Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #5 doesn’t go out quietly; it enlists you. Doubling down on its sharp satire and chaotic creativity, this oversized final issue plays like a warped recruitment brochure from hell. Whether it’s promising purpose, salvation, or cosmic significance, the Monkey Meat empire pulls out all the stops in its final pitch. With three tales spanning military indoctrination, holy space crusades, and personal “enlightenment,” Juni Ba’s finale is bold, bizarre, and bitingly on-brand.
Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #5 opens with a full propaganda brochure or commercial from the Monkey Meat Armies. This allows Ba to explore how the bad guys twist the truth to make the job of punishing locals and taking over their lands fun, educational, and for the greater good. Of course, Ba doesn’t shine a light so strongly that it comes off as appealing to the reader, but plays up the awfulness of fascist imperialistic takeovers. That includes visuals of an iron flattened smashing people into bloody pulp as they line up at gunpoint, and other equally clever cartooning that’s as symbolic as it is visceral.
Time to enlist.
Credit: Image
The second story is set up by Ba himself via a caption box in a much more positive tale. Of course, given the cynical and tongue-in-cheek nature of the series, you might be doubtful that the tale will amount to a true happy ending. This story delves into the conquering of other worlds and taking resources from faraway cultures. This leads to the people realizing the folly of letting another planet take resources for themselves, and an uprising takes place. In the end, there is a kind of happy ending, though a twist is involved.
A familiar gorilla creature is employed to smash the people down, while the captions give context and further detail on what’s going on. The battle is gruesome, with the imperialist ape taking out the people left and right, and plenty of clever visuals that are stunning. Take, for instance, a fist hitting a much tinier opponent, drawn with wavy lines as if it were moving towards them at an impossible speed. Like an animated cartoon, rules of physics and reality don’t necessarily apply to the visuals, and Ba can make anything happen in a dramatic and visually stunning fashion.
The third and final story takes place at a talk show where a goddess is interviewed. Once again, Ba explores a cynical subject with big smiles and positivity all through a cheeky dark grin of truth. We witness the evolution of this goddess who is repurposed and used, but it’s all the same to her, who only wants to be adored and prayed to. Unfortunately for the people, corporations prop her up, which leads to exploration and terrible calamity. Ultimately, this story ends with a cliffhanger in a clever way, as Ba strips away color, inks, and pencils with a big “coming soon” banner to tease the next five-issue anthology. In this way, Ba is exploiting the reader by asking them to come back for more to fill his own coffers.
Monkey Meat: The Summer Batch #5 ends the series with a bang, a sermon, and a smirk. It’s firing on all satirical cylinders while reinforcing just how daring and inventive Juni Ba’s voice is in modern comics. It’s not just a finale; it’s a call to arms wrapped in an ironic bow.
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