Title: Shogun Warriors
Issue: 12
Date: 1979
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Doug Moench
Artist: Herb Trimpe, Mike Esposito
Colorist: George Bell
Letterer: Jim Novak
Editor: Allen Milgrom
The Shogun Warrior pilots are summoned to prevent a worldwide disaster as a meteor hurtles toward Earth. So, this was a total blast of nostalgia for me, as Shogun Warriors was one of the first Marvel series I was into as a kid. The other series I loved at that time was Marvel's Godzilla, so I was very excited to find a bit of a crossover happening here.
The meteor proved to be not that much of a challenge for the team of giant robots and their pilots, but that was all just a setup to reveal the return of a major villain from the early issues of Marvel's Godzilla. Reading it now, I felt like the human elements of the story were handled well, especially the easy comradery of the three pilots. There's an early scene where Genji shows up looking for crash space at Richard Carson's house in Los Angeles, resulting in a bit of a jealous tiff from Carson's girlfriend, Deena, but even that gets tempered down a bit in a follow-up scene that has Deena acting a bit more real.
The battle with the meteor is rather anticlimactic, and it's necessary to suspend disbelief a bit around the idea that this is all actually taking place in the regular Marvel Universe continuity, but that was typical for a lot of toy-licensed books in this era. This was a great reveal when I read it as a kid and it still holds up reasonably well.
Rating: 6/10
