Book Review – Code Monkey Save World #1

I’m betting most of you reading this have at least a passing familiarity with Jonathan Coulton, even if it’s just from his song Still Alive from the end of the amazing Portal video game.  Code Monkey Save World is a graphic novel adaptation of some of JoCo’s music, written by Greg Pak (currently of Batman/Superman and Action Comics), drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa.  What’s it about?  Here’s the description:

The story follows a put-upon coding monkey as he teams up with a seething, lovelorn super-villain to fight robots, office worker zombies, and maybe even each other as they struggle to impress the amazing women for whom they fruitlessly long.

I feel lucky to have gotten a review copy as I missed the Kickstarter for it.  As for the book itself, it’s a lot of fun.  In a world of supervillains and giant robots, an intelligent monkey website coder working for an evil organization isn’t that far-fetched.  Charles just wants to do his job – and catch the eye of his beautiful coworker, Matilde.  An invasion of robot slavers interrupts things, and Charles gets roped in by his supervillain boss to try and track down the villain responsible.  Not your best day at work.  There is some funny stuff, but it’s hard to laugh at the parts that would be offensive to Charles – then again, if the job market is bad enough that I’m working for a villain, I might endure for the money.  The art is just the sort of style I enjoy, clear and expressive, with vibrant colors (from Jessica Kholinne).  The end panel is below, and still kills me.  Can’t wait to see what happens next.