Some thoughts about Monkey Prince #1

Who is the newest and weirdest superhero?

Marcus suffered a trauma during his childhood that involved Batman and now that he's a teenager he will realize there are much greater things to worry about once a secret about his ancestors is revealed.

I have an erratic history with Gene Luen Yang right since he started his work at DC.

I thought that his short Superman run was pretty dull for the most part, couldn't stand the first half of his New-Superman series while I thought the latter half was very good, his Terrifics run had a lot of wasted potential meanwhile his Batman/Superman run actually achieved such potential. "Inconsistent" is the best definition that I would give to Yang as a whole.

And sadly, Monkey Prince follows the same trend.

The idea of a superhero based on the legend of Sun Wukong (which Son Goku from Dragon Ball was also famously based on) offers a lot promise and it also plays with Yang's background and knowledge about Chinese history and mythology. Such potential creates many fun scenarios in which the supernatural powers that are given to the protagonist are quickly demonstrated and the fact that all of this occurs in a school also creates entertaining moments concerning the rest of the students.

Unfortunately, this also presents one of the issues I have with Yang, it seems like he wants to give his characters, especially his new characters, a personality tick and exaggerate the hell out of it. This is the reason why I didn't enjoy the first half of New-Superman, because of how incredibly douchy the protagonist was and this only got better after a while. Here, the main character shows a vocal tick whenever he's anxious and of course it had to be "Eeee! Eeee!" which is so in your face that makes Yang's early work on New-Superman seem subtle. He could have easily used the whole anxiety issue as part of Marcus' personality (which is still an overused theme these days but eh) but he just had to make a heavyhanded connection to the whole monkey transformation that is more obnoxious than anything else.

About the plot, it does everything it has to do for an origin story and it doesn't offer much beyond that. A bit disappointing in that regard.

Bernard Chang is a fitting choice for his background of course but also because he's a pretty great artist that offers expressive characters and a detailed style.

Kinda underwhelming overall, not sure if I should keep going.