Kaijumax. Season 1: Terror and Respect

Eisner Award winner Cannon (Top Ten) pens and draws a book whose seemingly kid-friendly images belie the adult-level content. While the artwork looks like something from the Cartoon Network or a children's anime—all bright colors, rounded edges, and, for the monsters, fairly silly expressions—the story, set in Kaijumax, tells of an island prison for the giant monsters of Japanese movie fame and includes all the dark plot elements that readers expect in that sort of fare. There are, of course, gangs, drugs, and murders, with the preferred shank being a sharpened oil tanker. Cannon employs jail slang, jail religion, and rape in the showers or, in this case, the waterfall. The guards are typical as well, never mind that they have suits that allow them to grow to the size of the inmates with appropriate weapons and armor. One guard is in debt to and under the thumb of one family member of an inmate, another has emotional issues, and a third maintains an inappropriate relationship with a kaiju. Center stage throughout is Electrogor, a giant crustacean-thing that produces pods of uranium-235 and that just wants to get back to his kids.