Kaijumax Season Two – Zander Cannon

As entertaining an idea as Kaijumax is, the potential comedy and drama that can be derived from the monster prison situation is limited; too limited for an imaginative writer/artist like Zander Cannon. It’s good to see then that the world of Kaijumax – and indeed the pan-dimensional multiverse – is expanded upon in Season Two: ‘The Seamy Underbelly’. Cannon had already hinted as much in Season One that there’s considerably more to play with here with occasional excursions into the world, the universe and the dimensions beyond, and in Season Two he takes those first tenuous steps outside the prison cells/craters of Kaijumax with the escape of Electrogor and the Green Humongo. Well, it is a prison drama after all, so inevitably there has to be an escape…

Cannon continues to play on the stereotypes, with the monsters as jive-talking criminal underworld types (“Yo mon!”, “My lizza”, “Move your ass, Megafauna”) and comic incongruity of monsters in that kind of situation. So when there is a prison break, obviously the escapees try to lie low, which is kind of hard when you’re the size of a 60-story building. They hole-up with Green’s brother the Red Humongo, who has been let out on licence on parole, and is trying to go straight and hold down a regular job… well, ‘monster regular’ …but you get the idea. Red doesn’t need the heat that two escaped convicts bring, nor the jibes that Green fires at him about the pitiful conditions of the shack (the size of an aircraft hangar or abandoned warehouse) that a once proud terroriser of “Squishers” (humans) has been reduced to. Tensions arise, and when tensions arise between monsters, well, you soon know all about it…

And that’s just one threat (and treat) that Season Two has to follow, but the wider expansion of the story has many other imaginative situations. There’s a new superhero team in this collection tasked with monitoring and cleaning up monster activity in the region, Team G.R.E.A.T. who have their own personal and ‘technical’ problems; there’s Corporal Singh’s descent into drinking at a casino on Mars and his potential rehabilitation; there’s the continuing story of Electrogor’s concern to be reunited with his children that takes him to an undersea underworld of vice and addiction in a Kraken house. 

By extension then, the comedy and social satire continues to be just brilliant, showing a population wary of ‘biological correctness’, using the ‘monsters’ as a way of examining how society responds with prejudice and racism. Aside from that, in rampaging monsters, mad-scientist development of robot technologies and invasion from creatures from another dimension, you’ve got the traditional metaphorical undercurrents of fear of the dangers of seismic activity, nuclear disaster and destruction of traditional cultural values. And Zander Cannon’s humorous take on it and his terrific creations. What’s not to like?

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