Welcome back, fellow creeps, and welcome new readers to the New Year of SCAPULA!  We’re kicking things off with a little old-school destruction, here in Civic Center, San Francisco…that’ll teach ’em to keep the streets clean!

It should be pretty obvious from this page that I’m a huge fan of monster movies, in particular the giant monster films from Japan (“kaiju eiga” to the Japanese or those trendy liberals pretending to be anything but white).  I used to be a pretty obsessive fan of the Godzilla series and Ultra Q, collecting a ton of toys, models, bootleg videos, and other pleasantly distracting wastes of cash.  While those days are long gone, I still have a lot of fun memories of the Toho critters and their city-smashing shenanigans (give me a “Hell Yeah!” if you love Rodan!).

Eiji Tsuburaya, the grand-daddy of Japanese monsters and special effects (tokusatsu, again for the Nihonjin and wannabes), makes a cameo in panel 4.