Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #3 // Review
She had come to the island looking to change. She had come to the island looking to improve. But it was something more than that. She’s looking for an upgrade. What she finds is considerably more dangerous in Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #3. Writer/artist Juni Ba continues a fun summer excursion into darkly weird and weirdly dark satire with a couple of thoroughly enjoyable allegorical satires and a few little extras around the edges of everything. Once again, it’s a deeply fun package that exists just outside the margins of the mainstream and in a world all its own.
She could go-in for something new-agey. She could go0in for some kind of wholistic inner journey or whatever. Or she could just get a new head. They’re perfectly fine and they seem to be much more efficient than the head that she was born with. What’s the worst that could happen? Elsewhere on the island...there’s a devout believer in an ancient pantheon who has had her temple bought-out by the Monkey Meat Company. She’s a disciple of Odin, but she’s going to be forced to be something else as modernization sets-in. Is she truly qualified for a job in the modern world?
The two stories explore different ends of human dislocation. The opening story looks to define the restlessness of the modern psyche that needs to constantly upgrade or be left behind. It’s a sinister look at progressive consumerism and what it does to the human soul. The second feature is more of a look at the nature of the loss of culture as flat, mass culture comes to take over everything. Both of these themes have been explored pretty extensively elsewhere, but Juni Ba does such a brilliant job of framing them in a new way that feels completely fresh and insightful.
The horror of the aggression and inner competition that drives the opening story feels remarkably palpable even as Juni Ba’s exaggerated style threatens to pull the emotionality of it all in a direction that threatens to completely divorce it from recognizable human emotion. Juni Ba has a brilliant grasp of just how far to push the intensity of the situation without completely blowing it all into unintelligible absurdity. The visuals completely ground the story in intelligible absurdity that maintains things quite well in another staggeringly entertaining trip to a pleasantly strange island.
There’s very little about any one element of Juni Ba’s work that feels totally new. The innovation in Monkey Meat lies in its totally un-self-conscious attempt to dive right into the quirkiness of hte storytelling and just have fun with it. Granted...it DOES seem to be driven almost entirely y a deep, deep frustration with the state of the world, but it all seems to swing from page to page with such impressive grace that it scarcely seems to be hampered by its frustrations. It’s a very cleverly-balanced fusion of many different levels of anger at the state of the world. Cool stuff.
