#godzilla legend

[geniriot]

Mecha Godzilla

[spaceleech]

General Products ad from Uchusen Vol. 32, 1986.

Along with the 3 meter tall Flatwoods Monster model, there’s an ad for Godzilla Legand, a doujin by MASH, the pen name of Shinji Nishikawa, who went on to work on Heisei and Millenium era Godzilla films.

You can see scans from Godzilla Legend HERE.

[geniriot]

Illustration based on the manga Godzilla Legend by Mash, pen name for Shinji Nishikawa.

[spaceleech]

Way back in the 1980s, Shinji Nishikawa (aka MASH) released a doujinshi called Godzilla Legend which eventually helped him land a job at Toho.

You can see some scans HERE.

Making of Godzilla Legend isn’t an autobio comic of Nishikawa hunched over his desk, but instead “behind the scenes” pictures and vignettes of the cast of Godzilla Legend that make it look like the doujinshi was a real tokusatsu movie.

[seatopian]

IT BEGINS

[spaceleech]

Thanks for the question, Luna.

Even though Godzilla has legions of fans that dig up whatever they can find, there are still some oddities that slip by unnoticed.

In this case, Godzilla Legend, published in 1986, is just such an oddity. I found my copy purely by chance in a very small doujinshi shop in Akihabara. The only other thing I bought from there was a comic that nothing but drawings of young girls posing with radios and electronics from the 1950's.

According to this article from Henshin Online, Godzilla Legend was a parody comic written by Shinji Nishikawa, who would go on to design creatures for the Heisei and Millennium era Godzilla films, including Battra, Mecha King Ghidorah, and Kiryu. In the book Japan's Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of "The Big G" by Steve Ryfle, it is written that Nishikawa even wrote a draft of the aborted 1990's King Kong Vs. Godzilla remake that was going to be about a female scientist that resurrects Kong as a cyborg.

Nishikawa wrote Godzilla Legend under the pen name MASH and later made another parody comic called Godzilla Gaiden, which was about his time working at Toho.

A long time fan of Godzilla, Nishikawa has an extensive collection of toys and merchandise and even dabbled in making short films with them, one of which can be seen HERE.

Legend is about Japanese society having to deal with hordes of kaiju that have no been shrunk down to the size of a house cat. In an interview conducted by David Milner, Nishikawa got the idea for tiny Godzillas attacking Japan after seeing a friend doing a comic about a dragonfly growing huge and rampaging. Nishikawa just reversed the idea and had a huge monster shrink down.

A friend of a friend that worked at Toho showed Shinji's work to the higher-ups, and Shinji was brought on to help design the monster Biollante. The rest is history.

(Note: All pictures shown come from Nishikawa's website: http://www.mashroom.com/

[spaceleech]

Godzilla Legend by Shinji Nishikawa/MASH, 1986.

[spaceleech]

Chibi Godzilla from Godzilla Legend by Shinji Nishikawa, 1986.