Gfantis vs the Guest Monsters

by Matthew Dennion

There Are Giants in the Earth…

  Let me start this forward off by answering the following: what is a kaiju? That may seem like a rhetorical question to most fans who are reading this anthology, but let’s ask the question anyway, just to be clear as crystal to the new fans this sub-genre of sci-fi fandom is increasingly attracting these days.

  For the record, the word “kaiju” is a shortened form of what should more properly be called “dai kaiju” (sometimes spelled as a single word by us English-speaking gaijin, depending on one’s sense of lingual aesthetics). “Kaiju” is a Japanese word which roughly corresponds to the English term “monster,” but more specifically in its native language as “mysterious beast.” Which, I suppose, can qualify as “monster” depending on how one may choose to look at the creature in question. When the creature discussed happens to be enormously dangerous, then there is perhaps less to argue about regarding whether or not it’s appropriate to call it a “monster.” The word “dai” in Japanese corresponds to “giant,” so when combined with “kaiju” you get “giant monster,” thereby making it more clear what type of strange and mysterious beast we’re talking about: one of immense size, thus adding to its power immeasurably and giving it the unpleasant but undeniably cool ability to literally smash brick and mortar skyscrapers to pieces as easily as you might smash a mini-fortress comprised of LEGO blocks.

  We fans in the English-speaking world who prefer to make things simple when typing have gotten used to simply saying “kaiju” when referring to these giant mysterious beasts. This term, particularly its abbreviated form of “kaiju,” has become much better known to the greater sci-fi and horror fandom thanks to its extensive usage in the recent American Godzilla comics published by IDW, Oni Press’ popular comic book series Kaijumax, and films such as Pacific Rim. Alas, Legendary Pictures decided to forgo using that term for its own fledgling kaijuverse, beginning with Godzilla (2014), by instead coming up with its own acronym for such creatures: MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms). Well, Legendary can call their giant mysterious beasts whatever they want, but to most of the fans, they will be kaiju, and we will be kaiju-fans!

  So, we understand that kaiju are, as far as we’re concerned, mysterious beasts of gargantuan size and literal city-smashing power. Among the best examples we can think of are: Godzilla, Gamera, King Kong (sometimes, depending upon how large he is in any given iteration), Mothra, and other popular second-stringers like Rodan, King Ghidorah, the entire bizarre rogues gallery of Ultraman, Guilala, Gorgo, Yongary, the trio of human-devouring beasts from the classic Rampage! video game (that would be George the giant ape, Lizzie the giant humanoid lizard, and Ralph the giant werewolf!); and of course, the monstrous antagonists of the Pacific Rim franchise. Sometimes kaiju are stand alone with only the human military to oppose them, often with great difficulty, until the respective kaiju’s weakness is inevitably discovered; other times, they exist in a universe filled with other kaiju, who often battle each other for territorial supremacy while a hapless human population is caught in the middle of the catastrophic fiasco; still other times they are used mostly as gargantuan foot soldiers by invading, imperialistic alien races against one or more sentai heroes… “sentai” being the Japanese word corresponding to kaiju-fighting super-heroes, with the numerous incarnations of Tsuberaya Productions’ Ultraman being perhaps the most famous example; or gigantic robots controlled by human soldiers -- think the Shogun Warriors, or the jaeger – German word for “hunter” – popularized by the Pacific Rim franchise, e.g., Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka, or even the various Zords piloted by the Power Rangers who unite their disparate components to form the single Mega-Zord robotic warrior.

  There are also instances where kaiju have appeared in super-hero universes, and find themselves knocking heads with the traditional super-heroes of those remarkable realities. Examples include Godzilla’s sojourn through the Marvel Universe in his own late 1970s American comic book when Marvel had the license to the character, or this anthology’s author Matt Dennion’s Watchtower Universe, where kaiju and super-heroes have an important connection to the fate of that world (more on this in a minute).

  And of course, there are some instances where kaiju themselves act as gigantic super-heroes of sorts, seeking to protect humans from harm, and that would include Gamera; the heroic versions of Godzilla seen in the Showa Era films of the 1970s and the Hanna-Barbera animated series of the late ‘70s; the second version of Tri-Star’s Godzilla (i.e., “Zilla”) seen in Godzilla: The Series of the late 1990s; and various iterations of King Kong, including the Toho version from King Kong Escapes (1967), the animated American TV series of that year which tied into it, and the more recent Kong: The Animated Series (where the suspected ability of some versions of Kong to change size is finally made official!), and the Netflix exclusive Kong: King of the Apes.

  Of great importance to this anthology’s major kaiju protagonist, Gfantis (more on this guy soon!), is the more recent concept of the guardian kaiju, one who is assigned by innate forces of the biosphere to guard the planet – not humanity per se, who may be stomped if they get in the way – against any possible menace, including other kaiju and alien invaders. This category has its root in the Toho stable with Bagan in the aborted film Mothra vs. Bagan (later turning up in the 1993 video game as a pawn of alien invaders in Super Godzilla); Battra, Bagan’s replacement on the 1992 release roster, with Godzilla and Mothra: Battle for Earth; and the Yamato Monsters of the unique G-film Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (or GMK, for the frugal typists among us; 2001). However, the conception would come to full realization on the big screen with Legendary’s version of Godzilla, who first appeared in Godzilla (2014).

  Many fans of the kaiju sub-genre of sci-fi/horror/fantasy believe that such entities have no history in folklore and mythology, as do monsters of less profound size such as vampires, werewolves, zombies, or even man-made monsters like Frankenstein’s creation, who have their folklore equivalents in the legend of the Golem, and stories of alchemists creating homunculi. Instead, they believe that kaiju were created for the silver screen, and first appeared in early 1950s cinema with the Rhedosaurus in Ray Harryhausan’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and the far more popular and iconic Godzilla (1954; released in America two years later with the aptly modified title Godzilla, King of the Monsters).

  This belief is actually untrue, as creatures we would now readily identify as kaiju have appeared throughout world mythology and folklore. This would include the Biblical beasts of tremendous size, destructive power, and spectacular majesty such as Leviathan and Behemoth. Need some evidence for this? Simply read this excerpt describing Leviathan in detail, courtesy of the Book of Job, 41:1-41:34:

  Can you fill his hide with harpoons or his head with fishing spears?

   If you lay a hand on him, you will remember the struggle and never do it again!

   

   I will not fail to speak of his limbs, his strength and his graceful form.

   Who can strip off his outer coat? Who would approach him with a bridle?

   Who dares open the doors of his mouth, ringed about with his fearsome teeth?

   His back has rows of shields tightly sealed together;

   each is so close to the next that no air can pass between.

   They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted.

   His snorting throws out flashes of light; his eyes are like the rays of dawn.

   Firebrands stream from his mouth; sparks of fire shoot out.

   Smoke pours from his nostrils as from a boiling pot over a fire of reeds.

   His breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from his mouth.

   Strength resides in his neck; dismay goes before him.

   The folds of his flesh are tightly joined; they are firm and immovable.

   His chest is hard as rock, hard as a lower millstone.

   When he rises up, the
mighty are terrified; they retreat before his thrashing.

   The sword that reaches him has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.

   Iron he treats like straw and bronze like rotten wood.

   Arrows do not make him flee, slingstones are like chaff to him.

   A club seems to him but a piece of straw, he laughs at the rattling of the lance.

  His undersides are jagged potsherds, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing-sledge.

   He makes the depths churn like a boiling cauldron and stirs up the sea like a pot of ointment.

  Behind him he leaves a glistening wake; one would think the deep had white hair.

  Nothing on earth is his equal— a creature without fear.

  He looks down on all that are haughty; he is king over all that are proud.

  With that description, one would think the ancient author of that passage had just caught an extremely early sneak preview of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! As if that wasn’t enough, the Hebrew Bible said, in Psalm 74, that no less a personage than Yahweh himself was capable of destroying beings like Leviathan and Behemoth. This was given further apocalypse-ish connotations in Isaiah 27:1, where it’s written that the great Yahweh will only do this “at the end of time.” This suggests an important destiny for kaiju, which is a central theme in Matt’s Watchtower Universe, beginning with his novella The Kaiju and the Crime Fighter.

  Also very interesting to today’s modern interpretation of the kaiju is how the Bible describes Yahweh insuring that Leviathan and Behemoth each harbor a tremendous instinctual desire to destroy the other, so that these titanic mysterious beasts -- apparently of the opposite gender and genetically compatible -- will never get together and produce offspring, which would quickly overrun the Earth and promptly knock humanity right off the top of the planet’s food chain (likely by becoming food in a rather literal sense). As we kaiju-fans are all quite aware, the penchant for these beasts to battle each other have become a main ingredient in the spectacle provided by the genre, and the tales comprising this anthology will bring us plenty of that action!

  Of course, these ancient kaiju are by no means limited to the Bible, and go much further back in time than the days of Jesus. Also not unique to Leviathan and Behemoth, many of these other kaiju of old have reptilian characteristics, just as several of those in modern pop fiction do, particularly the earliest, e.g., the Rhedosaurus, Godzilla, Anguirus, Rodan, Varan, Gorgo and his mother Ogra, Reptilicus, etc. More ancient examples include such legendary ultra-gigantic dragons as Jormungand the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology and Orochi the Eight-headed Dragon from Japan’s Shinto lore (and updated for a few Toho kaiju-films).

  Of course, kaiju are extremely chimeric, and in both world mythology/folklore and modern action fiction, they have run the phenotypical gamut from mammalian, to icthyean, to avian, to insectoid/arachnoid, to humanoid. Mothra, in fact, is depicted as a divine manifestation of the Earth’s biosphere, as is Bagan, who has an Asian mythological precedent. The same with King Caesar, whose depiction in G-films by Toho was based on an actual hybrid leonine/reptilian protector of Okinawa. Many others are robotic or cybernetic in nature, some are actually enormous mecha with synthetic animal-like characteristics, and others are supernaturally animated mineral, like the walking stone samurai statue Majin from Daiei’s eponymous film series and the aptly named Rocky from the video game King of the Monsters.

  And sometimes we have mythological deities who take the form of kaiju, such as Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of Aztec myth; Tiamat, the primordial Mesopotamian creator-goddess who could take the form of a gigantic dragon-like beast; and Garuda, the Asian deity who could take the form of a gigantic bird, and often served as a mount for the great Hindu god Vishnu.

  Further muddying these pseudo-taxonomical waters are giant mysterious beasts, many of them gigantized versions of familiar animals, who are not as large as traditional kaiju and have correspondingly less destructive might at their beck and call, but which are nevertheless dangerous enough that we mere humans would still prefer not to run into any of them on some remote island or hidden valley. These creatures are appropriately referred to by Matt as mutants in his various kaiju tales, and they’ve also been referred to as megafauna or “false kaiju” by author Den Valdron. They have sometimes appeared alongside genuine kaiju, as they did in Matt’s novella Atomic Rex, and as the monstrous human-killing insectoid species Meganulon did alongside the titular kaiju in Rodan (1956).

  Examples of such uber-deadly fauna would include King Kong, when he’s at one of his lesser statures (which can be as small as 10 meters to well over 30 meters); the Black Scorpion from the eponymous 1957 Mexican-American monster film; the giant ants seen in flicks like Them! (1954); the giant spiders from the movie Eight-Legged Freaks (2002); Gorgo himself (as opposed to his far larger, truly kaiju-sized mother Ogra); the various humanoid giants such as the cyclopses; the many cephalopod horrors like the kraken that appears in so many sources; the giant wasps and rats of The Food of the Gods (1976, and based on H.G. Wells’ classic novel); the monster lizards dubbed “slurposaurs” by Den Valdron, and seen in vintage B-movies such as King Dinosaur (1955), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and The Lost World (1960), as well as popping up in films such as One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Amazon Women on the Moon (1987); and of course, your garden variety prehistoric survivors, seen in films such as The Valley of Gwangi (1969), the Jurassic Park franchise (beginning in 1992), and Matt’s 2015 novella Polar Yeti and Beasts of Prehistory, which finally gave the ancient mammalian and avian denizens of the Cenozoic Era their proper day, with a bunch of giant bugs thrown in for good and exciting measure

  Despite this variety of presence across many mediums, be they cinema, TV, comic books, or video games, kaiju have recently begun conquering another popular medium, which is prose literature. With the exception of Marc Cerasini’s notable series of Godzilla YA novels published by Random House during the late 1990s, kaiju in contemporary settings rarely appeared in prose until the past few years, after indie and digital publishing became a force to be reckoned with. Now that authors and small publishers had unprecedented rein to experiment, it was discovered that kaiju tales of the apocalyptic kind proved quite popular with readers.

  What, exactly, is the appeal of such beasts and accompanying doomsday scenarios to the human psyche?

  I’d wager that the preponderance of such beasts and prophesied Armageddon-like events which have existed within the collective human zeitgeist throughout our tumultuous history suggests deep-seated fears of both the power of nature and what the future might bring. Humans have long perceived themselves as entities of sin, and that we as a species are consequently due for a huge reckoning or “cleansing.” Slasher characters may punish young sinners for fornicating in the woods or indulging in recreational drugs, but kaiju take this metaphorical punishment to the nth degree, putting paid to our entire civilization for myriad perceived sins against the entire planet, e.g., atomic bomb tests, pollution, warfare. Kaiju appear to be archetypal manifestations of nature at its most powerful, directed against us in purposeful fashion, and in the form of fearsome personifications taken directly from our nightmares, albeit on a scale that vastly surpasses the capabilities of all other archetypal monster-forms. Also, our earliest ancestors were often at the mercy of huge beasts which no longer exist, including many species of enormous snakes and birds of prey, which is possibly why kaiju so often take these phenotypical forms, or a combination thereof.

  It would seem these fears and self-deprecating beliefs exist in our collective mindset to this day, which has allowed kaiju apocalypse literature to thrive under the banner of indie authors. Modern phenomena that we today fear more than the gods, such as nuclear power, a creation of our own folly, have often not so coincidentally taken the place of supernatural forces as being the source of modern kaiju. It was a mere decade after t
he beginning of the Atomic Age that Leviathan and Behemoth’s ilk appeared to us in its modern form, and this further connected such creatures with the still greatly feared future apocalypse scenarios of the psychic gestalt.

  This brings us to the work of Matt Dennion, one of the most prolific and celebrated authors of kaiju prose conquering the market today. That also brings us to the main kaiju subject of this anthology, the mighty guardian kaiju Gfantis. No friend of humanity but nevertheless a protector of the Earth against all territorial transgressors, including other kaiju, Gfantis was created years ago as the official kaiju mascot of the long-running G-Fan magazine published by Daikaiju Enterprises, brought to us all this time by kaiju-fan supreme J.D. Lees. When first created, Gfantis was “merely” a fearsome meme, a representation of all that is made great by the genre, and which the pages of G-Fan bring us with every issue for going on two and a half decades now. However, Matt was the one who infused Gfantis with true personality and purpose, as he guided the giant golden solar-powered dragon through a series of stories published in the above mag where the guardian kaiju met and battled other kaiju created and published by a disparate assemblage of esteemed authors within the growing genre, including some by Matt himself.

  As you can doubtless tell by now, Matt is also a great fan of the crossover concept, and what you are reading now is the second of two volumes which collect the series of stories penned by Matt and originally serialized as stand-alone tales in G-Fan magazine. This particular volume will bring you Gfantis’ conflicts with a gigantic version of the legendary werewolf known as the Beast of Bray Road, two of the human-controlled kaiju-fighting avian weapons known as the ROCs from Matt’s novel Operation ROC, the giant humanoid doomsday weapon known as Kodoja, the nuclear charged carnosaur mutation Atomic Rex from Matt’s popular eponymous novel, and more!

  Now, for a second volume in a row, you get a collection of Matt’s best from the pages of G-Fan, featuring all the kaiju battle action you could possibly ask for, with Gfantis once again proving he’s more than just a not-so-pretty face representing a genre, but a direct participant in the popular growing apocalypse now wreaking a fun degree of havoc on the digital book stores. For this, we can thank the creative mind and inexhaustible energy of Matt Dennion, J.D. Lees, and all of the other kaiju authors who generously allowed Matt to pit their grand creations against the Prince of the Monsters.

  Chris Nigro

  GFANTIS VS NEMESIS

  Story by Matthew Dennion

  Art by John Opal

 

  Author’s Note: I would like to extend a very special thanks to Jeremy Robinson for allowing G-FAN to use Nemesis and her accompanying characters in this story. Nemesis is a kaiju featured in Jeremy’s novels Project Nemesis and the sequel Project Maigo. This story takes place between Jeremy’s two novels.