Former Kansas Citian creates monstrous TV show. Guess why it got the name ‘Monarch’?

Godzilla stands 400 meters tall. Matt Fraction had to somehow figure out a way to fit that colossal radioactive reptile onto a TV screen.

Now with his new Apple TV+ series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” which he co-created with Chris Black (“Severance”), Fraction is reinventing this Japanese pop culture icon for today’s binge-watching audiences.

“The spectacle, the scale, the destruction — this is a huge show,” says Fraction, who lived and worked for years in Kansas City.

“We set out to make a TV show that lived in the world of Legendary Pictures’ ‘MonsterVerse’” — built out of the relaunched Godzilla and King Kong franches. “Any Godzilla fan knows that the most frustrating parts of any of the movies is the 15 to 20 minutes where people don’t believe Godzilla is real. The movie is called ‘Godzilla.’ I bought the ticket. I know Godzilla is real. Why am I ahead of the characters?”

So he situated the 10-part series (which debuted Nov. 17) after the events of the 2014 “Godzilla” reboot. Thus the prehistoric predator’s reality is not up for debate. Now, he explains, the question for society becomes: “How do people get up and go to work the next day?”

“The movies are 9/11. Our show is 9/12,” he says.

Interviewed over Zoom from Los Angeles, Fraction was preparing to attend a premiere celebrating the “Monarch” launch. The 47-year-old (who could easily pass for an actor rather than a writer on the show) wears a T-shirt adorned with a faux Tokyo street sign of a “designated shelter,” showing a pedestrian running away from Godzilla.

“This is our VFX crew wrap gift. The signs we used on set were the most hotly contested,” Fraction says, pointing to his shirt. “The minute the show wrapped, literally everyone ran to the art department to get as many of these signs as they could.”

Also serving as an executive producer and writer on the series, Fraction found himself in charge of a television production for the first time. He soon came up with the best analogy to describe his role within this creative cacophony.

“In American shoots, where the trucks are located is called Basecamp. In Canada, they call it the Circus. And I like the Canadian version a lot more,” he says.

“Although we shot in Tokyo and Hawaii too, we shot in Vancouver as our home base for most of the season. For me, it felt a little bit like being a ringmaster in a circus. But because it’s a circus, there’s only so much you can control. There’s a lot of, ‘How do we do this? How much time do we have?’ And there’s a lot of writing, editing and rewriting.”

With that sort of involvement, Fraction had the power to insert hints about his Kansas City heritage.

“Is (actor) Anders Holm wearing a Kansas City Monarchs cap of proper vintage in the flashback sequences? Yes, he is. Does he go back inside the big spooky, half-destroyed battleship in the middle of the jungle to retrieve that Kansas City Monarchs baseball cap? Yes, he does,” Fraction says coyly, regarding whether the show’s title is an homage to the bygone Negro Leagues baseball team.

“I like the idea of baseball being a kind of link between Americans and Japanese culture. It all felt too much of a piece to not at least put a cap on the guy. Kansas City fans will know.”

While Midwesterners Holm and John Goodman are part of a large ensemble cast in “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” the real marquee hook comes from casting the father-and-son team of Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell.

The character Leland Lafayette “Lee” Shaw III is a military officer portrayed by Wyatt in the flashback sequences of the 1950s. In the present day, he is played by Kurt.

“They’ve been offered a lot of father/son parts before. But it really interested them, this idea that they could build one character. We’re also in this window where Wyatt’s resemblance to Kurt is particularly strong,” Fraction says.

He notes that Wyatt gave off more of a Gary Cooper vibe. Whereas Kurt was … well, Kurt.

Fraction says, “Kurt is a legend for a reason. He’s been in front of the camera every decade of his life. One of the first things he asked me is, ‘How are you going to get me and Godzilla in the same frame?’”

Born in Illinois, Fraction (the pen name variation of his actual surname Fritchman) moved in 1997 to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. In 2000, he and five classmates started MK12, a design and filmmaking collective. The company became internationally renowned for its title sequences to films such as “Stranger Than Fiction” and the James Bond installment “Quantum of Solace.”

Concurrently, Fraction began writing comic books, notably X-Men, Iron Fist and Iron Man (for which some of his ideas were incorporated into the eventual Marvel Cinematic Universe adaptations). While in KC he married comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, who would go on to become a fellow winner of an Eisner Award for comic book work. (She served as a consultant on the film “Captain Marvel,” and even makes a cameo appearance in it, and is a consulting producer for current release “The Marvels.”)

In 2009, the pair (along with their 2-year-old son) moved to Portland, Oregon. The family (now including a daughter) has lived there ever since. He is also an adjunct professor at Portland State University, where he teaches a course on writing comics.

What does he miss most about KC?

“Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque,” he says without pause.

“Matt is a great storyteller. He has a real sense for how to pull in character in a way that really integrates with and drives the story forward,” says Mariko Tamaki, a Canadian comic book creator who is also a writer on “Monarch.”

“Sometimes a complicated character just sits on top of a story like a cherry on a sundae. Matt really just has this way of making angst drive plot in a way that’s seamless and unexpected.”

She cites Fraction’s 2012-2016 work on the bow-wielding Avenger “Hawkeye” as her favorite of his creations, calling it a “near perfect comic book.”

In fact, of all the high-profile superheroes (Marvel, DC and Image included) that he’s written, Hawkeye proved especially memorable.

“I did an issue of ‘Hawkeye’ where he was hard of hearing — which is kind of an on-again, off-again thing. So we did an issue that was largely in (American Sign Language), sort of using the tool of comics to put a hearing audience in the shoes of a hard-of-hearing person. Any time I do signings or shows, I will meet a deaf person or hard-of-hearing person who wants to talk about that issue,” he says.

Fraction realized how many ways ASL and comics are the same: They’re representations of greater aggregate concepts.

“Even just the fact that they had Jeremy Renner wearing a hearing aid (as Hawkeye in the MCU universe). What that did for kids who were embarrassed or ashamed to wear hearing aids was a huge thing. Suddenly an Avenger is wearing a hearing aid,” he says.

It also led to the popular Disney+ series of the same name in 2021 chiefly based on Fraction’s comic. That incorporated his creation of Lucky the Pizza Dog, an injured pooch who becomes Hawkeye’s sidekick.

“My dog died, and then I wrote an issue where Hawkeye saved the dog because I couldn’t save mine … and Lucky was born,” Fraction says. “They now sell stuffies of him in Disney theme parks — like he’s got one eye and a piece of pizza in his mouth. That’s just crazy.”

Fraction admits that the crush of writing multiple books for Marvel and of doing his own projects (such as the Image comic “Adventureman” and the upcoming Amazon Prime series “Sex Criminals”) led to a career crossroads.

“I was in parallel development on two shows and was writing like five comics and was miserable. Absolutely miserable. I gave myself shingles. And I was late for the first time in my life, which I hated,” he recalls.

“So when ‘Monarch’ became ‘Monarch,’ I cut loose a lot of plans. I want to ride this and be present and learn as much as I can about running a show. I can’t do it if I’m writing a script in ‘video village.’”

The writer confesses to still being in awe of the scale of this project — a far cry from crafting a comic book while sitting alone in his office typing at a keyboard.

“There’s almost 500 people on the payroll. It’s one thing for me to type, ‘It’s a battleship in the jungle that’s been torn in half and dropped from great height, and it’s rotten and overcome with growth.’ But then a bunch of folks have to build it. And they do,” he says.

It’s been virtually five years to the day from the first document Fraction turned in at Legendary to the show’s premiere this month. Despite all his success in so many different creative avenues, he is genuinely having a hard time processing this information.

“There are ‘Monarch’ billboards right now on Sunset Boulevard,” he says. “And I’m still like, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure if this is really going to happen.’”

Jon Niccum is a filmmaker, freelance writer and author. His new book is titled “Power Up: Leadership, Character and Conflict Beyond the Superhero Multiverse.”