ABSTRACT Mike Gagnon & Nelson Danielson - MIDGETS &
MONKEYS. Illuminati Comics. Vanity published glossy
Comic book about a group of professional
wrestlers falling on hard times. Desperate to keep their business going, their unscrupulous manager, who has clearly squandered the money earned on his own lavish lifestyle, dupes them into combating wild circus monkeys instead of other wrestlers. Initially of course, the monkeys cause mayhem, which appeals to the audiences at the shows who are eager for sensational drama, and this mess continues until the human wrestlers
work together to bring the situation under control. One monkey however is in fact half human, being the illegitimate bestiality spawned offspring of a union between an ape and a Mexican
wrestling woman marooned in the jungles. This is as every bit morally questionable, contrived, unlikely and unfeasible as it seems. There are flashes of genuine humour, i.e. the names of characters, such as the vain and effete Davey Goliath, and the movement is quite animated though the drawings are often very simplistic. The plot is predictable, in the use of corrupt managers, wrestlers being paid to take a dive which they
don’t then take, and the weakest, wrestler, seen losing in the
early the early part of the story becomes the hero in the end just as anyone can see coming a mile away. There is a finale in which the artist/author show pictures of the minor characters and what fate befell them after the adventure given. This suggests that the authors don’t plan to present their wrestling and monkey story as the first of a series. The work is in black and white apart from the glossy cover art and much of the book (really a padded out one-off comic) in which almost a quarter of the booklet is taken up with adverts and trailers for other Illuminati comic book work, none of which looks particularly interesting.
More reviews about the MONKEYS AND MIDGETS