Godzilla: The Half-Century War (2012)

A Godzilla story with a human lead worth caring about. James Stokoe, writing and drawing again, follows Lieutenant Ota Murakami, a young Japanese tank officer, from Godzilla's first Tokyo landfall in 1954 through five decades of encounters, so each issue is a different era and a different brawl, while the real subject is one man's lifelong obsession. The kaiju fights are spectacular, drawn with the same dense, neon-bright detail Stokoe later brought to Aliens, but what makes it more than a smash-fest is that the destruction has a cost and a point of view. No knowledge of the films is needed. It is five issues long, so the collected edition is the way to read it.