am not sure because those last five panels made no sense in their sequential storytelling.  For me, this ending proved to be a let down compared to the enjoyment of the previous issues.

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Godzilla: Oblivion #5 Writer: Joshua Hale Fialkov Artist: Brian Churilla Publisher: IDW Publishing Price: $3.99 Format: Mini-Series; Print/Digital

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