The Giant Kokjü #2 // Review
A giant lizard has invaded San Francisco. It isn’t some PG-rated Godzilla knock-off. This thing has a raging libido and a fetish for large buildings. One man and his giant robot mecha may be the only chance the city has for survival in The Giant Kokjü #2. Writer Gerry Duggan reaches the mid-way point of a three-part series that really has no business being anywhere near as funny as it is. Artist Scott Koblish gives the weird satire the intensity it deserves as Hi-Fi casts the action in livid, garish color. It’s weird. It’s perverse. And it’s actually kind of sophisticated.
It’s being called the Giant Kokju, and it’s messing up real estate in San Francisco. It seems to want carnal knowledge of every building in The Golden City. The military has sent a couple of jets out to try to bring the giant purple dragon-thing down. Realtors are flying around the monster in helicopters, trying to get it to move into the poorer neighborhoods. Meanwhile, there’s a guy who might be able to really do something about it. He’s got access to this giant robot, but it’s been a while since the last time he used it.
Duggan’s central idea is pretty silly. The joke really SHOULD have been over in 20 pages. Duggan manages to ram the premise into the architecture of politics and popular culture over and over and over again for another full issue. Some of it’s remarkably clever stuff by way of juxtaposition. At one point, the monster breaks open a bus. There isn’t much for Duggan to do while the monster proceeds to eat the passengers and...have its way with the bus, so he takes the opportunity to talk a bit about the sorry state of public transportation in America. He even manages to blow off a little steam about Elon Musk’s efforts to tank high-speed rail in California. It’s such a weird thing to talk about while a monster fornicates with an SFMTA bus.
Koblish’s overall look of the series continues to be very contemporary with some rather serious-looking drama playing out on the faces of heroes and horrified bystanders. The execution of the giant monster action feels inspired by vintage monster comics. Kokju seems like an R-Rated mutation of Kirby’s Fin Fang Foom. Koblish could have easily leaned into the silliness of the premise and simply done a crude and rubbery rendering of the ridiculousness of the story, but he’s taking it seriously enough to bring home the impact of Duggan’s comedy without trying to awkwardly amplify it.
It’s hard to imagine Duggan’s story remaining appealing as it crawls its way over to its third and final issue. Honestly, though, there’s really no reason why this thing should have been anything other than tedious by the time it hit its second issue (or even...the second half of its first). Duggan is a clever enough satirist that he’s probably going to make the comedy work right through the end of the third and final issue. It’s going to be kind of a close finish, though.
