Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #2 // Review
There’s a doctor who is looking to find a long-lost partner beyond the veil of the afterlife. Elsewhere a time traveler seeks to rectify a few things only to find that solving problems with crazy advanced tech is a heck of a lot more complicated than it would seem at first glance in Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #2. Writer/artist Juni Ba continues an anthology series assembled in the spirit of old pulp sci-fi with a cleverly skewed wit and heart drawn directly from a very, very potent place somewhere deep within the shared human psyche. It’s fun stuff.
Doctor Sow hasn’t left the hotel room in 23 years. So naturally, room service is going to want to come by to investigate the situation. The staff of the hotel really needs to clean-up. Doctor Sow is looking to find a path to the afterlife. Success in this is going to come in the least expected way imaginable. Elsewhere, a small community is trying to live...which means struggling to overcome everything that wants to kill them. Help comes in the form of a time traveler who really does want to help them survive. It’s not as easy as it looks, though.
Juni Ba’s overall premises for both stories have been around since the dawn of sci-fi. It’s fun seeing them skewed a bit to fit into the framework of the Monkey Meat universe. It’s a time-honored tradition of setting-up a conflict, rolling it through a whole bunch of panels and throwing-in a plot-twisting stinger at the end. Fun stuff. There’s still life in the old premises after all these years as witnessed by Juni Ba’s distinctive wit and heart.
A good portion of the work of selling the originality of the ideas in the stories falls quite squarely on the shoulders of Juni Ba as artist. There are some very clever decisions being made with respect to perspective and framing. An isometric view of a hotel hallway opens the first story from a tiny, little corner of the opening page, but it makes enough of an impact that it might as well be a full-page opening splash. Doctor Sow enters the afterlife and there’s a big two-page spread of...white. It’s a deliciously overwhelming moment of blankness in an otherwise delightfully, cluttered, little issue.
The first issue in the series may have been reaching a bit too far for the laughs. The second issue finds a firm emotional grounding for the stories that works brilliantly. The second issue in the series feels delightfully well constructed. Ba’s one-page ads and ancillary bits help make for a fully-conceived world that has a lot going on in the margins of the story. Once again, Monkey Meat is another fun, little speculative excursion into a place so startlingly relatable that it doesn’t really mater that it’s fiction. It just feels real on more levels than it has any right to be. Here’s looking forward to a nice, long summer vacation with Monkey Meat Multinational.
