Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #4 // Review
The family’s on vacation. THe place they’ve rented is a dump. They might have thought that they would have made enough money over the course of the year to be able to afford a nicer place on the island. It’s not. anything that they would put up with if they weren’t on vacation. (Can’t even touch the walls without risking infection.) Things are about to get a whole lot worse than. that in Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #4. Writer/artist Juni Ba continues a deeply complex satire on corporate culture and the great American summer vacation in another satisfying issue of the anthology.
The one thing that would be worse than being forced to stay in an awful rental property just might be getting FORCED OUT of the awful rental property. That’s exactly what happens to the family in question as they are forced to reassess things in light of the fact that there’s someone who happens to have been a resident on the island from before the current resort era. Elsewhere, an internet influencer gets a bit more than he had expected when he is offered the opportunity of a lifetime--an internet celebrity’s biggest dream come true.
The satire itself isn’t exactly anything that hasn't been explored before.What Juni Ba is managing in the context of this series is a very textured and nuanced approach to social satire with respect to capitalism and the current state of things with respect to corporate greed. It wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting or it not for Ba’s distinctly bonkers and pleasantly unhinged sense of humor. Everything is exaggerated in just the right way. Everything feels more or less perfectly formulated with respect to how all of the insanity hits the page. There's a very organic sense of pacing that gradually amplifies over the course of each of the stories in the issue.
Ba’s art is deliciously over-the-top on so many different levels. The sketchy cartoonishness of it all would be noting without a deeply entertaining understanding of how things move across the page in comic book format. Ba moves around his perspective on the page to amplify the sense of exaggeration from moment to moment. Big, heavy shadows dominate everything in and amidst lots of scratchy, sketchy rendering that all ends up being really, really impressive in different ways.
Beyond all of the details, Ba’s overall sense of style in color and layout make a Monkey Meat issue so completely distinctive. People familiar with the series could see it across the room and instantly recognize it. It's such a clever and cleverly designed look and feel that the artist/writer is going for in an issue of the series. it's not often that a single artists work comes across with such blinding clarity and such deafening sense of style and poise. It’s impressive stuff on a whole bunch of diffent levels that all seem to be working quite well together. It’s a very, very classy vacation. It’ll be sad to see it end next month.
