Review: Monkey Prince Vol. 2: The Monkey King and I hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

It’s a real shame Gene Luen Yang’s Monkey Prince didn’t last long enough for us to get a team-up between Monkey Prince and Yang’s New Super-Man of China, but we can always hope for the future.

As I’ve said before, I feel I came into my understanding of Yang’s style late, expecting (with the aforementioned New Super-Man) traditional superheroics and finding instead comedy that grew on me (or perhaps just grew) as it went on. Monkey Prince, which concludes with Monkey Prince Vol. 2: The Monkey King and I, is the culmination of that — a teenage protagonist (so some of the off-putting antics of New Super-Man Kong Kenan are more appropriate here) and enough intrinsic zaniness to the concept that Yang’s absurdity feels natural and not forced.

The push and pull of Monkey Prince is very much on display in this volume, between an Aquaman appearance that’s largely incongruous with the larger DCU and then this book’s really integral lead-in and ties to the Lazarus Planet event. I wouldn’t blame the audience for not knowing what to make of it. But given some patience, Monkey Prince is smart, funny, touching, and with surprising connections even to the DCU’s history. I’m all for Monkey Prince appearing in a team book, maybe alongside Lazarus Planet co-star Black Alice, Sideways, and others among DC’s quick-to-limbo teen set.

[Review contains spoilers]

Damage is the example I hold up of DC teen books in their post-Crisis prime, that period of Damage, Anima, The Ray, of course Karl Kesel’s Superboy and Chuck Dixon’s Robin, and I’d even lump Tom Joyner and Keith Wilson’s Scarlett in there. Damage Grant Emerson was “fortunate” not to disappear into limbo after his original series ended, with stints in the Titans and Justice Society (though at cost of being disfigured by Zoom).

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

I was brought to mind of Damage while finishing Monkey Prince. Not unlike Damage, Monkey Prince Marcus Shugel-Shen turns out to be the adopted grandson of Golden Age villain Ultra-Humanite, and in another time (perhaps when the dispensation of the Justice Society is still not so murky), one could see DC launching Monkey Prince based on those ties: “What is Monkey Prince’s secret connection to the earliest days of the DCU? The answer will shock you!” (Something we saw not too long ago with Naomi, though that “secret” ultimately came to naught.)

This connection was particularly surprising, and welcome, given how esoteric Monkey Prince can be. I don’t mean to engage in cultural relativism — obviously if one is familiar with the stories of Monkey King Sun Wukong or the mythology of Nezha, much of this may not be esoteric at all. But clearly we’re into deities not usually seen in the DC Universe — which Yang bridges cleverly by pitting Darkseid against Nezha — and the story turns on keeping the lineage straight of characters with similar names like King Bull Demon and King Fire Bull. To the extent that Monkey Prince spins at times far out from the known DCU, that Marcus has a permanent place as “Ultra-Humanite’s grandson” is a good way to root him.

That sense of Monkey Prince being “out there” — what I think ultimately sealed the title’s fate — was present in Damian Wayne’s out-of-character portrayal in Monkey Prince Vol. 1: Enter the Monkey, and that Damian’s appearance was wholly incongruous with the rest of the DCU at a time where DC was being particularly fastidious with where Damian was found. It’s here too in an Aquaman appearance that, within spitting distance of Aquamen, has Black Manta back to a cackling villain and the Trench as an intelligent horde (with humanoid children).

Equally that’s why it’s so surprising to find that Monkey Prince does not just lend characters to Lazarus Planet, but literally ends where Lazarus Planet begins. Reading Lazarus Planet by way of Batman vs. Robin, Damian crash-lands into a group of heroes that seems inexplicably gathered; Monkey Prince gives some context to it, such even to argue for one or two issues' inclusion with the event collection itself.

Similar to Naomi, Marcus' parents continue to play an outsized role. Yang depicts them more for laughs than Brian Michael Bendis and David Walker did, less “overprotective parents” and more “what’s it like to be bumbling henchmen for hire.” But there’s plenty untapped potential that Yang only began to approach, between Marcus now taking an active role in helping his parents stay on the run (despite that I don’t think they’ve leveled with him about their occupation, or he them) and the fact that each is significantly injured over the course of these pages. Yang has to give it all a swift and tidy wrap-up, but there’s plenty fodder too for a miniseries, including Marcus' debt to Ultra-Humanite.

In the closing pages, Yang reveals for Marcus a Superman-like origin, a baby-sent-to-Earth kind of thing. The twist I didn’t see coming is that Marcus is in fact a clone of the Monkey King, grown from his hair but without having reverted as the others do. Surely there’s a story there too, what differentiates Marcus from all of the other clones; meanwhile the sequence where Marcus chooses “to believe that I’m real” is a nice meta-touch, particularly for a fictional character gone public domain and subsumed into mainstream comics.

Art here is largely by Bernard Chang, who’s a fine match for Yang’s story — loud, boisterous, and at times outright insane; see the Trench-demon breathing mystic fire right into Aquaman’s face or about any time Marcus gets to use his detachable body parts as weapons. Way back in 2015 I had qualms about colorist Marcelo Manolo’s limited palette on Green Lantern Corps, but we’ve come a long way since then, more apparent not even in the fight scenes but in the lushness of those when Marcus is just home with his parents.

Monkey Prince always seemed like something of a tough sell, and again I do wonder if it might have gained more traction with “ties to the Golden Age” apparent from the beginning. Still, for a book that often seemed to be taking place in an alternate DC Universe, Monkey Prince Vol. 2: The Monkey King and I being one half of Lazarus Planet (and really contributing the core mythology thereof) is no slouch. Am I correct we still haven’t seen a “collection” of the DC Festival of Heroes anthology nor a second one since the first? That sours my hope for at least a new Monkey Prince short coming our way.

[Includes original and variant covers, character designs]

Rating 2.5