Review: Monkey Prince Vol. 1: Enter the Monkey hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Though this is no commentary on Gene Luen Yang’s writing prowess overall, it took me a while to come around to his mainstream DC titles. New Super-Man started far too light for me and only bettered in the later volumes — whether that’s an indication of Yang improving or me better acclimating to his style, you be the judge.

But it does allow me to “start all over again” fresh, so to speak, with Yang’s Monkey Prince Vol. 1: Enter the Monkey, knowing exactly what to expect and receiving it wholeheartedly. If I at one point compared New Super-Man to Karl Kesel’s Superboy, Monkey Prince is even more fully in that genre and therefore even more fully, it seems to me, in Yang’s wheelhouse.

Once upon a Zero Hour-ish era, DC had a whole bunch of “high school-age heroes fight crime and go to classes” kinds of series, from Superboy to Chuck Dixon’s Robin, plus Damage, Anima, The Ray, and so on. Various recent Robin series have eschewed high school entirely, and modern equivalents in the old vein haven’t lasted very long — Doomed, Sideways, and Naomi, all short-lived. Indeed, Monkey Prince joins that group on both fronts — a fun story of a happy-go-lucky teen hero and also one that’ll end with the second and final volume.¹

[Review contains spoilers]

Under a different writer, Monkey Prince could treat so many of its aspects differently, from the janitor who takes outsized interest in young Marcus Shugel-Shen, to the unexplained physics of the strange clouds that Monkey Prince Marcus can use as a weapon, to the relative tidiness of artist Bernard Chang’s depictions of Marcus' limbs being severed. Here, Marcus barely even questions the fact that he’s able to transform into a man-monkey, letting alone his mystic origins, before he’s accepted his role and coined himself a catch-phrase.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Such is the zany, absurd aesthetic of Yang’s Monkey Prince, in which from golden demons to giant crab monsters, nothing’s too weird for the characters. For all the ridiculousness, it is perhaps even more like what the DC Universe would be like in the “real world” than more serious titles; at some point, with multiple earths and Superman flying across the sky, it's not so strange that a man-monkey emerging from a high school pool might seem commonplace. Among a wealth of comics contemplating the meaning of existence, Monkey Prince blithely, joyfully bounds from one thing to the next with barely a second thought.

Yang does well making Marcus instantly likable, a good kid without even the initial hard edges of New Super-Man Kong Kenan. He’s cool, with a hip interest in shoes, but awkward, making him a target for the bullies — all classic superhero tropes that DC has mostly gotten away from. His parents, too, are wonderful — freelance scientist henchmen-for-hire, but whereas another creator might have leaned them toward the villainous, Yang emphasizes them as effective, loving parents even if they work for Penguin and Black Manta on the side.

The good relationship between Marcus and his parents forms one of the book’s best ironies, that most of Marcus' demonic foes in the book come from his parent’s machinations. That’ll get explored more in the next volume (Marcus, again in the blithe way of Monkey Prince, easily recognizes his parents even in full Black Manta-henchman regalia), but still I appreciated the sheer lack of angst here — it’s never like Winston and Laura are actively trying to kill Monkey Prince without knowing he’s Marcus, nor does Marcus seem deterred from rescuing his parents once he knows they’re henchmen — and still again in the way of Monkey Prince, all is forgotten a page later over Marcus' discovery that he can breathe underwater.

In what also reminds of those nascent series of the 1990s (and perhaps still true today), Monkey Prince must have an early Batman appearance to goose sales. I’ve made no secret that tween Damian Wayne hardly seems like the Batman and Son Damian to me and neither does Damian palling around with Monkey Prince, though I full accept this is all filtered though Yang’s unique style. Batman for his part plays “20 Questions” with Monkey Prince and admonishes Damian for drop-kicking a severed head.

For a DCU that’s at this point trying hard to keep its pieces consistent — ubiquitous appearances of Nubua, Bat-titles that line things up to the second — it’s surprising to find Monkey Prince pretty out of step. Batman and Damian are working together, for one thing, but that’s nothing compared to Jim Gordon standing beside them actually as commissioner! Elements regarding Aquaman are also way out of step, leading me to wonder just how long Monkey Prince was in the planning before it actually came out (and why no one could make adjustments before it did).

Taking from classic Chinese literature, and featuring an anthropomorphic monkey and pig, for gosh’s sake, Monkey Prince Vol. 1: Enter the Monkey is like little we’ve seen before from DC. And as we know, books that are truly revolutionary or off the mainstream have a hard road to survival, and Monkey Prince only gets one more volume. Where does Marcus go now, limbo? A team book (Doomed, Sideways, and Monkey Prince)? At least if DC keeps up their Festival of Heroes anthologies, maybe we can count on checking in with Marcus at least once a year.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 3.0

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1. The longest lasting 2000s teen series is probably Blue Beetle with Jaime Reyes, and in its humor and absurdity Monkey Prince follows very much from a legacy that includes Keith Giffen.  ↩︎