Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch

Back in April, I read the first collection of Monkey Meat stories and fell in love. Juni Ba’s art, humor, and themes were catnip for me. The vibes are Sunday Morning cartoons focusing on the dystopian nature of late stage capitalism, with heaping of weirdness thrown into the mix. Overall, I think The Summer Batch is (mostly) a direct upgrade, but the two can really be read in any order. Each story is self-contained, with only a few characters appearing in multiple stories – and never requiring you to have read earlier tales to understand what’s going on. All that’s important is that you’ve returned to Monkey Meat Island! Don’t worry, all we ask for access to the theme park is your immortal soul.

Comparable Media: The Triangle Agency, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Rick and Morty

Elevator Pitch
Welcome back to Monkey Meat island! Like last time, there’s a wide variety of stories within this volume. This time however, the book itself is a magazine created by the Monkey Meat corporation, meaning you also get complementary ads. Isn’t that great? Included in this collection is:

• a battle between groundskeeper Lug and a reanimated god (free from pesky dialogue)
• superhero characters get brought to life, only to sue for ownership over themselves from Monkey Meat Corp
• A scientist in therapy with an afterlife spirit, secretly working to recruit lifetime R&D workers
• Lug travelling through time to ‘save’ illiterate monkeys and do a single good thing in his life
• A temple guard gets fired after a fast food joint was built on her god’s sacred land. She searches for gainful employment
• A family AirBNBs for their vacation, only for an intruder (who claims the home is his) to break in
• An influencer destroys a refugee camp thinking its a fun new virtual reality game
• Propaganda recruiting young monkeys to the army
• A space colony seeks freedom from the tyranny of Monkey Meat corp
• An executive of Monkey Meat does a podcast about how she rose to power based on the sacrifices to her divinity.

What Worked for Me:
In my review of the original anthology, I described Monkey Meat as an anticapitalist fever dream. This remains true. Ba pushes even further into this direction in the sequel, and I generally thought the stories in this collection were sharper, more focused, and more insightful. Each of the stories was also shorter, and I felt like Ba got more done in fewer pages pretty consistently. He tackles quite a few real topics (such as AirBNB pushing out affordable housing to live in) and also quite a few absurd ones: the superheroes fighting for their own rights had some excellent bits, including them lambasting fans for voting to kill the female hero. Ba goes beyond simply lambasting corporations, though that’s absolutely still there. The scope of the comic has expanded to start pressuring the reader to consider their own place and complicity within this system. The freedom fighters realize that their suffering is a mirror of what they inflicted on the aliens who called the planet home, for example.

Similarly, Ba takes potshots at the very institutions that publish him – though not by name. During the supehero story (one of my favorites, though people who dislike 4th wall breaking will hate it), Ba describes the superhero industry by sayin they’ve become aesthetics for a dying empire. An infinite loop of sanitized re-enactments of its own glory. And I’ll be damned if that isn’t a clear indictment of fans & corporations desire to re-release stories about the same superheroes over and over again until the end of time.

Another change I loved was the full commitment to a magazine-style format. There were glimpses of this in The First Batch, but there was a sharp increase in how many you saw here. These weren’t always the most insightful pieces in the world, but they were invariably fun and evocative, and pushes this series further into something unlike anything else I’ve read before. They don’t get any happier than the rest of the Monkey Meat world – expect to have to pay for medical services before you bleed out, and the drinks you’re sipping on the beach are made from the souls of dead workers and guests.

Lastly, Ba chose to highlight some real world art throughout this anthology. Simian Sam is compiling the lovely magazine, and he’s been imprisoned because the Monkey Meat Corporation doesn’t like his attitude towards social justice issues. The artists and art featured highlight African perspectives across a wide variety of mediums. This includes the movie Hyenas, the sculptures of Beya Gille Gacha, and the literary magazine Brittle Paper. I didn’t need more things added to my list of things to read or watch, and I love that Ba kept piling them on throughout this book.

What Didn’t Work for Me:
The only disappointment in this collection was the art. To be clear, the art was not bad. I just didn’t like it as much as the original collection. In The First Batch, each story has a fairly unique art style. There’s some overlap, but each story was visually distinct. Not so much in The Summer Batch. Instead, Ba seems to have settled on a black and white art style that relies on cartoonish exaggeration of body parts of setting elements, mixed with regular pops of yellow and red. A few stories strayed from this, but I really missed some of the riotous color work that Ba showed us in the the earlier iteration of this world. Each of the three pages below is from a different story, but you wouldn’t know it from the art.

Conclusion: Monkey Meat remains riotously fun, and I won’t stop recommending it!