Godzilla Rivals: Biollante Vs. Destoroyah
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Godzilla Rivals: Biollante Vs. Destoroyah is the eighth installment of the IDW Publishing one-shot comic series Godzilla Rivals. It was published on May 10, 2023.[1]
Description
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No need for gloom, just drink a BLOOME! There's an irresistible new beverage, Bio-II from BLOOME, that's taken the world by storm. The lives of two unlikely allies collide as they scramble to unlock the sinister secrets behind Bio-II and halt the rebirth of the strangest botanical beast the Earth has ever seen, the blossoming Biollante!
Dr. Meena Shyam is a disgraced kaiju researcher whose radical ideas saw her shunned by the scientific community. Needles is a slacker hacker who's just cracked the code behind BLOOME's proprietary recipe. Together, crisscrossing the moonlit hills and bridges of Pittsburgh, they race against the clock to stop Biollante's destruction as they call forth one of the deadliest kaiju of all time, the dastardly Destoroyah![1]
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Plot
The year is 2019 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Meena Shyam and her coworker Sophie Eastman wait in line for a plant-based Bio-II drink at a BLOOME store. Meena is dismayed that they're spending their lunch break in line; Sophie is dismayed when Meena declines to order anything once they get inside. At the same time, BLOOME head Annika Rose fields questions from a reporter about the new drink, which is reportedly addictive, and what her company's name is an acronym for. She closes the interview by repeating her stance that plants represent the key to "a better, more unified humanity" more subservient to the Earth. After she orders her employees sent home early, she muses that her plan is close to fruition as the rose held in a glass dome on her desk sprouts fangs.
Working late, Meena is startled by a power outage, but quickly locates the perpetrator: Needles, a hacker investigating a "kaiju conspiracy." Before they can show her the files that prompted their break-in, they recognize her name. She recounts how her childhood fascination with kaiju, especially Godzilla, led her to join a defense organization. She developed a Unified Kaiju Theory, which held that some of the creatures were accumulations of smaller components. Her fellow scholars scoffed, however, leading her to leave the field. To her surprise, Needles is unaware of her history; they simply know from the files that she and Sophie tested and approved Bio-II the previous year. They next show her a heavily redacted document revealing BLOOME's full name - Botanical Liquids Organically Optimized for Maxmium Evolution - and that spores inside Bio-II will bloom into Biollante after 300 days of incubation. Marching to a giant rose contained in a BLOOME laboratory, Annika declares the start of the next phase.
Meena and Needles head outside and try to determine how long Bio-II has been available to the public. Meena spots Sophie kneeling on the sidewalk, wrapped in vines with a fanged rose petal above her head. When she approaches her, Sophie wraps a vine around her wrist, but she severs it with a pair of forceps. She ushers Needles into her car and they drive to her secret laboratory, built inside a forgotten funicular. Annika takes to the streets as well, urging other transformed humans to unify. Needles locates a news report on their phone showing the resulting vine monster. They descend to the second part of her lab, housed in an abandoned station, where she tests chlorophyll annihilator on a Biollante vine and grabs a bottle of oxygen annihilator and a culture dish labeled "Precambrian creature." To save time, Needles breaks into and hotwires a nearby truck. Meena deposits the oxygen annihilator and the contents of the dish into the pool, and a horde of person-sized, crab-like monsters soon emerge: Destoroyah. They barely outrun the hostile creatures and lure them towards the vine monster, now recognizable as Biollante's Flower Beast form. She easily knocks the smaller monsters away, but they combine into an Aggregate Form Destoroyah. This vindicates Meena's Unified Kaiju Theory, but her elation dissipates when she spots Needles escaping in the truck.
Destoroyah stabs Biollante's core with a giant pencil sculpture, drawing a cry of pain. Biollante retaliates by picking up Destoroyah and hurling him a great distance into the Andy Warhol Bridge. As she moves towards the fallen monster, Meena grabs a ride on one of her vines and spots Annika cackling in triumph atop one of the monster's mouthed vines. Needles picks her up, having just needed the truck to swipe some drones to deploy the chlorophyll annihilator with. Now in his Flying Form, Destoroyah reengages Biollante in the Allegheny River. His horn shreds Biollante's rose and his Micro-Oxygen Spray disintegrates Annika, prompting Biollante to blossom into her Plant Beast form. She knocks him out of the sky; he shifts into his Perfect Form, only to be met with a spray of acid to the face and an onslaught of tendrils that rip him apart. The drones, which Needles reveals he designed, fly into action, dissolving Biollante with the spray. The Bio-II drinkers inside emerge unharmed, which Meena admits she wasn't sure would happen. She finds Sophie in the crowd and they embrace. She explains to Needles that the threat isn't over: they need to spread the cure to every area where Bio-II is sold.
Appearances
Monsters
Characters
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Weapons, vehicles, and organizations
Locations
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Gallery
Concept art
Early Destoroyah design
Early Destoroyah design
Early Destoroyah design
Final Destoroyah design
Final Destoroyah design
Biollante and Destoroyah concept art
Needles concept art
Needles concept art
Dr. Meena Shyam and Biollante Zombie concept art
Covers
Cover A by Sean Dove
Cover B by Andrew MacLean
Retailer incentive cover by Camila Fortuna
Online exclusive cover by Juan Samu
Exclusive cover by Clayton Crain
Portion of cover A art
Portion of cover A art
Cover B pencils (left) in a banner for Godzilla Rivals
Art
Trivia
- This issue was announced during San Diego Comic-Con 2022, along with Rodan Vs. Ebirah and Mothra Vs. Titanosaurus.[2] Whereas portions of the primary cover art for the other two issues were revealed during the announcement, only pencils from cover B of this issue were revealed.
- Writer Nick Marino used Google Maps to plot out the action of the story, with many major and obscure Pittsburgh landmarks appearing throughout.[3][4]
- Marino is married to Rosie Knight, the writer of Godzilla Rivals: Vs. Battra.
- The rose held inside a glass dome on Annika Rose's desk is likely a reference to the 1991 Disney film Beauty and the Beast.
- While the anti-kaiju organization Dr. Meena Shyam worked for is not named, the patch on her uniform is that of the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasure Center.
- Inside Shyam's secret laboratory are an anatomy diagram of Gamera and a large moth in a glass case that resembles Mothra. Her Godzilla plush heavily resembles Kidrobot's Godzilla plushes, only green in color.
- The oxygen annihilator is an obvious reference to the Oxygen Destroyer.
- The can Shyam throws at a Crawl Form Destoroyah reads "GABARA BEANZ." The number 69 is also printed on the can; Gabara's debut film, All Monsters Attack, was released in 1969.
- This comic ends with advertisements for Godzilla Rivals: Vs. SpaceGodzilla, Godzilla: Monsters & Protectors, Godzilla vs. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Godzilla Rivals: Round One.
External links
- Zine made by writer Nick Marino to promote the comic on Free Comic Book Day
- Twitter thread by Sean Dove detailing the design process
References
This is a list of references for Godzilla Rivals: Biollante Vs. Destoroyah. These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: [1]
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