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Hello all, been awhile. Life got kind of busy toward the end of the summer with my sister going to a big shot university and all. Having one less person in the house makes things…quieter. You may notice that the thing I’ve spent nearly a month on is now in the gallery. Its club dedicated twin will pop up at the DA Villian’s Guild should any of you be inclined to see what purpose the insane project really had. Lots of fun that one and for once, I finally made something seasonal for Halloween; by that I mean getting some of the most terror inducing characters in fiction together in one place. On the kaiju front, some may be wondering what the hell happened to Guilala, he’s coming. I have the reference sheet and everything it’s just a matter of getting back into the swing of things after this rather impromptu project suddenly demanded my attention. Some of you may wonder about where the Kaijuverse Reviews ran off to, well you’re looking at one lol. Since *Mecha-GREGOLE has taken a vacation from his kaijuverse, I’ve decided that now would be as good a time as ever to review it. A lot of you may have heard of Rygama, the green and orange carapaced wonder of evolution and mass bloodshed that is the star of said kaijuverse and thus the name. Rarely have I encountered a creature with as much charisma, character, power, sheer unadultered and uncensored awesome as good ole’ Godzilla. The series has gone through at least three major revisions but the key corner stone of the whole thing and most of the kaiju remain intact throughout. So begins my little tour of one of my favorite kaijuverses.

***WARNING*** The contents of this review are simple opinions and satire laced with heavy doses of funny. If for some reason you are allergic to such content, I advise you to give yourself a massive enema and feed yourself to a whale…or a shark…or a 50 ft. ten year old with boils. Pretty much anything that can swallow you whole and vomit you back up at its leisure. Lacking that you can always hack yourself up and go out Hannibal style. ***END WARNING***

Our journey starts in a wonderfully exotic place known as Australia. In this hot bed of skin cancer, crocodile molesters, legions of poisonous EVERYTHING (half of which are on a barby somewhere) a giant burning corpse suddenly makes a giant hole in the outback. The eccentric public set forth and performs the scientific and military equivalent of poking it with a stick. One lucky and thoroughly depressed professor gets waved in by a friend he knew in college and is given the opportunity to study some blue goo that has farted itself from said corpse. He goes home to study the bizarre and seemingly living goo before it makes like Flubber and leeches some DNA from an old fossil he had on his desk. It then proceeds to make its escape into the big wide world and the poor sap is stuck contemplating how much his life sucks. The goo then goes on a Darwinist journey of self discovery and evolution as it grows and evolves to deal with wild life, an urban waste issue, and a surly and eventually gun toting janitor. It becomes something big, reptilian and still hungry before launching itself into traffic after our depressed professor who is now pulling a Bond chase scene just to stay alive. The Aussie Military do not like rampaging giant lizards they can’t cook on one barby and thus unleash hell on the poor reptile before it manages to escape into the sea. In the ocean it rediscovers its roots and becomes a sea monster but one with a healthy respect for firearms. Meanwhile in a warehouse, the professor’s college friend oversees the corpse which apparently isn’t as dead as they all thought. It gets up and starts slurping up people like an anteater. The giant corpse, an insect like simian kaiju named XENOVORE, gets smarter everything it eats a new squishy brain and it begins to develop an ego as nothing the military throws at it can thwart its endless need to feed. The Military decide to bring out the experimental stuff and lure the big blue, tongue lashing, double jointed people eater into a big F’ing rail gun. It screws over one of his arms but he’ll be back after he gets more food. Back in the ocean, the sea monster meets a lonely little girl and the two become fast friends on the principle that little kids are too naïve to be scared shitless of giant animals and the sea monster is actually an intelligent and social creature just trying to find some security in the world. The two share several nights together before the parents find out and lock their daughter up. Apparently the parents need someone younger to make them look less terrified as Xenovore decides to drop by for a game of ‘Get In Mah Bellah’. The sea monster gets rightfully pissed and gnaws on Xenovore’s ankles. The Xenovore is currently high on blasphemy and madness so he eventually punts the sea monster back to Sparta and realizes what a badass he is. Xenovore then rides out to Sydney and starts eating people by the truckload. He runs around like an ADHD kid in a candy store all the while the military are helpless to stop him in the congested city. Unluckily for him, the Sea Monster is sick of getting the crap kicked out of it and evolves one more time into a the star of the show. Named by our now enlightened professor, Rygama rises from the deep like a Guyver crossed with reptilian hornet and beats the living hell out of Xenovore. Xenovore isn’t ready to lie down and die and the two struggle back and forth across Sydney before both fall back into the ocean. In the boiling waves, -somebody- gets decapitated and Rygama flies into the sunset.

So begins an epic tale of graphic violence, mutant monsters, deranged business tycoons, and the occasional kaiju homage. The Rygamaverse is a thrilling and sometimes hilarious take on the genre that deconstructs the genre just as much as it builds on it. Sometimes you really don’t know what to make of it because it seems to go in many directions at once. The only thing you can really say for sure is that its badass and it really doesn’t give a damn what you think, much like its creator. Rygama herself is a very interesting character, with a entertaining and sensible ‘by sci-fi standards’ background. Rygama is one of the few main kaiju that do not fall into the usual trap of being a blatant Godzilla pastiche. A chimerical fusion of insect, reptile, and juggernaut, Rygama is a wonderfully original creation that regardless of what you do with her; is recognizable in just about any form. Her fighting style is different, her personality is empathizable. She can go anywhere and fight anything, anytime. Rygama is complex and multifaceted but still very down to earth and practical for a giant monster; it’s part of the reason she is so effective. The rest of the cast have gone back and forth in terms of design and name but Rygama remains largely the same, it’s a testament to the power of her concept. Character wise Rygama skirts the territory of heroes and villains, preferring the sanctuary of the naturalist instead. Rygama is a sentient animal and as you might expect from a sentient animal, she prefers to do what she can to exist but is not above taking things into a social context if it means mutual gain. You see evidence of this through her interactions with the small child in her origins and in Klora when they have to work together to face The Rage, a horrific tree elemental beast brought about by a galactic plague that mutates the host when it gives into its baser emotions.

The various other kaiju in the Rygamaverse are a diverse bunch. The afore mentioned Klora is an alien creature mutated by the Rage virus but not to the point where all decency has left her mind. She vaguely resembles a kangaroo mixed with a dinosaur…an alien dinosaur. Then there is Jitsugo, informally known to me as ‘Mr. Fluffy McWhiskerkins’. The token arachnid of the series, the big purple tarantula with the mind of Pat Morita and mouth of a great white shark is something akin to King Caesar in role but more like Gaira in terms of human relations. The only kaiju I can convincingly see roundhouse kick someone eight times in succession. He gets a brain injury but in the end, he got better. Dyna has changed from giant bird to giant pterodactyl from hell. Still mean, still ornery, still a bitch and we wouldn’t have her any other way. The Harpy is another kaiju from the Rygamaverse a lot of us may recognize. The sleek mecha is the only robot in the series and has always been rather ‘saw-licious’. He now is divided into a ‘red oni, blue oni’ format with alien origins because the military just doesn’t have the patience for that kind of shit.

Aside from alien invaders and interdimensional journeys into the great unknown, the Rygamaverse contains a subplot that brings the human cast into the story. A brilliant but morally insane man by the name of Ned Wolf decides that taking over the world via giant monsters is a great idea and thus he does but at the expense of his own humanity and later life. His legacy is an island full of mutants and bat-shit-crazy dinosaurs that make Jurassic Park look like Care-a-lot. If there is one thing the Rygamaverse is never in lack of, it would be fun and creative monsters that savagely over the top in all the right ways. Story wise it occasionally ‘jumps’ here and there. Combine this with the three different time lines and it can get kind of jumbled. The basic gist is that after Rygama takes out her first foe, she travels the world and the world enters a period of time when monsters are spawning all over hell from both genetic mad science and an alien virus that turns all organic things into horrific beasts of solid angry. When things settle down a bit, there is a settlement period that has the various creatures living on their islands and occasionally tussling with each other and man. Then Rygama gets sucked into a worm hole and begins ‘Rygama’s adventures in The Warp’ where she encounters other worlds, new foes, and one winged angel wolves that snap like twigs. She eventually finds her way home and finds Xenovore alive and causing hell and this leads to a final battle where they both die. Cue time skip and a monster using Dictator following in Wolf’s shoes is terrorizing a Road Warrior like world for the lulz and red wine. Rygama fully regenerates and so begins Rygama’s era of future rebellion which is all about kicking ass, taking names, and surviving while giving the empire the middle finger. This time line could easily fit into several kaiju eras or volumes a piece. There is such great potential in this Kaijuverse that I would love to see it go somewhere. It’s a little messy, self doubting, and confused at the moment but it wouldn’t take much to shape it into a truly formidable series that could shake the genre to its foundations. It’s largely what the Shinsei Godzilla era could have been and it has a similar vibe but still has that solid Showa foundation and occasional light heartedness.

Art wise, the series is coming along. It has a thick grittiness to it that feels like a young Sin City but with color. The art always has strong lines and color values have improved with time. The two sore points in the art work are the perspective and the backgrounds that are often linked to that perspective. When it isn’t the kaiju by themselves, sometimes the art seems almost like a Picasso painting in that things that should be at a distance are at the same level as the characters. This can make the art seem unintentionally surreal and ‘off’. These things generally improve with time and practice though and I’m fairly certain that Gregole is well on the way to eventually getting things to come out at the right angle and depth. Kaiju design on the other hand is something that Gregole has in abundance as you won’t find many more original yet practical kaiju anywhere. You may also notice that a major feature of this kaijuverse is big feet. Pretty much everything in the Rygamaverse, unless it’s obviously parodied, has enormous feet. This makes a deal of sense since all mobile life forms need weight distribution and heavier something is, the wider it has to distribute that weight. Feet, being the primary tool in this function, are affected by this and the Rygamaverse nods its head at this rule and gives it some lip service since the square cubed law is boring and makes everything over a couple meters explode. Those of you who are in the ‘thin and chicken footed’ camp will find this aesthetically displeasing…not that we care. Like myself, Gregole also enjoys making things naturally spiky and you’ll find no shortage of barbs, stingers, talons, spines, and spikes throughout the Rygamaverse. Giving dentistry nightmares also seems to be on the agenda.

In closing, the Rygamaverse is so bursting with potential that it sometimes doesn’t know what to do with itself. It wants to be so many things but ultimately it confuses itself in trying to be all of them. The art is at a level that it can bring a lot of concepts to life but still needs some help in the finer points of the basics. My diagnosis is to streamline the focus, improve the perspective, and cement the overall goal of the setting. Every bit of fiction has to have some kind of message or meaning that the work builds up to telling the audience. The Rygamaverse just needs to figure out what its message is and then it will have no trouble delivering it. Some more drawing from life would also help quite a bit, the basics usually do. Everyone else, you need to see this stuff for yourself; it’s a good example of the sheer creative force that is in the genre. It may not know exactly where it wants to go and it’s still a little rough around the edges, but it’s got a passion and practical purpose that a lot of the ‘Godzilla Neo Fan’ kaijuverses do not. I find that both awesome and a little disappointing lol.



Skill: 7
Design: 10
Creativity: 10
Story: 9
Total: 36/40
Grade= A