Marvel Monsters #1 Review

Writer: Cullen Bunn

Artist: Scott Hepburn

Color Artist: Israel Silva

Monster Pin-Up Artists: Various

Monster Cross-Sections: Superlog

Monster Cross-Sections Letterer: Gaigan-Yamazaki

Letterer: VC’S Travis Lanham

Published by: Marvel

Marvel Monsters is, in essence, a combination of a picture book to look like research entries and a brief story that follows Kid Kaiju, from the series Monsters Unleashed, as he tries to discover the source of the sudden appearance of monsters in the Baltic Sea. 

What you make of this comic really depends on your expectations of it are going in. If you are looking for a completely fleshed-out story from Bunn and Hepburn, then you will finish reading this comic pretty disappointed. This issue acts more like a one-shot, following the end of the Monsters Unleashed comic, to keep Kid Kaiju in the public consciousness so that he doesn’t disappear in the  void that is forgotten Marvel creations. 

If you are looking for a comic that is roughly two-thirds a combination of pin-ups and research entries, then you are going to love this comic! To me, these entries are truly the selling point of the comic as the various artists get to have a lot of fun exploring the plethora of monsters that have appeared in Marvel comics in the past 80 years. I mean, there are some deep-dives in this issue that I had to Google to confirm they were part of the Marvel family. 

The star of this issue is Superlog and Gaigan-Yamazaki with their Cross-Sections. For each pin-up of a monster there is, they make a journal/encyclopedia entry for the monsters with varying facts/attributes about them. It’s really well done and fits really well in the Kaiju/Monster, Japanese/English theme of it all.

This issue may not be for everyone, especially at a $4.99 price tag. However, having looked at the preview for this issue, it should not come as a surprise that it is mostly a pin-up book with a little bit of story attached to it.