Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Kaijumax Deluxe Edition Volume 3 is the final oversized hardcover collection of Zander Cannon’s monster prison saga featuring the last two Kaijumax books – season five, The Orange Mile and six, For All Mankind – at appropriately super-sized ultrascale, twice as large as a regular graphic novel.

The generous proportions mean room at the bottom of each page for Cannon to add a running commentary discussing all the in-jokes, references to comics, films and TV shows in these pages that readers might otherwise not pick up on. The visual information is so densely layered that even if you know the sources inspiring Kaijumax there is bound to be something you missed, so it’s a pleasure to have the author alongside you adding an extra dimension to the narrative.

The deluxe editions are definitive reading for the annotated feature alone, but there are other extras here too, beginning with an extremely in-depth interview with Zander Cannon, full disclosure being that it’s conducted by reviewer Woodrow Phoenix. It goes through the making of Kaijumax from its beginnings, motivations and inspirations to the final results. There are biographies of all characters introduced in the last two volumes, design sketches and production notes, another look at favourite monster films, and there’s a generously laid-out cover gallery of all the art produced for the twelve individual comics forming the last two volumes, plus a one-page biography of Zander Cannon.

It’s going to be hard to say goodbye to Electrogor, Daniel, Sharkmon, Jeong, Chisato and Nobuko Matsumoto, to name just a few of the many protagonists who have driven this series. But this final volume does a great job of giving the reader just enough resolution to the very many plotlines making up Kaijumax that it feels like an okay place to leave it. The last word on this book is probably best left to its author: “I spent many years doing work that I thought was “important”, and I believe some of it was, but for all its importance it never made me half as happy as I am when I’m drawing monsters taking drugs and murdering each other.”