I remember the first time, as an adult, that I read a Marvel / DC comic that took a “day in the life of…” approach to its titular hero, and feeling like it was a particularly creative take on the genre. …Flash forward years later, and I’d find that that type of story gets / has gotten done quite to death, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t great versions of it, but does mean that it’s not novel or unique on its own.

This kind of feels like the top-down summary of IDW’s Godzilla 70th Anniversary one-shot anthology, in which various writers and artists take a stab at Big G, with the majority taking the approach of viewing things from the POV of those affected by the kaiju destructions (whether as a result of heroism or monstrousness), and generally not striking many unique beats along the way. Which, similar to my above caveat, doesn’t render any given entry pointless or bad, but does give the book less of an event vibe: it often feels like we’re getting the same basic tale, just told via different art and narrative styles. Those that step off the path either have fun with it (Stokoe, riffing on his terrorizing of Gojira clean-up crews; E.J. Su’s team-up dream sequence), or unfortunately produce lesser results (Dan Didio and Joelle Jones – an artist whose style has, to me, sadly become much more cinematically generic than their older style, which I preferred, whether or not that’s just for this entry – produce a hair-tearing-out bit of plotty tropes; Danny Lore and Sebastian Piriz have an intriguing way of backgrounding Godzilla to a con man’s actions, but it’s clunkily scripted); those that stick to the street-level vibes are well selected and sequenced by editors Jake Williams, Jamie S. Rich, and David Mariotte to give us a nice mix of art and text approaches, just again, there’s a bit of a sense of repetition, which lends the whole book a middling, though entertaining, vibe.