To The Last Page

Living volcano monsters – that’s a new one on me. Seeing things differently, even if it is in the rarefied genre of Japanese kaiju monster movies, is however just what you can expect from artist and writer Zander Cannon in Kajumax , now up to volume three in its collected editions. The same problem that Cannon applies to other rampaging giant lizards also applies to living volcano monsters; not just how you stop them in their tracks (lava flows?), but what do you do with them once they’ve been ‘decommissioned’? Well, you put them in prison obviously, into holding craters on the maximum security prison island of Kaijumax. Season One and Season Two , collecting the first twelve issues of the series, introduced some of the main players – or former players – who are now adjusting to a life that doesn’t involve crushing cities and squishing their inhabitants. Life in prison is no walk in the park for its inmates, they’re an ugly bunch of violent offenders, as you can imagine. Many of the ...

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 the...

Ever wondered what the Japanese authorities or Ultraman superhero teams do when they round up the monsters who have been raging and rampaging through the streets of downtown Tokyo? You haven’t? Well, Zander Cannon has and it turns out to be an interesting and fun idea for a comic that has a certain geeky coolness to it. So now that you have had time to think about it, just what the heck are you supposed to do with kaiju creatures like Mothra and Godzilla once they’ve been stopped in their tracks? Well, you could hope that they return to their undersea lair or remote volcanic island, but obviously the better way of ensuring that they or their offspring don’t return for a sequel is to lock them up, and for this purpose Zander Cannon has devised the maximum security kaiju monster prison island of Kaijumax. On Kaijumax you find that you have the same problems as any regular prison. More or less. There are tensions between inmates in the cells (craters), some of the more troublesome beast...