Golo rises, and with his rise comes the fall of Monkey Meat Island. Is this truly the end of the Monkey Meat industry? And has it now been replaced with something far, far worse? Only one thing is for sure — there are no winners in Monkey Meat #5, a Juni Ba creation (with special authorization from the Monkey Meat Company).
Armaan Babu: And here it is, the final issue of what — happily — turns out to be just the first round of Monkey Meat stories. Spoiler: Monkey Meat will be returning for more issues at some unspecified point in the future, and I couldn’t be happier. In the here and now, though, we get to see what the fall of Monkey Meat Island could look like, and man, it’s a doozy. How are you doing, Ritesh, and how excited are you for more Monkey Meat to come?
Ritesh Babu: I would like to thank our corporate overlords at the Monkey Meat Company for giving us more of their exquisite product. It is truly the finest of IP, the most magnificent of franchises, and who could say no to that, truly? God bless capitalism!!! (Jokes aside, fuck yeah, great comic, glad we’re getting more of this satirical ride.)
The Fall of Monkey Meat Island
Armaan: So last week, our new star character was a Monkey Meat super-fan. This week, though, our lead is someone who takes consumerism to a whole new level. We know Monkey Meat’s Soul Juice™ can give people powers, but apparently regular ol’ cans of Monkey Meat also do the trick if you eat enough of them, and our new friend Golo has been glugging them down like there’s no tomorrow. It’s a real Popeye situation here, only a lot more bloody for everyone involved.
And I mean bloody, because when he runs out of Monkey Meat cans, he starts eating monkeys themselves, including the monkey-humanoids that run the company. It’s not long before both the company and the island itself are devastated, which is a hell of a way to open a comic.
Ritesh: I was terribly amused by the notion of the Monkey Meat Company’s fall being … ultimately self-constructed. They were consumed, in the end, by their own consumer, as it were. Their rapacious predatory instincts and unstoppable hunger, their endless greed, finally found its match in a monster that in itself embodied those very traits as well as any employee of the company ever did.
Armaan: I was struck by the idea that, while Monkey Meat Multinational constantly sells the idea of goods that empower you (superpowers from Soul Juice (or from a Dark God) was a rather big selling point if I’m remembering the marketing correctly), actual empowerment is one of MMM’s biggest nightmares. You’re right about this threat being self-constructed — Golo is absolutely a product (heh, no pun intended) of MMM’s practices. The only difference being that he is the one product they have no control over.
As we discussed last issue, a lack of imagination is one of MMM’s biggest failings. What do they do when one of their creations becomes an out-of-control monster with nigh unlimited power? Why, they build a new monster with nigh unlimited power that, ah, very quickly gets out of control.
As great as this double page spread of the great evil robot is, I want to give special appreciation to the lettering. Out-of-control yellows are Monkey Meat’s specialty, but the way the wide, shakily outlined, barely contained “BADOOM” just dominates the page has more of an impact than any on-page explosion I’ve ever seen.
Ritesh: The entire issue is built upon a classic idea — an idea for which the basic foundation already exists with the very debut of the title and its premise: In capitalism, given enough time, people will eat each other to sate their predatory hunger. It’s like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. The guy just has to do this, otherwise he can’t live, he can’t survive. The monstrosity is his nature. The culture of capitalism is a cult, it is dictated not by reason or logic, much as it would like to pretend it is. It is a vulture-like mindset of predatory consumers who just take and take, for the sole purpose of taking, to fulfill their desperate need to do so, rather than for any actual meaningful tangible reason. And so we have Monkey Meat literally doing that with the monkey cannibalism stuff.
Now, this issue takes it even further. It plays out the premise even further. The premise that given enough time the system is such that it is unsustainable in the long-run. That given the hyper-consuming nature of this predatory system, it will inevitably engineer its own collapse as that hunger and that consumptive nature grow far beyond its own capacity to serve it. And thus we have Golo. And thus we also have the robot. Both of these are reflections of the same core principle: that capitalists will inevitably be destroyed by their own drives, for not even they can anticipate the monstrous consequences they’ll engineer.
… or can’t they?
Armaan: Ritesh, are you saying a company could become a truly unstoppable force by being able to look into the future and course correcting by getting ahead of itself?
I mean, maybe they could, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Golo’s rampage has effectively brought Monkey Meat Multinational down, and between him and the robot, there’s really not much of anything left over. It feels depressingly apt that if MMM fell, they would damn well make sure they brought down everyone they could with them. What the poor, short-sighted, ultra-consumer Golo failed to realize, however, is that with MMM gone, there’s no one left to make him more of his favorite snack. Enter our old friend Astou from last issue — former MMM superfan who saw the error of her ways. After being dunked in Soul Juice, she’s gotten enough of a power upgrade to be one of the island’s few survivors, but not nearly powerful enough to take on the robot.
Golo, though? Golo’s got all the power, and the robot just destroyed. The last. Monkey Meat. Vending machine.
We’ve had some great fight sequences in this comic, and I’ve seen some breathtaking work by Ba in the most recent TMNT Annual, but by god, this one goes all in. Golo is a blur of uncontained rage and energy. Lines can’t contain him. Panels can’t contain him. Clouds of rubble are left in his wake as he leaps onto this robot’s head, and the “BADOOM” lettering before is nothing compared to the wild frenzy of “BOOMs” that are quite literally brought down on this robot’s head. No one sells impact quite like Ba does — and no one captures movement like him either, as Golo does his best to dodge robo-lasers and grab a can of Monkey Meat. These pages are alive.
Ritesh: There is conflict between the two forces, certainly. But in the end, these two forces are effectively mirrors. They are products of the same unthinking madness and rapacious instinct. And so while they are pit against one another, in the end, they are one. They are joined and allied. The robot’s ferocious power becomes the body to aid the will of Golo’s addicted, empty, consumerist mind.
You know what this all reminded of a bit? I’ll show you.
Armaan: Show me!
Ritesh: This amazing, evergreen Evan Dorkin strip:
GOTTA HAVE MY BATMAN!!!
Armaan: Look, I’ll wear a cup and breathe through gas filters if it means we keep BatChat on the air, but I get your meaning.
Ritesh: Alas, I am loyal to nothing … except the dream of Biryani. But really, point being, while it is about Batman above, it applies to way more than just Batman. I think a lot about how a lot of corporations try to use addiction mechanics on consumers now more than ever. And Golo’s the kind of scary endpoint of that. What happens when you’ve cultivated a level of hunger even you can’t sate? Because that’s the thing about productions. At some point, you’ll cease to a halt when the resource you’ve been mining and exploiting runs out.
The Rise of Golo
Armaan: If Golo’s our cautionary tale, then Astou is our more hopeful one, and she’s kind of a light mirror for Golo’s dark rampages.
D’you know what the most maddening part of Monkey Meat has been? Genuinely charming characters and interactions that I would be delighted to see in a regular series of their own, all shunted toward inevitable doom and gloom. I wouldn’t change it for the world, but you think I’d’ve hardened my heart to it a bit by now. Astou and Golo make a very cute pair of (not-quite) heroes. Astou’s determination, the strong head on her shoulders, being the only one with a plan and the ability to break the Golo/Robo stalemate, and Golo’s mute but eager willingness to team up.
It raises my spirits, it really does. And speaking of raised spirits, it turns out that the scientists who created the robot in the first place are still hanging around, waiting for someone to come and put an end to this madness by taking control of the robot.
The scientists are as ignorant in death as they were in life. Like you said, Golo and the robot are mirrors of each other. Both, in their way, created by MMM. Both granted additional power by these scientists, who believe they can just delegate responsibility the first chance they get and move on.
Because Golo’s no hero. He’s as single minded as the robot he now controls. All he wants is more Monkey Meat, and with the robot under his control, he finds Astou’s stash. No telling what happens when that stash runs out — because that’s as far as this projection goes.
That’s right, it was all a dream! Or, at least, a highly accurate simulation of a possible future!
Ritesh: This image is firmly lodged in my head after this issue.
There is no heroic rescuer. There is no champion at the end. This is no dystopic tale where an old mess of an individual does one great final deed and finds peace and acceptance, having helped others. No, it’s really just clamoring for more product, and how the ravenous hunger for that cruel, horrible product turns people into monsters. They’re not even people after a certain point. They’re just reduced to their most basic instincts.
They’re like Gollum.
They want it. They need it. They must have it.
THEIR PRECIOUS!!!
The Equilibrium of Inevitability
Armaan: Well, to a point. Apparently, a 20% price hike in Monkey Meat cans is enough to dissuade He Who Would Be Golo from becoming the meat-maddened monkey we’ve seen here. It’s a punchline that just deflates all the air from the story we’ve just seen (Ironic, considering the inflationary solution we see here). It’s … mundane, and self-serving of MMM. As horrific as it was seeing the destruction of Monkey Meat Island, it was also just a little cathartic to see the corporation finally defeated after all the misery it’s caused. Like the first issue, though, any sense of triumph we have is taken away, and priced higher, too.
(No lie, a part of me would find it hilarious if Monkey Meat charges a higher price for its comics when the series returns.)
I’m still reeling from just how little thought goes into defeating Golo before he becomes a threat. Raise the prices. Make a young proto-Golo unable to afford any of the power he was able to wrest from MMM. Profits rise, and rise, and rise.
The continued rise of Monkey Meat Multinational is inevitable.
Ritesh: What the reveal tells you is that Golo isn’t someone who is super well off. It’s a telling moment in that regard. And I really, really loved the story being revealed as a fun future What If exercise, in the vein of so many great genre comics, because in the end it felt very reflective of a sort of fantasy. The fantasy that this corporation could fall and be torn down, so fast and so easily. I don’t mean to be a “Capitalism and corporations cannot be stopped!” dipshit, but what I do mean is, certainly that’s one way to imagine an end, but I don’t reckon that’s a very useful one. This corporation may yet be stopped, but it’ll take a lot more, it’ll be a lot more difficult, and it won’t just happen because of One Individual. It’ll take a collective. It’ll take a whole legion of people united against it. That feels like a useful case. Which is why even as it was happening, I knew the destruction of Monkey Meat wasn’t truly real. It was a very probable future, certainly, but it wasn’t real, not yet.
That’s the real scary part laid bare here:
The corporations don’t only rule the present and actively rewrite the past. They own your bloody future and will rewrite that, too. All to make meaningless stocks go up and make board members happy and their pockets lined. They’ve stolen not just the souls of people who once were and the people who are now … but they’re all set and prepped to steal the souls of people yet to be.
All must turn as gears in the empty-profit machine of capitalism.
Armaan: As we meet the board (do you have a favorite? Mine is the disembodied heart powered by soul juice that has a straw to suck Monkey Meat out of a nearby monkey, straight from their bared brain), our company representative reports that everything’s just going up. Profits are up, expansion is up, conquering new lands and dealing with the natives is up, and with their new prophecy machine, we get a glimpse of what may be coming when this anthology returns — superheroes, a political uprising, even a possessed goose.
Nothing that can’t be monetized, of course.
That last page — “You didn’t really think you were rid of us, did you?”
The flames, the yellow, the look of absolute, composed smugness. The eyes that say, “We’re coming back. And you’re lying if you say you’re not happy about our return.” It’s evil. Doubly so, because, dammit, I am happy they weren’t destroyed after all, because forget my Batman comics — I need me my Monkey Meat.
Ritesh: That last page is just directly looking into the soul of the reader and speaking out loud, and it’s great. Grant Morrison, move aside. This owns. I cannot WAIT for the next batch of this. This was so, so much fun. I love this book. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s utterly depressing. It’s great satire. This is just delightful cartooning that hits my exact sweet spot. It’s cool, it’s kinetic and visually interesting and it deals with Big Ideas in really fun ways with a prismatic approach across each issue, with each being a fairly strong installment on their own. This being such a “You can just pick it up, read and get in” book is a delight to me. We need that. We desperately need more big, ambitious, cool comics like this that also do that.
I cannot wait to see where this heads next.
Monkey Meat Minutiae
- ETERNAL being asterisked with “The word is not yet copyrighted by Marvel AFAIK” just killed me. So good. I’m still laughing at that one.
- Oh, me too, though the gag that “Heaven” includes free drinks for women is a close second for my favorite gag. The Heaven in the (after)world of Monkey Meat is a pretty easily corruptible place, it looks like!
- Capitalism and money are inescapable even in heaven! God save us all!
- He can’t, Ritesh, He’s under contract, have you forgotten #1 already?
Ritesh Babu is a comics history nut who spends far too much time writing about weird stuff and cosmic nonsense.
