GAMERA

Real Name: Gamera

Identity/Class: Terrestrial amphibian (prehistoric era to modern day) (see comments)

Occupation: Animal, defender of the Earth/humanity

Group Membership: None

Affiliations: Unrevealed (see comments)

Enemies: Unrevealed;
   probably formerly JSDF (Japanese Self-Defense Forces) (see comments)

Known Relatives: None

Aliases: Kamera, Gammera, Gamela (see comments)

Base of Operations: Mobile around the world's oceans, most frequently in the Pacific near Japan

First Appearance: (original) Gamera the Giant Monster (Daiei Motion Picture Company, 27th November 1965);
    (Marvel, pictorial evidence of existence on Earth-616) Uncanny X-Men I#181 (May 1984)

Powers/Abilities: A giant turtle capable of walking on all fours or just his hind legs, Gamera possesses immense strength allowing him to lift hundreds of tons, and incredible durability, shrugging off most attacks up to and including missile strikes. If he is badly injured he can enter a hibernating regenerative state to rapidly recover. He is fully amphibious, surviving underwater with ease and able to dive to the deepest parts of the ocean, casually withstanding the immense pressures. He can swim in excess of fifty knots (around 57mph - by contrast, a U.S. Destroyer's top speed is around 30 knots).

   Gamera feeds off energy, be it fire, electricity or nuclear; he can also chow down on oil and coal as raw fuel, storing them inside his gut in specialist organs until they can be passed into his internal furnace. Able to generate massive internal thermal energy, he can breath jets of flame. More astoundingly, he can fly by retracting limbs or his head inside his shell, then discharging flames like a rocket jet; he sometimes retracts all four limbs and head and flies spinning around like a top, and other times only his hind limbs. He can exceed Mach 3 while flying, and is capable of flying into deep space, surviving in the vacuum without any obvious difficulties.

Height: 196'10"
Weight: 78.73 tons
Eyes: Unrevealed (see comments)
Hair: None
Scales: Blue-green

History:
(Gamera movies) - Believed to have been a member of a rare species of giant turtle that once inhabited the lost continent of Atlantis, Gamera was apparently trapped in Arctic ice after his home continent sank. In the modern day an aircraft from an unidentified nation hostile to the U.S.A. was shot down during a dogfight with American fighter jets near Gamera's location; after it crash-landed the nuclear bomb it was carrying detonated, thawing out Gamera. When the creature made his way to Japan, he was initially assumed to be hostile and attacked by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) but over time it became clear that Gamera was not only friendly towards humanity but protective of it, willing to battle other monsters in mankind's defense.

(Uncanny X-Men I#181 (fb) - BTS) - The giant turtle kaiju (see comments) Gamera was well known enough in Japan to warrant an entry in a "Monster Book" that featured silhouettes and basic information about its entries.

(Uncanny X-Men I#181 - BTS) - When the giant dragon Puff appeared over Japan a group of school children were among the first to spot her, but were unable to identify her from their Monster Book, instead flipping past images of Gojira, Gamera and the Hulk.

(Muties#2 - BTS) - Telekinetic Japanese mutant youth Seiji Honda owned many action figures (see comments), including a Gamera toy. When his abusive stepfather Noboru threatened to kill Seiji's mother the boy used his telekinesis to make his toys attack the man.

Comments: Daiei Motion Pictures' president Masaichi Nagata claimed he conceived the concept of Gamera, inspired by witnessing a turtle-shaped cloud; however, it's worth mentioning that this is a suspiciously similar story to the one film producer Tomoyuki Tanaka gave years earlier while explaining how he came up with Godzilla, and TV producer Tomio Sagisu, who founded and ran a company that made tokusatsu shows claimed Daiei stole the idea from a kaiju series he had been shopping around. The people who built the Gamera suit for his debut movie (and so I assume the people who came up with his look) were the brothers Kanju Yagi and Yasuei Yagi, who had previously created the original Godzilla suit. Gamera was introduced into Marvel, albeit only via sneaky unidentified silhouette, by Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr. and Dan Green; given he only appeared as an unnamed figure in a monster book it is possible that the script didn't mention Gamera and only Romita was actually responsible for his inclusion.

   Before going more into Gamera, a few quick explanations of Japanese terminology related to their monster movies for the uninitiated.

• Tokusatsu is an abbreviation of tokushu satsuei, literally special photography. In movie parlance it more colloquially translates as "special effects," and so productions with lots of special effects - e.g. SF, fantasy, superhero or monster - are generally described as tokusatsu shows or movies.
  
• Kaiju literally translates as mysterious beast; more colloquially, it gets translated as monster, and is usually applied to movies involving the likes of Godzilla, Gamera, etc. AFAIK, the first movie to be described as a kaiju movie was the 1955 Godzilla (Gojira in Japan), but like many such cases, once the parameters for what counted as a kaiju movie were figured out, hindsight showed that earlier movies, most notably the 1933 King Kong, were also kaiju movies. Strictly speaking Gamera and Godzilla are not just kaiju but daikaiju (dai meaning giant), but the distinction is rarely brought up; most kaiju movies feature giant monsters, not human-sized ones. And besides, humanoid monsters (and superhumans) are kaijin, literally "mysterious beings."
• Showa era vs Hesei era: The Gamera movies made in the 1960s through 1980 (and the Godzilla ones made from the 1950s to the 1970s) are considered their Showa era movies, while the Gamera movies of the 1990s (and Godzilla from 1985 through the 1990s) are Heisei era movies. The names come from which Japanese emperor was on the throne when they were being made. Emperor Hirohito, who died in 1989, was posthumously renamed Emperor Showa ("enlightened harmony") in recognition that (even with his role in WWII) under his rule Japan enjoyed a lengthy period of peace and economic growth; the era of his son Akihito (who ruled from 1989 to 2019, when he abdicated due to old age) is the Heisei ("peace everywhere") period; the current Japanese emperor as of this writing, Akihito's son Naruhito, presides over the Reiwa ("beautiful harmony") era.
  

  Toho is the studio that produced the Godzilla movies, Japan's (and probably the world's) most famous kaiju; Toho is also responsible for Akira Kurosawa's films (historical epics such as Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo, etc.), and distributing most of the Studio Ghibli anime movies. Daiei was a rival studio, and Gamera remains the most successful kaiju star outside of the Toho fold.

  Gamera's name derives from the Japanese word for turtle "kame" combined with a suffix "ra"; it's been suggested that Kamera became Gamera to avoid his name sounding like the English word camera. When his first movie was released in the United States he was subtly renamed Gammera, and it has also been spelled Gamela in some international release literature.

   Is Gamera definitely a real creature on Earth-616 (the mainstream Marvel universe)? It's not confirmed, given that we've only seen a drawing of him and a toy, but the context of the former is significant - both the other "monsters" depicted in that guide are real being in 616, and if you were putting together a "spotter's guide" to help people identify things they see, would you include fictional beings? Of course, that begs the question as to whether the other things mentioned by the children as being in the guide might also exist in 616. These were:

• Space Cruiser Yamato (a.k.a. Space Battleship Yamato), a giant flying spaceworthy battleship. Though the whole backstory behind the ship from the anime it originates in wouldn't fit well into 616, there's no reason a version of the ship itself couldn't.
  
• Astro Boy, a tiny boy-shaped robot hero. Though Japanese children should have called him Tetsuwan Atom.
• and Red Ronin - who definitely does exist in 616, supporting the proposition that the others do too!
  

   I'm less inclined to assume that Seiji's toys are evidence (on their own at least) of the beings they represent existing for real in 616, though we can't rule it out, given they include confirmed "real" beings like Godzilla and Ant-Man. If the others also are based on real beings, then we can add Godzilla's sometimes ally/sometimes foe Mothra (seen in his larval form among the toys), one of the Kamen Rider superheroes, the giant robot Tetsujin-28 (a.k.a. Gigantor in the U.S.), the giant mecha Eva Unit 1 (from Neon Genesis Evangelion, whose world can't co-exist with 616, but maybe the mecha could), and Optimus Prime of the Autobots.

   Since we don't know how much, if any, of Gamera's movie history might transfer over to 616, I've left his allies and enemies as largely unrevealed. It's feasible that in 616 he might be a Deviant mutate, or another creation of Doctor Parker. He's probably not Parker's previously seen experimental giant turtles 247 or XYZ, as neither of them have Gamera's distinctive mouth tusks, though it is possible those developed over time.

   Gamera has appeared in a reasonable number of manga in Japan, but the only Western comics he's starred in that I know of was the four issue Gamera miniseries released by Dark Horse in 1995.

Profile by Loki.

CLARIFICATIONS:
Gamera has no known connections to:

• Gamora of the Guardians of the Galaxy--Strange Tales I#180
• 247 - giant turtle created by Doctor Parker--Tales to Astonish I#1
• XYZ - another giant turtle created by Doctor Parker--Tales to Astonish I#1
• unidentified giant turtle--Order II#5
  
• any other turtles - Gamera might be mutated, but he's definitely neither teenage nor a ninja
• or any other similarly named characters

images: (without ads)
Uncanny X-Men I#181, p2, pan3 (main image, Monster Book's Gamera silhouette)
Gamera the Giant Monster production still (main image, black and white Gamera photo)
Muties#2, p19, pan3 (Gamera toy)
Gamera#2 cover (Gamera comic art)

Appearances:
Uncanny X-Men I#181 (May 1984) - Chris Claremont (writer), John Romita Jr. Dan Green (artists), Louise Jones (editor)
Muties#2 (May 2002) - Karl Bollers (writer), Patrick Spaziante (pencils), Danny Miki & Victor Olazaba & Crime Lab Studios (inks), Mark Powers (editor)

First Posted: 09/17/2023
Last updated: 09/17/2023

Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.

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