Starship Godzilla issue 1 (2025)

Starship Godzilla issues
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"Chapter One: Comet Salt" Written by Chris Gooch Art by Oliver Ono Cover by Oliver Ono (CVR A) Chris Gooch (CVR B/RI 1:50) Victor Cafaggi (CVR C) Bob Eggleton (CVR RI 1:25) Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou Edits by Jake Williams Design by Brian Kolek

IDW Starship Godzilla #1 • #2 • #3 • #4 • #5 • #6

"Chapter One: Comet Salt" is the first issue of IDW Publishing's Starship Godzilla. An exclusive black-and-white edition was made available for purchase at the 2025 San Diego Comic-Con International, held July 24–27. The retail version was published on October 1 of the same year. Five pages from the comic were also previewed in the Free Comic Book Day one-shot Godzilla: The New Heroes.

Description

“

The Kai-Sei Era goes to space inside a brand-new Mechagodzilla! You didn’t think kaiju were only on Earth, did you? In the fight for galactic supremacy, no weapon is more powerful than a kaiju…and no team is better equipped to capture and transport these titanic monsters than the crew of Starship Godzilla! This ragtag group flies through space in Mechagodzilla and takes high-risk, high-reward missions across the galaxy. A kaiju heading toward your planet? Give them a call. A colossal space pest clogging up your trade route? They’ll get rid of it. A galactic civil war utilizing kaiju on both sides? They’ll…uh…do their best to stay out of it. But where there’s a galactic war, there’s a galactic conspiracy-, and this may be one fight our crew doesn’t land on the same side of. A brand-new kaiju space epic starts here in Chris Gooch (In Utero, Under-Earth) and Oliver Ono’s (Godzilla: Monster Island Summer Camp) Starship Godzilla!

„

Plot

A man named Rohan is held at knifepoint by several alien adversaries who ignore his attempts to defuse the situation and charge him. As he grapples with the assailants, first mate Ayan arrives and helps him subdue their foes. Ayan grabs the lead man's limp body and presses his face against an identification pad to open a door as Rohan contacts a woman named Ilsa, telling her to stand by for extraction. The two locate their target, which they discover to be rare kaiju eggs. As they talk about the mysterious and wealthy client who tasked them with this heist, the man Ayan subdued comes to and sets off an alarm, forcing Ayan and Rohan to scramble out of the room with the former strapping the incubator to her back. Rohan contacts Ilsa and orders immediate extraction. The duo interrupts an auction being conducted by aliens as they make their escape, though they are soon surrounded by security forces sent to stop them. Fortunately, Ilsa arrives in the S.S. Mechagodzilla, which smashes through the ceiling of the facility.

Sometime later, the ship flies through the depths of space with all crew accounted for. Ayan brings Rohan to the room with the incubator, explaining how their cat Ralphy had taken a liking to its warmth, prompting her to open it to allow the cat to sleep inside. In doing so, Ayan sheepishly reveals to Rohan that she had forgotten to close the incubator door, and that one of the eggs had hatched as the duo inspects a massive hole that the unknown hatchling had burned through the walls of the ship. Rohan, the captain of the vessel, immediately orders a ship-wide lockdown, instructing the crew to return to their quarters while requesting the Simian Lif's help in locating and stopping the beast. As Ayan, Rohan, and Lif search the ship, Ayan objects to Lif's plan of killing the creature, insisting it hasn't done anything wrong. As Rohan is about to weigh in, the baby kaiju appears above them and leaps down, spraying a stream of acid from its tail which Rohan barely avoids. Though the hull is breached in the attack, Ilsa remotely seals it from the flight deck, narrowly preventing the trio and the kaiju itself from being sucked into space. As they gather their bearings, Lif corners the creature and prepares to execute it, only for Ayan to knock him off his feet, allowing the creature to escape deeper into the vessel.

In an elevator descending to a lower level of the ship, the trio resume their argument over how to handle the kaiju, with Ayan arguing the monster is merely scared. Though Rohan concedes that she is probably correct, he asserts that the creature is dangerous nevertheless and poses too great a risk to the ship, reluctantly supporting Lif's plan to execute it. At that moment, Ilsa contacts Rohan and informs him that the baby kaiju has breached the flight deck. Ayan stops the elevator, ignoring Rohan's protests as she leaps through the escape hatch into the elevator shaft. As Rohan uses Lif's gun to blast the elevator doors open, he contacts Ayan and tells her he knows his way through the ship and that she cannot beat him to the flight deck, though she retorts that she has been climbing through the bowels of the ship since she was a child and knows everything in between the rooms and corridors. Ayan subsequently arrives in the ship's cockpit first to find Ilsa and Ickblob hiding from the creature, where she gently greets all three of them as the creature hisses.

Rohan and Lif arrive at the flight deck to find the baby kaiju sitting harmlessly on Ayan's lap as she, Ilsa, and Ickblob feed it treats. Ayan smugly informs the two that she was right and that the baby kaiju is indeed benevolent. In the aftermath, Rohan and Ilsa sit by the incubator, admiring the kaiju eggs as they recover from the day's harrowing events. Ilsa reveals that she deduced the buyer's identity due to how much they were willing to pay for the eggs. She asks if Ayan knows, and after Rohan affirms that she doesn't, Ilsa expresses relief, saying it would break her heart. As Ilsa remains captivated by the eggs and describes them as beautiful, Rohan silently draws his gun behind her. He quietly concurs with her sentiment before raising the weapon to Ilsa's back and pulling the trigger.

Appearances

Monsters S.S. Mechagodzilla Kaiju eggs Bug Alien bird-like creature (CVR B) Characters Ayan Rohan Ilsa Lif Ickblob

Weapons, vehicles, and races Simian Various alien races Xilien UFO (CVR C) Locations Uton-9 (mentioned)

Gallery

Covers

• 
  Cover A by Oliver Ono
• 
  Cover B by Chris Gooch
• 
  Cover C by Victor Cafaggi
• 
  Blank sketch cover
• 
  1:25 Variant cover by Bob Eggleton
• 
  SDCC 2025–exclusive black-and-white cover
• 
  Collector's Paradise–exclusive connecting Kai-Sei Era cover by Patrick Horvath
• 
  East Coast Comics–exclusive cover by NRG
• 
  East Coast Comics–exclusive cover by NRG
• 
  New York Comic-Con–exclusive cover by Jesse Hernandez

Panel art

• 
• 

Scans

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Trivia

• Cover C recreates the poster for the original Star Wars (1977), another story set in outer space.
• Though the Simians are depicted using their green-skinned ape-man design from Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, one of them wears the helmet worn by members of the race in Terror of Mechagodzilla.
• While the art in the SDCC 2025 edition is entirely without color, the text of one of Lif's screams is red. The cover gallery page is also in full color, though the following ad pages are printed in black-and-white.
• The East Coast Comics–exclusive variant covers recreate a scene from Alien 3 (1992), with Ayan and the hatchling in place of Ripley and the Xenomorph.

References

This is a list of references for Starship Godzilla issue 1. 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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