The much anticipated conclusion of Godzilla Oblivion hits the shelves August 2nd. It is my second favorite Godzilla comic run by IDW. Godzilla Cataclysm narrowly beats it out. In point of fact, I wasn’t sure Cataclysm would beat Oblivion out until the final issue.
Oblivion #5 continues on where #4 left off. Godzilla Oblivion #4, lest you doubt, did in fact manage to make things not only worse after issue #3, but in keeping with every issue of the run so far, made things catastrophically worse.
Godzilla Oblivion is a tragic tale in the classic sense of the word. The final issue wraps things up in the only way they could have been completed. If it had concluded in any other way I would have felt cheated.
Emotionally I was conflicted by the final conclusion of Godzilla Oblivion. It made sense, it was true to Godzilla and yet—I had hoped for something else. I had hoped for something less dark. Yet there is no doubt in my mind that this is the right and proper ending. Godzilla is the king of the monsters and mortals who dare tamper with him must expect nothing less.
Godzilla Oblivion also stays true to the mad scientist story that it began as. Classic mad scientist stories tend to be cautionary tales about mankind encroaching upon the purveyance of the gods. They are invariably destroyed by their own hubris. See such classics as Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, or even The Fly. So too the scientists of Oblivion are punished by, to quote Vivienne Graham from Godzilla 2014, “a god, for all intents and purposes.”
It is their fidelity to the sub-genre of Mad Scientist stories that makes the ending the only one it could be. While I had hoped for something less dark, anything else would have been wrong and felt out of place. Sometimes the path we start down must be followed to its darkest end.
The authors of Godzilla Oblivion managed to seamlessly mesh two of my favorite story types: Kaiju and the Mad Scientist story. That they were able to realize both properly and stay true to both is what has catapulted Oblivion into second place on my favorites list.
