Crustacean Domination

I've been meaning to check out the work of Guy N. Smith, in particular his Crabs series, for a very long time. Fortunately for me, David Zuzelo has written extensively about just those books and what's good about them. Check out his blog Tomb It May Concern and his posts Crustacean Domination parts one and two He promises a third post in the near future.

Here's a quick quote about the first book, Night of the Crabs, as well as Zuzelo's own banner:

Night Of The Crabs plays like a classic horror film of the 50's, with a good helping of 70's gritty gore slathered on top. The prose is tight and words are not wasted-each detail furthering the story towards gory conclusions. There is the tendency in Smith's world (and it is a fairly unified place to my experience) for people to act utterly illogical. But it doesn't feel that way as you read along, instead it feels as if the writing is in fast forward.

Now it's a movement

Thanks to a comment on my last post, I now know there's another game in town. Check out Giant Monsters Attack, a new blog about giant monsters. It's sort of like this blog, only Mysterious Pants (that's the blogger) has a deft hand in using photos and, of course, has his own voice. He's even reviewed Gamera: The Little Braves, which I have yet to see. He also has a post speculating on what monsters will be used on Godzilla: Unleashed.

Welcome to the neighborhood Mysterious Pants. I look forward to trading links and ideas about the biggest genre of them all!

Alex Wald, artist of giant monsters

Omni-Monster!!! has a great post about Alex Wald, an artist whose works will certainly interest those of you who come to this blog. I particularly liked this album cover posted at Wald's blog, Astromonster, but be sure to take a look around his sites. He's done Ultraman and a load of other kaiju and science fiction works.

And while I'm at it, be sure and check out Omni-Monster!!! It's a fun blog filled with giant monster toys and other plastic kaiju goodness.

Godzilla's storytelling engine

I've been reading the blog Fraggmented for a few weeks now. It's mostly a comic book blog and one of the main features is "Storytelling Engines." With this series of posts, John Seavey looks at the protagonist of a comic book series and tries to delineate how the writers create "storytelling engines" -- the ongoing goals, characters and situations that keep the plot moving perpetually -- for that protagonist. (You can find some background on this idea here and here.)

This week, Fraggmented takes on Marvel's Godzilla series. Seavey talks about how Godzilla was added to the Marvel universe and how the story was run on the basis of a "false status quo" (think "The Fugitive" or "The Hulk" TV series). It's interesting stuff, Seavey thinks strongly and well about series and has interesting insights. Take a look at the Godzilla entry and let it lead you through his blog to the other Storytelling Engines, all of which are highly recommended.

The post makes me think about the Gorgo comic books (which I promise I will get back to). It might be interesting to look at the storytelling engine there, if there was one ...