Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Kaijumax Deluxe Edition Volume 2 is a hardcover volume, presented in the popular ‘Absolute’ format that showcases the interior artwork twice as large as regular comics size. It features books three and four – King of the Monstas and Scaly is the New Black – of Zander Cannon’s kaiju prison comic at epic size. There is the additional bonus of an author’s commentary running through the book, with footnotes on most of the pages. These are where Cannon points out some of the hidden jokes in the art, explaining details of plot points or character motivations and discussing his inspirations for stories and homages to a wide variety of source materials. If reading these comics for the first time you will probably find it impossible to jump between footnotes and artwork without losing the flow of events and getting confused, but there is a treasure trove of information in the commentary to return to once you’ve finished the story so far.

Along with the 280 pages of comics, this book also contains 36 pages of extras, including the Kaijumax theme song, a character design appendix supplying backstory for all the new characters introduced in this volume (all 61 of them!), reviews of Cannon’s favourite kaiju movies, pages from his sketchbook, and a cover gallery of all the art for the original twelve issues of the ongoing series. This is a great-looking book, and if you haven’t already purchased Kaijumax in its original form you may find it better value to pick this up instead, especially with the many extras.