Natalie Rambles About Monkey Man

Because all of Natalie Neumann’s creative endeavors must be preserved!

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Following the establishment of Natalie.TF on May 25, 2012, this rinky-dink little blog has become the dumping grounds for pretty much everything I make. All the stories I write, all my game reviews, my contemporaneous thoughts on the happenings of the video games industry, and my ramblings on TSF. I’m glad that I have been able to maintain something like this for the past 14 years, and unlike some creators I don’t have any real shame or desire to hide my past. I was young, I was stupid, and if I did something that was so bad way back when, I am confident that my current stuff shows that I have grown, honed my skills, and am finally approaching something “good.”

Back in 2020, I attempted to take this to a new level with Natalie Rambles About Her Childhood Fan Fiction, an essay slash showcase of my creative endeavors from ages 9 to 13. The Sonic and Pals trilogy, Super Maxio and the Thousand-Year Diamond, Metal Gear Switch, they were all clearly the work of some kid, but I was glad that I made them and to recover what I was doing back before I had awakened into the creature I am today.

In that article, I mentioned that my narrative creative pursuits actually when I worked on a comic series called Monkey Man. I used my fuzzy memory to recall when and where I wrote this comic, got pretty much all the details wrong, and dismissed it as being lost media, thrown out a decade ago.

…But then, in December 2025, when cleaning up things at my grandmother’s house, my mother uncovered a near complete collection of Monkey Man. I had been sitting on these comics for a few months— I was busy writing over 500,000 words of stuff— before finally doing my due diligence, scanning every comic, assembling them in a decently readable format, and finally reading through them. Having done so, I can confidently say that… it’s a comic made by an 8-year-old who liked Dragon Ball and cartoons a bit too much and was still trying to figure out how to tell a story.

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The Genesis of Monkey Man!

I created Monkey Man back in the summer of 2003, when I would have been 8-years-old, fresh out of second grade, with a summer all to myself. No school, no camp, no responsibilities, just free time to play and do things as I saw fit. I chose to spend a good chunk of that time making comics.

Production began sometime in late June 2003, ended around July 31, 2003, and was spread across 41 issues, 32 main issues, four specials, and a five-part miniseries dubbed Monkey Man The Movie.

Now, that all sounds wildly impressive— insane, even— and it kind of is. How many 8-year-olds have the ability to focus on a project like for over a month? Though, looking at the actual comics, impressive is not an apt descriptor. Each issue of Monkey Man only contained a cover, roughly 4 pages, and often a preview image of the next issue. The storytelling is loose, spontaneous, and difficult to follow due to a lack of dialogue, with most issues immediately jumping into the action.

Oh, and I should not merely leave this implied, but the series is actually called Monky Man if you look at the actual covers. I either did not know how to spell the word monkey, or deliberately chose to spell it as “monky” because I thought that it looked cooler. I was 8 and a B- second grade English student, so both theories are equally plausible.

The illustrations are effectively quickly made doodles, with the effort being squarely placed in doing a lot over doing anything well. I produced the comics using a number two pencil, both sides of letter-sized printer paper, and often drew them on a hardwood floor— not even a desk. None of them were colored, as I did not like coloring as a child. And the linework was very faint.

These comics were drawn in pencil, copied using a home printer, and in the scanning process, certain details were either lost or obscured. The end result of this is very harsh and difficult to view on paper, and even worse on my current pandemic-era Lexmark scanner. The image quality I was working with was poor, and in order to make these comics legible, I had to play around with the brightness, contrast, and highlights, artificially darkening things, so I could see something. This is not ideal, but I think it is good enough for what it’s for.

As for why, as a kid with basically no artistic talent, I decided to make a comic, the answer is pretty simple. Because I liked cartoons and comics. I was a big fan of Captain Underpants and Ricky Ricotta’s Mighty Robot made by Dav Pilkey— such a fan that I actually gave Pilkey copies of some Monkey Man comics when attending a book signing. I was an avid watcher of Saturday morning cartoons on FoxBox, including Pokémon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Kirby Right Back At Ya! During the rest of the week, I would spend my TV time watching Cartoon Network, after school Toonami blocks, and Nickelodeon. So I naturally wanted to try making something I liked.

I was similarly a modest fan of comics. We had a comic shop a ten-minute walk from my house that I would frequent, mostly grabbing comics based on cartoons like Dexter’s Laboratory. I never had many, as comics were expensive to a kid who dealt in quarters, but I enjoyed what I got. However, the most comic reading I did was easily with the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comics, starting with issue 119. I had never engaged with Sonic until this point, but my sister had some of those Betty and Veronica comics, they came with a mailer for other Archie comics, and my parents wanted me to read more. So, they bought a subscription and, like that, I would get a new adventure in the mail every month for the next nine years.

You might think that I would understand the art of comics from this, and how paneling worked, or how perspective should be managed but, uh, no? Look at any page and I clearly did not understand the art of comics, or just… how things were supposed to be made. I did not know how to trace or eyeball something, and that’s why Monkey Man looks the way it did, because I did not understand how to imitate something. Again, I was 8. And not even a smart 8-year-old. I was an autistic 8-year-old who was good at math, bad at English, and developed at a boy rate. (If you’ve ever worked with children, you will know that girls develop faster than boys due to how much extra work needs to be done to make a male body in utero.)

These factors make Monkey Man comics hard to read in general, and doubly hard to read given how much of the story is either gestured at or barely even there. This is made worse by how I was not able to recover every comic, as the collection I found did not contain issues 1 or issue 3, which are easily the most important issues in the entire series. Again, these are decades-old memories, but I think I remember what happened, or at least what I intended.

Monkey Man was originally a single human father of six boys who, when taking his sons to the zoo one day, was bitten by a monkey that caused him to transform into the superhero Monkey Man. His powers are loosely defined, broadly being whatever I felt like at the time, but more specifically lifted from Dragon Ball. Super strength, super speed, flight, energy blasts released from his hands, that sort of thing. His appearance also changed: He grew a tail, his head became wider, hair became three single strands, hands became “monkey hands,” feet became “monkey feet,” and his clothes were traded for a long-sleeve white shirt with “MM” drawn on it. Because that’s what superheroes wear! Oh, and no pants, because cartoon characters don’t need to wear pants!

In his debut role, Monkey Man battled against a villain by the name of Pig Snake, a creature with the body of a snake, head of a pig, and limbs of a pig. While issue 3, which is lost media, would have seen Monkey Man get brainwashed by a female character with long blonde hair, named ?, the symbol. Her name is just Question Mark, written as a backwards “?” because I did not know which way a question mark was supposed to go! In order to save their father, Monkey Man’s six son venture into the zoo at night and get bitten by the monkey there, gaining their own superpowers.

They were Awesome Ashie as Monkey A, Mega Michael as Monkey M, Super Sony as Monkey S, Rocko Rob as Monkey R, Danny the Dude as Monkey D, and Monkey D#2… whose name I cannot remember and was lost in the scanning process back in 2003.

Monkey R was based on me, while Monkeys A, M, S, D, and D#2 were based on my friends in second grade, but I’d use the term “based on” very loosely. These characters are not distinct and don’t have differing personalities. They have the exact same design of a guy with a triangle body, oval head, single spike for hair, lines for arms and legs, and a fifth line for their tails. …Tails that often come right out of the bottoms of their bodies and curl, giving them an unintentionally phallic look. Though, that’s nothing on Monkey Man himself, whose hands, feet, and tail, all look unintentionally phallic in their own way.

As for how most comics plays out, there is very little continuity or any consistent plot. There are a deluge of bad guys whose names I cannot remember— they were written on a posterboard I threw away in 2007 or so— but their names were probably pretty simple. For example, there is a recurring villain with wings, talons, demon horns, and BB on his chest. He was called Bird Bull.

Broadly, I do not think there is much to say about these literal children scribbles, but rather than just throw the comics at you, I should try to describe them and provide some context. So, without further ado, let’s do an issue-by-issue breakdown!

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The Monkey Man Journey!

Issue 2, the first issue that I have, sees Monkey Man fight against a giant bird reptile creature, named Chicken Alligator, before… uh, I think he grabbed and threw them spiraling into the sky. It is just a five-page fight scene, followed by the reveal of another character’s silhouette and a narration prompt, written by my mother, asking “can you guess her name.” It’s later revealed to be Chicken Woman, and if you want to know why I had chickens fighting monkeys, the answer is, uh… I liked the movie Chicken Run and played a lot of Donkey Kong 64 as a kid. That’s my best guess!

Issue 4 was a supposed Fourth of July special that entirely consists of a bunch of candy and cake based creatures appearing before they are eaten by Monkeys R, S, and D. R, S, and D eat until they become too fat to move, leading Monkey Man to finish eating these goes before becoming fat himself. …At least I think so. Well, I don’t even know what that thing on the bottom of page4 is supposed to be, but it sure does not look right.

Issue 5 is raw action, but it is also barely comprehensible. Monsters appear with doodly designs, a giant ball with nubs opens to introduce Bird Bull, who launches into battle with Monkey Man and his sons. Here, we see that Monkey Man and his sons can also inexplicably fuse together into different forms. One of these forms is that of a Monkey Son with burgeoning muscles, capable of firing, deflecting, and breathing energy blasts. With a boom, crash, barg, and smash, Bird Bull is defeated, but Monkey Man is grievously injured, his arms, legs, and tail all severed from the battle. To save their father, the sons take him to the inside of a spaceship where he is hooked up to a Frieza Force healing pod, powered by their combined strength. Together, they heal Monkey Man and live to fight another day, with the ending page teasing a new member.

Issue 6 is where Monkey D#2 is introduced as a creation of some monster of some sort and teleported his way to the Monkey Sons, who are in the middle of fighting Bird Bull. The Monkey Sons say that Bird Bull is “so screwed” and as D#2 explains that he was “having so much fun” before getting some influx of power. The fusion of Monkey Man and Monkey R then says “All systems ready” before… something happens, ending the issue.

Well, that’s not technically the end. From here on out, most issues end with a preview image for the next issue, and the reason for this is pretty simple. One, I liked drawing covers the most, as they were the most fun to draw. Two, I wanted to imitate how real comics ended with a preview of the next issue. I always thought they were exciting, that they got me psyched to see what would happen next month. I was probably inspired by how Sonic the Hedgehog ended issue 123 ended teasing a big event that would come in the next issue, Sonic Adventure 2.5 Alpha. Or maybe I was fascinated by how licensed cartoon comics would end by advertising other comics. As a kid, content and advertisement are the same thing.

Issue 7 marks the point where the Dragon Ball references become truly overt. It’s Monkey A’s birthday and as he opens his present he is greeted by an evil twin of himself— the first of MANY evil twins, so let’s call him Evil Twin A. Evil Twin A uses his scouter to measure Monkey A’s power level as 1,012. Despite this concept not having been introduced, at all, Monkey A can tell that the evil twin has a power level of 1,999, much to his surprise.

The evil twin, despite being far stronger, then transforms into a super buff giant version of himself, his clothes tripping, and battles against Monkey A. They boom, bang, smash, and the evil twin powers down, but Monkey A is battered and limping from this battle, feeling that he cannot win. With rage swelling within him, Monkey A awakens to his Super Monkey power. Evil Twin A’s eyes shoot out of his face in response, and Super Monkey A fires an energy beam that destroys his opponent. With this threat defeated, Monkey A then gets a well deserved rest.

Moving onto issue 8, the Monkey Sons are going through a mountainous tower that reaches beyond the clouds and to space, where a cloaked figure resides. The tower is full of monsters, mostly weapon-wielding Waddle Dees from Kirby: Right Back at Ya!

For context, I had a Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance by this point, but I only had maybe ten games between them, half of them being Pokémon. I barely played them, as I was scared I would lose, and I had yet to play a Kirby game.

To get past these monsters, Monkey D, M, A, R, S, and D#2 fuse together and fight two monsters as they go through the tower. One is a bipedal giant made up of six Chain Chomps from Mario Kart 64 that appears before vanishing the next page. The second is a malformed three-eyed monster with a giant tongue and ray gun hand who uses its giant tongue to eat the fused Monkey Son. Fused Monkey Son then breaks the monster’s stomach open and goes to sleep. He then wakes up to prepare some breakfast, presumably some of the donuts (bagels?) from the prior page, but fused Monkey Son eats too much and gets FAT. The end!

Issue 9 is incredibly simple. Fused Monkey Son appears near what seems to be the final door, meets a character called Pig Chicken, who looks nothing like a chicken and appears to either have boobs or a bra. Your guess is as good as mine. Fused Monkey Son launches an energy blast on Pig Chicken, who is sent flying through the floor, allowing the fused Monkey Son to woosh up the stairs to another threat, a giant bipedal dragon thing.

The back section here was meant to be a checklist of sorts for what comics had been done at this time. I had marked off issues 1 to 9 as being done and issues 10 and 11 as coming soon. However, I also listed 32 “MM” comics and 10 “MMF” comics. This was meant to be a series called Monkey Man Future, likely inspired by Dragon Ball Z: The History of Trunks.

I specifically cite that because the past two issues were absolutely based on the original Dragon Ball anime, specifically the “Muscle Tower” section of the Red Ribbon Army saga. Super Monkey is just Super Saiyan, spiky blonde hair and all. And the next three issues—because issue 10 is three parts— are a tournament arc that does not fit in with the plot preceding it. I’d say just like Dragon Ball, but that’s not true. I just watched Dragon Ball out of order and did not always understand when or where events were happening.

Case in point, issue 10 part 1 is just a bunch of single page fight scenes. The characters say “prepare to die,” fight for three panels, then the Monkey Son says “I win.” Monkey R beats Pig Snake. Monkey D beats Chicken Alligator. Super Monkey A beats Chicken Woman. Monkey M is eaten by Bird Bull, but then Monkey M’s head grows out of Bird Bull’s shoulder, making them like conjoined twins. …Which was definitely inspired by the Futurama episode, Put Your Head on My Shoulders, one of the… three TSF episodes in that series.

Lastly, Monkey S, who is super buff now, disintegrates the cloaked figure first teased on the cover of chapter 8. Yep, just that easy! One blast, they become bones, and the bones turn to dust. After this, as if to explain why Monkey S got so buff, he is then shown in a gym, training up, with weights and drinks around him as he bench presses.

Issue 10 part 2 is the semi-finals of this tournament, beginning with a battle of brothers versus brothers as Monkey R and Monkey A fight each other with energy balls. They battle as the sun sets and the moon appears within the sky, turning both of them into giant monkeys, another Dragon Ball callback. Rather than fight though, Monkey R is a cheap jerk and I think they pull off Monkey D’s tail, turning them back to their normal size. Recognizing defeat when faced with their giant brother, Monkey D pulls out a white flag to surrender, and the two brothers then sleep side by side, no harm, no foul.

Also, look forward to Monkey R getting special treatment. I wonder why!

The second fight is between Bird Bull, who has imprisoned Monkey M in a little ball between his horns, and Monkey S, now with a headband for some reason. Bird Bull darts around Monkey S, appearing behind him before launching a powerful energy blast, but Monkey S survives. Shocked, Bird Bull’s horns snap off, he thinks of a solution, and with a bingo, he decides to suck up Monkey S into the ball between his horns. This means the finale will be Monkey R versus Bird Bull.

Issue 10 part 3 jumps right into the fight, with Monkey R saying “I will kill you and win,” which is probably the longest sentence in the entire series. Bird Bull then uses his Special Beam Cannon on Monkey R, who dodges repeatedly, his rage billowing before he becomes Super Monkey R. It’s a feat that causes Bird Bull’s eyes shoot out of his head, but in a far more exaggerated and cartoonish manner than issue 7. Much like Monkey A, Bird Bull surrenders and releases Monkey S. No idea what happened to Monkey M.

This would be a decent enough ending, but there is one last battle between Monkey R, no longer super, and Chicken Woman. Chicken Woman attacks using… eggs, I think, but Monkey R dodges them, eventually sending an egg down Chicken Woman’s gullet, causing her to explode. The Monkey Boys then are crowded the winner by… some slug thing with legs, and do a human pyramid to celebrate.

Following that diversion, issue 11 sees the fused Monkey Son fighting against the bipedal dragon creature, who deals some damage before fused Monkey Son is able to become super and beats the dragon by doing… something. It makes the dragon grow FAT before exploding into candy, as I thought the idea of someone getting so big they exploded was the peak of comedy. Definitely nothing to look into there!

Oh, and the ending page features this weird almost maze chase game where the Monkey Sons are going around, eating candy, complete with controls labeled A for munch and B for reverse. …Again, I had a Game Boy Advance, but I was scared of video games and did not understand them, so this is what I thought a video game was as a kid!

Issue 12 is… just a repeat of issue 7. Monkey M is having a party with presents from his brothers and dad, when an evil Michael with a robot arm appears. The evil twin, Evil Twin M starts a beam struggle, proving an even match before he unleashes his true power, getting all muscular and giant. This puts Monkey M into a tight spot, leading him to become a Super Monkey and uses his power to blast his evil twin into a skeleton. The end!

Issue 13 appears to be a continuation the storyline from issue 8, 9, 11, and 12, but the story here is as substantive as you would expect. Super Monkey A and M say “prepare to die,” fuse, get into a beam struggle with the cloaked figure, then unfuse, so they can charge and launch two Spirit Bombs. The cloaked figure is unaffected by this, remarking “they won’t kill me” much to the surprise of his opponents. They then re-fuse together, this time adding in Monkey Man, Monkey R, S, D, and D#2… before Monkey Man #900 shows up.

Who is Monkey Man #900? I have no idea, he is Monkey Man, but wearing black, and blows up the cloaked figure. The Monkey Sons are happy about this, except for Monkey D#2, who was abducted and turned into a cyborg when nobody was looking. “Now” he has a rocket jet for legs, a robot claw, a laser gun hand, and two intersecting D’s on his shirt, indicating he is now DD. What does DD stand for? That is lost to time!

Issue 14 begins as Monkey R, S, D, and A are playing a crude facsimile of a video game before getting sucked into their Nintendo 64. The following page, this is revealed to be a plot by ?, a woman with extremely long blonde hair, who also Monkey Man at some point. This leaves Super Monkey S to throw away the game console that ate his family and then get pissed, charging up his power and rage to become Super Monkey 2, using his power to destroy ? and also DD. Yeah, I went to the trouble of turning D#2 into DD, just to destroy him on the last filled page of the comic.

The next issue, issue 15, features a villain designed by my childhood friend, Michael McKenzie Monogue, who I have not spoken to in 20 years after we had a terrible falling out. He tricked me into trading my female Mudkip for a Surskit in Pokémon Ruby, my first Pokémon game, and stole hundreds of Pokémon cards from me. I got back to him by stealing his copy of Pokémon Sapphire, but we just hated each other’s guts by the fourth grade, and I was glad when he moved away after grade school.

Anyway, the framing device here is that the Monkey Sons are out enjoying a picnic of sorts when a giant worm (designed by Michael) emerges from the ground, attacking them. I would specify who, but I sometimes didn’t bother labeling the Monkey Sons, not like it really matters. The Monkey Sons shoot energy blasts at the giant worm, when they are greeted by a baby monkey with a single wiggly hair and diaper called Monkey t. Lower-case T because he’s a baby. After unleashing a “poo-poo attack” on the giant worm, Monkey t then uses an energy attack of some sorts to defeat the worm. To commemorate this victory, one of the Monkey Sons looks at Monkey t, now wearing a shirt and shorts, with three hairs, and says they “you are T now.”

How did this baby become a regular-sized kid like that, and why did I add another member to the Monkey Sons? I dunno!

Issue 16 is largely substance-less. Monkey M and Monkey T are fighting another sharp toothed vaguely lizard-themed monster, where Monkey M, now a Super Monkey 2, takes care of most of the work, flying high while leaving T in his dust. Some flying around and a beam struggle later, the monster is blown to bits, and we get more irrelevant power levels. In case it’s not obvious, as a kid I absolutely printed out fan made power levels of Dragon Ball characters by arc, from multiple sources, just so that I could find what felt right.

Issue 17 is also boring. Monkey Man fused with Monkey R and is chilling on the grass with Monkey T. Then some two-headed dragon appears, kidnapping Monkey T somehow, and Monkey Man R (I guess that’s the convention I’m going with) goes to rescue him. Monkey Man R clowns on the dragon, slicing off one head, which develops its own body for a panel, before decapitating the body, saying this is “cool”. Monkey T is then freed, and they do something to store the two-headed dragon’s corpse.

Issue 18 is… the third evil twin comic! Why was I so enamored with this idea? Was it just because it was a common cartoon cliché? Was it Turles? Monkey R is getting ready to celebrate his birthday, with oodles of presents and a big birthday cake, when Evil Twin R appears on a hoverboard and steals the cake, moving too quickly to be tracked and using “rocket attack.” Monkey R becomes giant to snag Evil Twin R, but the evil do-er then pulls a Jackie Chun and blows up the moon. Monkey R is so distraught by this that he becomes a Super Monkey. Evil Twin R’s eyes pop out of his head, literally in this case, as he is actually a robot. You could tell if you looked at the cover, where I half-erased a character who was originally going to be part of this issue.

Like with everything else, Super Monkey R blows up the robot doppelgänger and that’s it!

Issue 19 is remarkable mostly for its choice in antagonist, as this is a direct reference to the Donkey Kong 64 boss, Mad Jack. A jack-in-the-box monster that I was always horrified by as a kid. Now, everything in Donkey Kong 64 scared me as a kid, but this guy was as scary as Michael Myers to me! (I watched Halloween (1978) with my mom in 2001. I don’t know WHY she thought that was a good idea.)

Authorial context aside, the comic is just not interesting. Monkey Man R and Monkey T are both on their roof, having a snack, when a giant jack-in-the-box monster appears and multiplies into three copies. Monkey Man R is PISSED at this, and everything explodes. The jack-in-the-box then becomes tiny, and runs away, with Monkey Man R and Monkey T both high-fiving at a job well done.

Monkey Man issue 20 is strange in that it is a flash forward to April 25, 2009 where a character who looks like Bird Bull with arms is commanding an army of monsters. Super Monkey Man R then appears to fight the horned commander, with a burning fist and weapon. The two clash, but decide their power is not high enough. The horned creature becomes some strange curly horned quadruped with a power level of 130,000, while the Super Monkey Man R goes Super Monkey 3, 100%, with a power level of 750,000. With one hit, the horned creature is destroyed, and that’s it for this comic.

Issue 21 is evil twin comic number four, as I could not rationalize another way for someone to get a power boost, I guess. It’s Monkey S’s birthday, when Evil Twin S appears, darts around, and overpowers Monkey S with raw power level. Monkey S cannot keep up, and after Super Monkey mode does not help enough, he decides to crank it to Super Monkey 2. Evil twin’s eyes burst from their sockets, and with one energy blast, he becomes a skeleton.

Issue 22 is the start of another tournament, this time promising 14 battles, ending with a championship battle against Monkey R. Needless to say, it’s more rapid fight scenes with no good ideas, sauce, or really even sense. First is Monkey D versus a buff and edgy character with T on his shirt, who… might be Monkey T from the future? Regardless, T wins, knocking Monkey D off the platform. Next is a battle between regular Monkey T and… A sleeping floating Monkey T who is meant to be… Evil Twin T! Yeah, you did not miss anything, I just introduced him here, and he died just like that!

Round 3 is just Monkey S versus Evil Twin S. Monkey S completely messes his twin up, turning him into a pile of eyes and guts and hair before… stomping on him! Round 4 is Monkey Man #900 versus Evil Twin R. One beam struggle and Monkey Man #900 wins. For round 5, Evil Twin Monkey Man, another new character, appears and defeats Monkey D#2, and no, I don’t know why he’s not a cyborg. Round 6 has Monkey Son M beat Evil Twin M, slicing him like a pair of scissors before sending him spiraling into the sky. Lastly, Monkey Son A versus Evil Twin A… goes as you expect. Monkey A fires an energy blast at his twin, and wins.

Issue 23 is just a continuation of these vague fights. Future Monkey T is able to defeat his younger self, obviously, sending him flying away in an abrupt conclusion. Evil Twin Monkey Man goes up against Monkey M, who just hits a Super Monkey 3 transformation with no build up, and wins, sending Evil Monkey Man out of bounds. Next page, Monkey A has also achieved his own Super Monkey 3 transformation and despite having a slightly better power level, Monkey M loses the beam struggle. Even though he’s a Super Monkey 3, Future Monkey T is not able to defeat Monkey Man #900, who blocks his attacks, dodges him, and sends Future Monkey T into a healing pod.

Issue 24 is where I think I struck a continuity flub, as the battle depicts begins as a fight between Monkey A and Future Monkey T, but Monkey A becomes Monkey M as the fight goes on. Regardless, Monkey M wins the beam struggle, leading to a final battle between Monkeys M and R, both Super Monkey 3. …Monkey R just gets the high ground on a platform and blasts Monkey M, winning the tournament as a two-time champion.

You know, I talk about tournaments being boring, but this? This is one of actually nothing. The ideas weren’t even cool!

I know I say that ideas are free and not worth much, but if you don’t even have good ideas… what do you have? You have something uninteresting and boring!

As much as I hate to admit it, Monkey Man is just boring!

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The Monkey Man Journey Continues!

Moving onto the latter half of comics, issue 25 is not a milestone, but rather another evil twin storyline. It’s Monkey D’s birthday, and he is attacked by Evil Twin D, who appears with a giant Luigi’s Mansion like vacuum cleaner for a single panel. After that, it’s just some loose combat, power scaling as Monkey D goes from Super Monkey to Super Monkey 2 to Super Monkey 3. His tail then grows exceptionally, and he blows up Evil Twin D. It’s the same as every other comic!

Issue 26 is more… abstract by comparison. Monkey Man R and Monkey T are both flying through space in some sort of spaceship. They are then attacked by a giant baby, who looks identical to the original baby incarnation of T from issue 15, who is now flying, through space, dropping bombs onto the spaceship. To combat this new threat, Monkey Man R and Monkey T then fuse together and… the spaceship blows up. As… Monkey Man RT is drifting through space, the giant baby opens his mouth, eating him and sending him down into the giant baby’s stomach, which is full of chocolate and candy. Rather than try to escape, Monkey Man RT decides to take a nap inside this belly, happy that he’s been vored by a giant space baby full of space candy.

This is never followed up on, but is absolutely a tribute to the likes of Osmosis Jones, The Magic School Bus, and that one part of the Fusion saga in Dragon Ball where Super Buu eats Vegito after turning him into coffee candy. …I was exposed to a lot of vore bait as a child, and that scene from the Fusion saga is still a top five Dragon Ball scene in my book.

…No, I don’t have a vore feitsh! Trust me, you’d know by now if I did. I just thought vore was funny as a kid and still think it’s funny to this day.

Issue 27 is meant to be a more detailed take on a “trapped in a game” storyline, but from someone who did not really understand the conventions of games or know much about them. Three Monkey Sons are busy playing a game of some sorts when a monster that resembles a TV appears and somehow sends the Monkeys into a video game. You can tell it is a video game because it has a bunch of HUD elements. Hearts, smiley faces, random numbers, and a giant “LV1.”

The first Monkey fights monsters with a giant Donkey Kong (1981) hammer, the Star Rod from Kirby, and jumps over monsters, beating them up before reaching a hard boss of some sort. Two lives, meaning Monkeys, had been lost, and now Monkey T is in control, defeating some circle guy with spinning tentacles, but he gets suffocated by some three limbed monster. This is already a pretty long comic by Monkey Man standards, so I’m not surprised that it ends with a Super Monkey asking an old man Monkey, who does not have hair, “can you fix my game.” Then, following an unintelligible illustration of a dinner table, the comic is over.

Monkey Man issue 28 sees Monkey Man R enjoying some manner of pool festivities with a radio and slides to go down, before everything is blown up by Pig Squid. Despite his name, Pig Squid is a pig head with four octopus tentacles coming out of their neck. From there… it’s a slew of contextless fight scenes. Monkey Man R fights some one-eyed monster, a butterfly woman, an edgy chicken-headed man, and eventually blows up a computer in a Legion of Doom looking pig-head base that I guess he ventured to.

That’s it!

Issue 29 is in really rough shape compared to other ones, and is quite vague. Two Monkey Sons venture through a mountain base full of various bad guys, beat them, and blow it up. At this point, this is just overly familiar and boring.

Now, issue 30 is incredibly interesting by comparison. Starting out, one of the Monkey Boys, probably just Monkey Man R, who was my default, as he goes inside a cupcake-shaped house asking for a cupcake. The two monsters there, both robot cupcake creatures, say no, and seemingly blow up the house. …Then some demonic bat feature appears, but it gets fried by Monkey Man R, becoming a child-friendly skeleton. You might think he is going Super Monkey 10 in one panel, but nah, even I would not be that gauche or ridiculous as a child.

Among the wreckage, Monkey Man R discovers a cupcake person with wings and a crown who runs away, hitting Monkey Man R with a ray gun that…

Wait.

Is this…

OH SHIT!

This flying cupcake creature pulls out a ray gun and uses it on Monkey Man R, turning him into a woman. I know because that’s how I drew girl hair as a child, and on page 5, he’s wearing a dress.

I made a goldarn TG sequence when I was an 8-year-old, before I knew what a TG sequence was. …And the subject of the sequence was my self-insert.

lol.

lmao even.

This entire project was worth it for this one discovery alone. I’ve been TECHNICALLY making TSF stuff since I was 8! And it looks like when a TG artist is mocking how basic TG sequences can be!

I love this. I adore this. Easily the best comic of the bunch.

Now, modern Natalie would use this to spin a story about existential dread, the correlation between power and masculinity, the true definition of strength, and jolly old gender dysphoria. But 8-year-old Natalie had different ideas. Monkey Man R is angry after being TG’d and the cupcake critter runs away, hiding among a bunch of cupcakes, or maybe mushrooms. Monkey Man R finds them, fries the cupcake with an energy blast and steals their, uh, picnic basket. Where they got that from is beyond me.

Afterward, Monkey Man R returns to the ray-gun and turns himself back to normal, enjoying his picnic in peace.

Yes, the transformation was undone, but what did you expect? That’s how it always worked in “gender bending” cartoon episodes, and I hadn’t been exposed to anything better.

Issue 31 is special, as it is a 2-in-1 combo back and also the Halloween special, despite having been written in July. Unfortunately, it’s pretty unintelligible to me, the most qualified person to understand what is going on here.

The first section depicts two monsters going trick-or-treating when Monkey Man R and Monkey M see them and decide they need to be assaulted! As they charge up to Super Monkeys, some pumpkin headed man sends out various candy creatures at them, like in issue 4. The creatures are then gathered in a big bag after being defeated, and this bag is swung around as a weapon, destroying the pumpkin headed man.

This somehow sends Monkey Man R and Monkey M through the sky, where they fall down the chimney of a buff guy with long hair. This guy… is probably based on Broly from the Dragon Ball movies, and he is defeated almost immediately by Monkey Man R, who gets mad, channels his power, and slices the strong guy in half by turning himself into a drill.

Yep, 31 issues in and still just a bunch of mindless, directionless fight scenes.

Issue 32 is strange, as it is meant to be the “last comic” yet does not seem to have a clear idea of what it should be. It begins with some old man scientist in a laboratory of sorts before shifting to Monkey Son punching a training bag. As he trains, everything blows up, and the Monkey Son looks to see a destroyed city, attacked by a giant dragon monster in the process of eating other Monkeys. The dragon consumes Monkey Man, Monkey R, and Monkey S, before another Monkey Son appears, says bingo, and points at the monster. The monster then explodes, blood spreads everywhere and his head falls down from the sky, smoke coming out of his mouth.

Another regular-old victory… before we cut over to see Monkey D, R, M, T, D2, A, S, and Monkey Man himself. They are all looking around, confused, looking like “regular humans” but with tails poking out from behind them. I think the idea was that they lost their monkey powers, somehow, given their rampant confusion, yet why would they still have monkey tails?

Before anything can be expanded upon, a spaceship flies away, shouting bye-bye. What I think is happening is that the old scientist from the first panel did this to them and left. He staged a distraction, then robbed the Money Sons of their powers. …Except we then see a Super Monkey appear to blows up the spaceship, saying “yeah yeah.”

…The end!

Have a word search puzzle, a tic-tac-toe game with a terrible grid, some faces of Monkey Man himself, and an advertisement for “Monkey Man Move #3.”

Clearly, I did not know how to end a story at this point, and this is obviously NOT the last comic. Instead, we have three specials, five “movie” issues, and another special that’s the actual final comic. In the interest of maintaining flow, I’ll start with the specials first.

Origin of Monkey Man is mostly just my attempt at recreating scenes from Dragon Ball Z: Bardock – The Father of Goku. It is not any true origin for Monkey Man, he was just a man who got bitten by a monkey and became a superhero.

The comic opens with a giant monkey soldier destroying an alien city before departing via a space pod as the alien planet blows up. A Waddle Dee then informs the recurring cloaked figure that “planet Quse is destroyed,” to which he says good. After arriving at some safe location, the monkey soldier is brought back to health by a robot, before being sent off to another planet, where he crashes into two aliens, vaporizing them. However, the monkey soldier does not even get out of his space pod before this second alien planet is vaporized by the cloaked figure.

The cloaked figure is meant to be Frieza, who killed the eponymous protagonist in Bardock, but as Bardock died he had a flash forward to the events of Dragon Ball and his son, Goku. I decided to do my take on this too, showing off various vague scenes from Monkey Man before ending with the sight of a Dragon Ball space pod rushing to Earth.

I guess the idea was that the monkey in the zoo in the missing issue 1 of the main series was meant to be a space monkey, who can give powers to other people via monkey bites. Which, uh, is not that crazy if you know a thing or three about American superhero comics. Still, this is a prime example of monkey see, monkey do. I saw something I thought was cool, so I wanted to make my own version of it, not understanding why it was cool or what it was trying to achieve. I could be harsher on it, call it a rip-off, but an 8-year-old even attempting to adapt a movie is sort of admirable, right?

Monkey Man Wedding is meant to be a wedding between two villains, Chicken Woman and Chicken Alligator. Unfortunately for them, a Monkey Son appears, attackes everyone, kills both Chicken Alligator and Chicken Woman, and with the wedding go-ers all dead, he proceeds to eat all the wedding cake, getting fat in the process. The end, have some power levels on random villains who mostly never appeared in anything, and some heroes from Monkey Man Jr.

…I do not know what Monkey Man Jr. was supposed to be. Though, I think it was meant to be new adventures starring Monkey Man, a new character called Bull Night (I did not know how to spell knight), and a character who was just a toilet man with plunger arms and rocket feet. Some banana man is trying to destroy a town, calling upon various monsters, they get defeated, and the three main characters return home to their weird hut houses. The end, have a sequel tease for them going into a spaceship. This was the last Monkey Man comic ever made, dated 7/31/2003, yet it was not the conclusion.

Monkey Man the Movie is split between five issues, which attempt to be more focused, and take place in some vague intersection of the main series. My concept of continuity was skewed by a mixture of cartoons of the era and the incompressible canon of the Dragon Ball movies, but even that explanation makes it hard to justify how aimless these comics are.

The subseries begins in space, where something fires from a moon to an empty arena with a ninja battling against Bird Bull. Bird Bull uses his “horn drill” to fuse with the ninja, getting a spiffy black outfit he insightfully calls “cool.” The next page, Monkey Man crashes into the stadium from space, looking ripe angry. Bird Bull is immediately zapped, becoming a skeleton, while Monkey Man flies away, now wearing Frieza Force armor.

Will this begin some actual continuity? Hell no! Because issue 2 jumps over to Monkey R at a city beach, ready for some rest and relaxation when a monster appears from the ground and is promptly blasted. That not being enough, Monkey R is picked up by a tornado with a face and sent to another battle at the bottom of the sea. You can tell based on my attempt at drawing a fish and sea urchin.

At the bottom of the sea, Monkey R, or I guess Monkey Man R, somehow, fights against a Frieza clone who shifts from form 2, to 3, to both 33% and 100% of form 4 before getting defeated in the most spectacular way. With an explosion, the Frieza knock-off is shot from Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond before landing in a black hole far, far away from Earth. Not an original finisher, but certainly an extra one.

On the final page, we see Earth, surrounded by various satellites and King Kai style micro-planets, normal stuff, except for a curious small spaceship, labeled “EE.”

Issue 3 once again ditches everything narratively and is instead a different fight scene every page. Monkey man R fights a bunch of low level grunt enemies. Then he fights a cyborg Monkey Man. Then he fights a robot chicken (the show debuted in 2005). Then he fights another generic dragon monster. And that’s it! It’s just fight scenes with no substance, no sense!

Things get more confusing with issues 4 and 5 of Monkey Man the Movie, as… I am missing some of the pages. My copies had duplicate pages and I do not know which comic they were originally associated with. The covers, first pages, and ending “adverts” are different, but everything else is the same. This was simply a copying or transposition issue made back in 2003, and the originals are long-lost, but I believe that I am missing pages from the movie issue 4.

Movie issue 4 does not seem very interesting based on the first page, which just as Super Monkey R go to a new place and battle more does, seemingly with the goal of getting a magic cupcake. Why a magic cupcake? Because I had watched the Fairly Odd Parents TV movie, Abra-Catastrophe!, and a magic muffin was a key plot device. What exactly this did is seemingly not important, as continuity is so loose here, but I think that the character teased in issue 2, Monkey E, no doubt meaning Monkey Evil, found the cupcake and used it to make a wish.

I say this because issue 5 takes place in a battleground where a giant mecha dragon is attacking the world, and a bunch of Monkeys are rallying together, while villains, such as the cloaked man and the woman named question mark, or ?, are now back. Clearly, things are going on, but I’m more mystified by the last panel of the first page, which I think is another weird Dragon Ball reference. The fusion of Monkey Man is mindlessly lifted from Dragon Ball, and improper fusion technique can change what the fusion looks like. Mostly, it will be really skinny or really fat.

I think the idea here is that these Monkeys screwed up fusion and both became women, with one being labeled as “fat” despite clearly not being fat.

Whatever. That’s the second TSF transformation in the series, and I’ll take it.

As for what happens after that… I do not know! There are too many characters, their designs are too wild, and I think they fuse together throughout the battle. But it does not really matter, as they all seem to get eaten by a giant dragon, where they are… pooped out in a giant turd full of limbs sticking out. All the villains, and the Monkeys, are seemingly dead, leading into the actual final issue of the series, Dead Zone.

Oh, a comic where Monkey Man and the Monkey Sons rally together to fight villains in the afterlife? It’s a cool idea… but it’s also just nothing but gestures at fight scenes.

Characters shout, eat candy creatures, shoot off energy beams. They beat up Pig Snake and Bird Bull, become giants, assume their super forms, and eventually all the Monkey Sons, including a buff one who I guess was supposed to be from Monkey Man Future, throw Monkey E into a pit.

With one final look at various oddball villains who never appeared, we are then informed that MONKEY MAN IS OVER!

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The Monkey Man Postmortem!

Having gone through the near-entirety of Monkey Man, I am left very confused about what child me was trying to do, other than make cheap comics I could sell to Grandma Addie and pseudo-uncle Bob Brooks for a quarter each. I am simultaneously happy that I had the effort and gumption needed to make something like this as a kid and confused as to why I decided to execute these ideas this way. Truthfully, the answer is that my brain was still developing, and this whole storytelling thing was new to me.

As seen in my fan fiction, Sonic and Pals, Maxio, and Metal Gear Switch, I eventually figured out how to tell a longer-form story, as I got older and smarter. I’m sure that trying to tell a story with Monkey Man helped with that, but… there’s surprisingly little to look into despite how much of it there is.

While I cannot say I felt particularly attached to or even nostalgic for this comic, I am glad that I was able to recover, preserve, and go through it again. It might not be anything special, but it was me taking the first step towards being a creator. Now you can look at me now and ask yourself “how did she go from making Monkey Man to Psycho Shatter 1988 in just 21 years?”

The answer… is a long one, but you can probably find it somewhere on Natalie.TF.