COMIC REVIEW - GODZILLA: HERE BE DRAGONS #1 – EVEN PIRATES V GODZILLA ISN’T A SURE THING

Godzilla: Here Be Dragons is the latest IDW release of their menagerie of Godzilla spin-off stories. This one boils down to the simple combination of Godzilla being encountered by 16th- Century pirates.

The specific iteration of Godzilla they are working with is the classic Toho canon, including Monster Island and the various Kaiju that inhabit it. On the human side they are leaning rather heavily on motifs from Pirates of the Caribbean. The pirate who plays the narrator for the story is of course a ‘Jack Sparrow’ look-alike (though with an eye patch) and begins the issue calling out for rum while awaiting execution by hanging.

The story itself centres around a pirate treasure that had been buried on Monster Island, by 14th Century pirates who became lost at sea for months and were brought there by a storm.  The narrator gives this as an introduction for telling his own adventure aboard a The Golden Hind captained by Sir Francis Drake. Upon which they went in search of this long-lost treasure.

Now the basic premise had me eager and excited. It sounds cheesy and fun, even though 16th century technology is comically outclassed by the giant monsters they are set up against. And I was curious to see what IDW would do, considering they have such a good history with their licenced materials (like Transformers, TMNT, etc). But as soon they were mentioning dates and name-dropping historical figures, I had to look for more information. It would have been rewarding, had the writers done their research. Unfortunately, it was disappointing.

Firstly, the tale of how the pirate treasure ended up on Monster Island is in 1326, which is problematically old, and unnecessarily so. The ‘present’ year, where the narrator is telling his story is 1556, so the older pirate tale only needed to be 50-60 years prior, maybe 100 on the outside. Additionally, the 14th Century wasn’t well known for oceanic exploration, and their story requires them to have sailed from the European coast into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, over several months. Which feels extremely contrived. Simply, the year 1326 seems unnecessarily old and feels like the writers just picked the year at random and gave it no further thought.

A Godzilla doubloon is the sort of thing I’d overlook, but in this story it’s just another irritatingly illogical element.

Worse still, their use of Sir Francis Drake is completely ridiculous. He was born in 1540 so when the narrator is telling his story, Drake is only 16 (and is supposed to have been the narrator’s captain an unspecified number of years prior). He also only became an independent captain in 1572 and wasn’t knighted until 1581 (so the narrator would never have called him “Sir” since he had not yet been knighted). The ship the narrator claims to have served on, the Golden Hind, is actually the historic ship that Drake circumnavigated the globe with (from 1577 to 1580), but it was originally called the Pelican and was renamed mid-journey in 1578, so that also doesn’t match up either.

Once I learnt this, which only took the most cursory of internet searches, I just felt disappointed and a little insulted. It would have only required just such research as I’d done when the writers decided to use actual historical periods and figures, and to fix it would only require a general tweaking of the years where everything occurs. Unfortunately, this kind of lazy writing, is usually indicative of there being further issues with the rest of the plot and narrative, so it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the story.

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