A Glimpse into Madness - "Justice League vs Godzilla vs. Kong"

From 2023-2024, DC and Legendary Comics published a 7 issue limited series called Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong.  It's a crossover that's exactly what it sounds like.   

And I love it.

It's bananas but really enjoyable.  I got the collected edition for my son who loves both Godzilla and Superman and I've read it to him like 15 times.  it is a joy every time and I think it's worth some discussion.

The art is fantastic, the character writing is great and specific, and it's woven into a serviceable enough story when it didn't really have to be.  It could have been a lazy cash grab coasting on the novelty of the title which, as I understand it, is not uncommon for intracompany crossovers, but it's not.  This was written and drawn with care and affection.  I might even say it seems like it was done with joy.

Also this is a story that could really only exist in the comics medium.  Putting this on film would cost a billion dollars and it's still probably too niche to have the mass appeal required to recoup even a fraction of the cost.  Superman and Godzilla might be very recognizable to a general audience but this book's target audience is the more specific market of comic book fans.

That is not to say I think only comic book fans would enjoy this or should read it.  I, in fact, think everyone should read this but if you're not really familiar with DC Comics or the Monsterverse, which I am not particularly, there's going to be some stuff you're going to just have to be ok rolling with and some easter eggs that are going to whiz by unnoticed.

Passing pop-cultural familiarity with the main heroes, e.g. Superman, Flash, Batman, Green Lantern etc) is more than sufficient to getting this.

Also, one of the minor villains is a psychic gorilla.

This book rules.

Background

Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong was written by Brian Buccellato, drawn by Christian Duce and Tom Derenick, colored by Luis Guerrero, and lettered by Richard Starkings, Tyler Smith, and Jimmy Betancourt.  (Comic book art is split out into pencilers, inkers, colorists, and letterers, whose jobs are pretty self explanatory.  Usually the penciler is the person we think of when we talk about a book's art but all the roles are important and a failure in any of them can really mess a book up.)

In 2010, Legendary Entertainment licensed Godzilla from Toho, the Japanese company that owns the Godzilla IP, which led to Gareth Edwards's 2014 film Godzilla.  Since then Legendary has acquired more licenses to create their Monsterverse, which includes the films Kong: Skull Island (2017), Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Godzilla vs Kong (2021), and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024).  Legendary Comics has been publishing Monsterverse comics since 2014.

In an interview with the YouTube channel "The Comic Source," Buccellato said this about the conception of Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong:

It was really between Ben Abernathy, who was a longtime editor at DC at the time, and Robert Napton, who runs the comic side of Legendary. It's their conversation that bore this fruit, and I was just the lucky jerk that they chose to ask first. And yes, it took me .0000001 seconds to say yes.

I can't really tell how this book was received, either critically or commercially.  I only found 3 reviews, one being fairly negative and the other two more ambivalent but ultimately landing on "it's fun."

I suppose it did well enough to get a sequel which came out in a collected edition this year. (2026)

The Art

As I said in the opening the artwork here is fantastic and all the reviews I've seen, even the negative one, praise it.

The human (or humanoid) characters all look to be on model and are both consistently drawn throughout and distinct from each other.  The faces are expressive but not over-exaggerated and there's lots of good moments where you can tell pretty much exactly what is running through people's heads without any expository dialog.  One small example I really liked was how the art captured a moment of devastated stillness in the Fortress of Solitude as the League struggles to process that Superman might be dead.

The giant monsters all look great too.  There are two that are made up for this book but the rest are all definitely the Legendary Pictures designs, all of which I really like.

There is also a great sense of scale, with the monster reveals generally being from a human perspective, similar to how in Godzilla (2014) the camera was always placed where a person would be standing, which really emphasized the size of the creatures and reinforced a feeling of impotence before them.  This is especially true of the incredible opening scenes of Godzilla making landfall in Metropolis.

The color in this book is incredible.  Again the opening sunset scenes in Metropolis are standouts but there's great work all over.  There's a large variety of locations and times of day which gives the colorists lots of opportunity to show off.  I suspect this book was fun to draw and color given how there's big urban environments, the forests of Skull Island, an underwater brawl near Atlantis, etc etc.  Also, giant apes and robots.

The book has a good sense of movement.  The character posing is dynamic and the action is cleanly drawn and easy to follow.  The action scenes are also paced well and do a good job of keeping track of multiple characters simultaneously.

Also, I couldn't really see much obvious difference in the parts which were penciled by Christian Duce and the ones by Tom Derenick.  It's pretty seamless.

The Story

Buccellato got a lot of free reign with this book.  As he told The Comic Source:

There was no mandate.  I wasn't told to use these characters, use these versions of characters. It was pretty much a blank slate in terms of like...all the pieces in the toy box, all the toys. Go for it.

Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong is definitely a kitchen sink story.   It opens with Clark Kent about to propose to Lois Lane on the helipad of the Daily Planet building but getting interrupted by Godzilla's appearance in the bay.  It then flashes back to show how we got here,  with the Legion of Doom led by Lex Luthor breaking in to Superman's Fortress of Solitude where a mishap sends them to Monsterverse and then a magical dreamstone stolen from the Fortress brings the monsters back to the DC universe because D-list Superman villain Toyman is an idiot.

Brandon T. McClure in his review for Atomic Geekdom said this book "is as surface-level as a crossover can get."  Which on the macro sense, yeah sure, there's contrivance to make the plot happen but that's kind of inescapable given the premise.  I run into this all the time with my son who loves to come up with mash-up stories.  If he wants Star Wars mixed with How to Train Your Dragon, I need to come up with some shit.

A grounded and meditative story of deep themes in a world of realistic cause and effect is going to be a tough task when you also need the Justice League to fight Godzilla.  I'm sure it could be done; after all, Tom King has a gritty noir Batman and Elmer Fudd crossover that apparently is really good.

I'm generally not a fan of "just turn your brain off, dude" type apologetics for crappy media but there are times when it's worth considering the kind of story the creators are trying to tell and judging a work in that light.

For me, a bigger issue than a story being dumb is when there's a fundamental mismatch between what the creators thought they were making verses what they actually did make.  To use the Montersverse films as an example, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs Kong (2021) are both real dumb but the former's plot, dialog, and aesthetics all code it as an attempt to make a serious gritty movie with weighty themes and it just...isn't that.  Godzilla vs Kong knows it's a fundamentally silly movie and just lets itself be one.  It isn't at war with itself.  King of the Monsters reads as a failed attempt at elevated genre work which. in my estimation, makes it a considerably worse film than Godzilla vs Kong.   

(Side note part of the issue is that King of the Monsters still maintains the grounded and somber aesthetic of Godzilla (2014) which was a very different kind of movie.  And for my money, Godzilla (2014) is a legitimately pretty good movie, easily the best of the Monsterverse Godzilla films, though not the most fun.)

Buccellato knows the inherent silliness of the story he's telling but I think he really deftly threads needle and makes it feel high stakes for the characters without having any illusion that this is a high stake experience for the reader, who is likely to be grinning the entire time.

And of course we shouldn't discount that this is a comic, so the artwork is a huge part of the draw, regardless of how rigidly airtight the plot is or is not.

I think the character writing is actually quite good.  The characters feel individualized and like they know each other.  With such a large cast that is in crisis mode the entire story, not everyone gets significant page time, but the time they do get is well spent.  I hate using the word "efficient' for stories as to me "efficient" usually means "wikipedia style info dump" but it really is the best word to use here.  And for the characters I was familiar with, their dialog sound right.  Superman sounds like Superman, Lois Lane sounds like Lois, Wonder Woman sounds like Wonder Woman, and, importantly, they don't sound like each other.

I appreciate that Buccellato lets the characters react to things and to each other.  The small moments, like the one I mentioned earlier where we see the Justice League members react to the apparent death of Superman and have a few different reactions, really stand out.

Admittedly, there are also some smaller plot contrivances beyond the fundamental "how do we get the monsters to the DC Universe" like the monster attracting beacons that serve as the excuse to justify the creatures leaving an area so we can have another fight later, or getting Superman off the board for most of the book so the fights won't be too easy.

But overall these things didn't bother me and only stand out because I've now read this book 15 times.  The pacing, writing, and artwork are such that I didn't really notice them on my first reading.

To me the only real plot misstep was having the League of Shadows using a Lazarus Pit to resurrect the big Skullcrawer that Kong killed in the Kong: Skull Island (2017) film.  If any of that sentence was confusing, that captures how I felt reading it the first time.

The book doesn't exposit on this subplot and I didn't know the Lazarus Pit was a thing, nor is the name, which would have made its function clear from context, ever said in the book.  It's not a fatal flaw or anything but seemed an unnecessary complication that doesn't really change the stakes.  The book had escalated so much by the time this subplot pays off that it didn't really bother me, I just wasn't sure of the mechanics of that part.

The reviews I saw were critical of the of perfunctory resolution of Toyman's fate, and it is perfunctory but I also thought that perfunctoriness was very funny.  After ten days of trying to find him everywhere and find the dream stone he had on him, the League finds out at the end that he had gotten stepped on by Godzilla almost immediately and the stone was embedded in Godzilla's foot the entire time.  I don't think Buccellato wrote himself into a corner, here, I think the absurd anticlimax was funny on purpose.

As Flash sums up: "This is the weirdest week we've ever had."

(Also, it's a really nice touch that in the end flashback to Godzilla making landfall, we see Toyman say "I wish I could get a better look" while holding the wish-granting dreamstone.  There's no flash of light or overemphasis of his verbiage, it just seems like a normal thing a weirdo would say when seeing Godzilla, and the story just moves on without showing what happened next so it's easy to miss this setup.  But it was funny.)

A Cast of Thousands

As I mentioned above there are a lot of characters in this and the book definitely throws the reader into the deep end of the DC and Monsterverse casts.  Fortunately it doesn't stop dead to explain who everyone is; the characters all know each other and address each other as they would in an in medias res crisis.

A comic can get away with this because comics have a different economy and different medium expectations than, say, films.  You can have 900 characters show up in a comic for just a panel or two as kind of easter eggs for nerds, but that would be a strange thing for a movie.

The book isn't trying to onboard anyone into the lore and isn't concerned with making sure every reader knows how clever the writers and artists are for all the references they put in.  That would have screwed up the pacing and made the book worse. And no character is asked to carry dramatic weight that their limited page time can't support.

The characters would feel right to people familiar with them from the comics and for the most part an unfamiliar reader would figure out everything they needed to know about the characters from how they interact with the world and each other.  Red Hood is a resentful former Robin who is kind of a dick and, yeah, he comes off that way.   I didn't know Batwoman was a thing but she talks kind of like a soldier and has one line that implies if it comes down to it, she's not going to be too sad if they have to kill some of the League of Assassins.  When I looked her up later, what do you know, she was a soldier and has killed people before.  I didn't know who Atom Smasher was but he's a guy who can make himself Godzilla sized and that's all the story asks him to do.

The only real exception was Beast Boy, a green character I had never heard of that can turn into any animal. A green version of any animal.  In a final battle that has Green Lanterns making green constructs, having a giant green gorilla show up was confusing.  The book does not show his transformation from a little green furry man to a giant ape and it never says his name so I don't feel too bad for missing that.  All in all it's like 2 total panels in an insane and fun final battle and if you knew that was Beast Boy, it would be obvious.

It's also cool that Buccellato managed to find stuff for the regular street level heroes to do, too, without asking them to do more than they should.  Like Nightwing and Batgirl being on crowd control and rescue duty and then watching the finale of the giant bat kaiju fight from the top of a building because...what the hell are two regular humans on foot going to be able to do against a 400 foot flying monster?

Fun Interactions

Part of the fun of the book is watching the cast interact with each other and it is at times quite funny without the humor feeling forced.  There is amusement to be had in the way Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, and Wonder Woman all have quite different reactions to Superman's planned proposal to Lois.  (Some are more supportive than others.... Hal.)

Hal and Barry (Green Lantern and Flash) are constantly good-naturedly giving each other shit in a way that other characters don't and crucially, they drop it the second the chips are down and unhesitatingly have each others back when they're in real danger.

(I also like how, after Wonder Woman says of the bickering friends "Maybe they should get married" Hal tosses an amused "He wishes" over his shoulder as he flies off.)

Superman and Lois, though they don't interact all that much given how the book takes Superman off the board for most of the story, have a really good rapport that that feels true to their characters and highlights their affection and respect for each other despite their very different personalities.

I particularly like how at the end after the monsters have been sent home Clark asks Lois "Are you ready to be Mrs. Lane?"  It's absolutely perfect that he didn't say "Mrs. Kent."  Lois would definitely keep her maiden name and Clark wouldn't have it any other way.

Also the Legion of Doom, the mostly inept band of supervillains led by Lex Luthor, has some fun squabbling amongst themselves.  They all clearly think Toyman is an idiot (which he is) and Black Manta's insistence that they don't have a leader and are all independent operators who just happen to be working together is a funny gag.

I chuckled when in response to Manta's "We're a collective!"  Giganta just says "We are literally waiting for Lex to tell us what to do next."

Gallimaufry

• RIP Guy Gardner, the worst Green Lantern, crushed by a psychic gorilla.  I really like how, after the battle is over, Superman says to the surviving Lanterns "I'm sorry about Guy. I liked him."  Guy is canonically a huge prick, but of course Superman liked him.  Superman likes everybody.

Also, my son responded to Hal saying that Guy was hard to like by saying "Yeah because he's the biggest jerk."  Nathan Fillion's performance as Guy in Superman (2025) really made an impression on my six year old..

• I like how Batman reacts to the apparent death of Superman with anger, denial, and a vow that he'll find a way to fix this.  A sort of "I defy you stars" response that feels really right for the character.

• Flash and Green Lantern go to get sandwiches at Reeve's Pastramis which is a cute reference to Christopher Reeve, the original cinematic Superman.

• Oh, by the way after Guy Gardner dies his Green Lantern ring decides Kong is worthy.  A Green Lantern Kong is utter lunacy.  And I love it.

• I liked this exchange between Clark and Bruce after Clark, having heard Bruce arrive using his super senses, opened the door before Bruce had a chance to knock:

Bruce

You know it's customary to wait until someone actually knocks before you answer the door.

Clark

I half expected you to come in through the window.

Bruce

I thought about it.

This story is firmly of the "Superman and Batman are best friends" type.  Which is not always the case.

• Ben Herman's ambivalent but ultimately positive review is well argued and in good faith, but I did find this line kind of funny:

And I don’t think we ever find out how Green Arrow gets rescued after getting dumped in the middle of the ocean by the League of Assassins.

...

My money's on "one of the many characters in this who can fly went and got him."

• This book making Toyman plot critical brought me joy; I love when books get the D-listers involved.  The last book I read that did this was the Batman story The War of Jokes and Riddles where Tom King used Kiteman as the dramatic fulcrum.  The War of Jokes and Riddles is a much more serious story, though, and Kiteman's involvement goes from amusing to tragic.  (That book's really good, by the way.)

• When it's sunset in Metropolis, it appears to already be night in Gotham.  I'm not quite sure how that works out time zone and geography-wise.

• The giant Bat-Mech robot defeats Mechagodzilla with a backbreaker move that I assume is a reference to the Knightfall arc from the early 90s where Bane broke Batman's back in a similar fashion.

• This book is heavy-ish on Flash characters.   I'm assuming it's because both Brian Buccellato and Christian Duce did a lot of work on Flash comics.

• Though you only see Clark Kent briefly at the beginning and the end, I like how he's drawn compared to Superman.

• The variant covers collected in the back of the trade are pretty universally awesome. The two variants for issue #5 by Puppeteer Lee and Jock are probably my favorites, but they're all pretty cool.

• I had a hard time finding out about the creators's bodies of work.  It makes me sad how there isn't much easily available and organized info on this.  It's just kind of weird that you can find obsessively detailed information about most comic stories, but not about the artists and writers unless they are big names.

Conclusion

Ben Herman's review sums this book up pretty well:

[T]he Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong miniseries is the equivalent of a big budget action-packed popcorn flick. It’s not any sort of sophisticated work of high art… but it sure is a lot of fun, especially if you happen to be a fan of both DC Comics and kaiju movies, like myself.

I would also add that it is well crafted and a satisfying read.  Highly recommend.  The artwork alone is worth the price of admission.

Happy reading.

-m