Panel Vision - Great Ten

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As the 21^st century prepares to exit its adolescence and enter its quarter-life crisis period, the idea that this will be the Chinese century seems more and more assured.  Chinese tastes and interests have grown into a major box office force for American blockbusters, Chinese industrialism drives a lot of the global economy, they’re the only people with the billions to dictate commands to the likes of Apple or Google, and recently they’ve established themselves at the forefront of the Green Energy push. 

This means that everybody has to adjust, hence why we see a larger Chinese presence in US blockbusters like Transformers 4 or Iron Man 3.  Comics are usually slow to adapt to these kinds of trends save for one exception at DC comics, who got on board the China train as early as 2006- 2 years before their coming out party to the world stage that was the Beijing Olympics.  They did it with a new prestige team of superheroes meant to embody various aspects of Chinese culture known as the Great Ten.

1st Godzilla 2016 Images

In case you hadn’t heard there’s a new Godzilla movie coming our way real soon.  I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing, the last one was only a couple of years ago and even though sequels come out quick these days there’s usually more of a gap than that, especially given all the production shenanigans now plaguing Legendary studios.  However, this new Godzilla film isn’t a sequel to the 2014 formula snore-fest with a better than expected ending, it’s a whole new Godzilla movie produced by Toho, the Japanese studio that invented the king of the monsters.  While none of the Godzilla films are objectively great movies the very achievement of Godzilla himself is pretty impressive, one of the truly modern pop icons that comes exclusively from the world of film. 

The entire genre of “giant monster movie” was more or less defined by Toho and it was Godzilla that helmed that flagship.  What’s more, a lot of now common ideas like broader, inter-movie continuity originated in the Toho Kaiju franchise as well as the Universal monster movies.  As such, the launch of a new Godzilla film from the people who created him is a big deal and now we have our first images and they’re absolutely terrifying.