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Preface
Godzilla. King of the Monsters. He’s doing pretty well right now.
This weekend, Godzilla’s been part of a pretty big team-up film with King Kong in the New Empire in as of now the biggest opening weekend of 2024. And, the movie right before it that released last year, Godzilla: Minus One, had gotten critical acclaim from almost everyone, even winning an Oscar. It’s also his 70th anniversary! He’s doing pretty spectacular!
Power Rangers, on the other hand…
Power Rangers celebrated their 30th anniversary last year and… that’s it. Radio silence for this whole year.
It’s Godzilla’s time to shine and fortunately enough, he has graced us with presence by returning for another team up with the Power Rangers. Following the surprise crossover from 2022, we have its sequel! The original series was fun and short, showing all of the battles you could think of with these monsters. It ended with a tease looking through the multiverse of both franchises, which elevates this sequel with the amount of possibilities that could be.
Let’s see how these two worlds collide… again!
The Cover
I love the framing of the cover. How Godzilla almost encapsulates the top half while Rita covers the bottom half, essentially trapping the Rangers between them.
The Story
Time has advanced since the last crossover. In another dimension, a Tommy who is the White Ranger there has a fragment of the Multiversal Focus, the magic rock that started the crossover last time. With his Tigerzord, he fights off some monsters under Rita’s command (Sting King and Clawhammer from “In Space”, and Tentacreep from “Ninja Storm”), but then this world’s Godzilla appears, taking on all of the monsters including the Tigerzord. The energy from Godzilla’s blast triggers the Multiversal Focus again, sending the White Ranger to another dimension. This time, he meets the real MMPR team, the one from the last crossover.
Tommy tells them that Rita has been going to different dimensions, trying to recover the fragments of the Multiversal Focus. She used her magic to imprison Rangers from other realities, including his own team, and stripping them of their powers. Tommy manages to steal the fragment that he has now, but also reveals that she is working with someone else: an alternate Astronema.
The MMPR team agrees to help when Zordon senses another dimensional rift. At downtown Angel Grove, a portal opens up as the Godzilla and Rita’s monsters continue their fight. The Rangers decide then that it’s Morphin’ Time!
Rita and Astronema then converge their forces together with Astronema planning on sending out her Psycho Rangers. But, there’s no Yellow Psycho. Instead, replacing her is a Psycho Ranger of Rita’s creation: Psycho Ranger Ghidora…
Ending Thoughts
Already, it feels the same as the first series.
Like the previous crossover, there is not much characterization here, mainly it does what it needs to do to get from Point A to B. But, still, it’s enjoyable. We don’t get Rita interacting with Astronema much, only a few times in the original In Space season, so it is cool to see the two of them bouncing off each other with Astronema being the confident one with Rita trying to get the upper hand. And, as I said in the beginning, the premise alone is intriguing enough, especially since this comic is leaning more toward the Power Ranger side of things which would appeal to someone like me who is a casual when it comes to Godzilla.
The artwork for this series is done by Baldemar Rivas, a comic artist who has experience with superhero stuff in the past, mainly DC and Batman stuff. And, to compare it to the original series artwork done by Freddie Williams II, it’s a bit of a downgrade in my opinion. The art there was more stylized, trying to create a healthy blend of reality and cartoons. In the previous series, the designs of Godzilla and the monsters worked well while the Rangers were acceptable. It worked for the kaiju battles, showing the amount of detail in each fight and having the action come to life. Here, it minimizes a lot more of that detail, creating characters with very odd proportions and not showing the action accurately. To put it simply, the Rangers and the villains here look so much worse than they did back then.
Godzilla vs Mighty Morphin Power Rangers II #1 is a good start to a surprise sequel to a surprise crossover, but not great. We’ll see how it continues…
Random Thoughts from the Morphin’ Grid
- We get a glimpse of what is supposed to be the White Ranger’s team in their civilian outfits and, it’s not exactly like how it is in MMPR S2. I doubt if they’re actually going to do anything, but we’ll see.
- I will give this comic points for actually having Saba talk, something that the main series hasn’t done since the White Ranger’s debut about 60 issues ago!
- I will take those points away, however, because I just noticed that the writer swapped Bulk and Skull’s names in their cameos!
- Psycho Ranger Ghidorah… looks nothing like a Ranger. At all. I think even Zedd’s Dark Rangers from the comics look more like Rangers than this guy.
