It’s March. It’s time for summer vacation. Which is weird. It’s not even Spring Break yet. Why is it already summer? Well...it’s because THIS summer is going to be five months and it’s being sponsored by an openly unethical corporation. Welcome to the opening issue of writer/artist Juni Ba’s Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch. There’s a plane ticket on the opening page to Monkey Meat Island...the place where the Monkey Meat Company grows its delicious foodstuff. Once again rumors of horrific goings-on have surfaced...so Monkey Meat has decided to report them directly to the reader.

It is, of course, really, really nice to have a major corporation like Monkey Meat electing to be so completely transparent with the dangerous conditions on its island. There’s the small matter of a conflict between a godlike being and some of the inhabitants of the island...and then the strangely familiar story of fictional heroes somehow becoming real and the mess that that sort of thing so often produces. It’s going to be more than a little bit upsetting for everyone involved, but hey: things are only just getting started and there’s so much else ahead in the remaining months of summer.

The opening story of the issue is largely nonverbal...which gives Ba a chance to script out an entire conflict without words. (There are a few pictograms thatt make for fun bits of “text.”) It’s a fairly simple tale of things getting progressively more and more out of hand...which makes for deeply enjoyable satire. The second story is a lot more textual with a deep and surprisingly comprehensive satire on the comic book industry and various superhero tropes. It’s not necessarily anything terribly new, but it’s all a great deal of fun from a whole bunch of different angles.

The visuals of the first issue of the new series are suitably over-the-top. The largely black-and-white nature of the issue feels very vintage indie ’80s comic book shop stuff that works just as well as it always had with edgy, offbeat satire from the margins of the new issue rack. It’s all a great deal of fun that feels perfectly packaged and paced. Ba has done a brilliant job of opening a whle new series that should be really, really fun to continue to intermittently inhabit in a summer of 2025 the feels very much like it’s teetering over the edge of the Earth.

The fundamental ground for the current series of Monkey Meat isn’t really all that different from quite a lot of other bits of satire that have found their way onto the comics rack over the yeas. What DOES make this particular series so much fun is Ba’s distinctive sense of hu,or which is staggeringly engaging on a whole bunch of different levels. Ba frames comedic elements with such an irreverent sense of inventiveness. It’s really amazing stuff that wouldn’t quite work in any other format. It’s a good thing there’s a comic book industry. Othewise Ba would just be a weird person with a weird hobby.

Grade: A