Jonathan Coulton, the musician behind songs like “Code Monkey” and “Re: Your Brains” may have quite a bit of audience crossover with comics and “geek culture”, but he’d never really thought about the idea of throwing his songs into a blender and seeing what kind of comic book might come out until his longtime friend and famed comic book writer Greg Pak (Batman/Superman, World War Hulk) approached him with the idea.
At first, it was just a tweet that seemed half-joking…but when Coulton told him to “Do it!”, Pak responded by crafting an elaborate story about a put-upon coding monkey who teams with a supervillain named Skullcrusher to rescue his (the Monkey’s unrequited love from the clutches of an even more dangerous supervillain: Skullcrusher’s own unrequited love.
Coulton greenlit the comic, which was funded via Kickstarter and brought to Monkeybrain Comics, where the first issue is released today. In a recent interview with comicbook.com, Coulton remarked:
“This book takes the sci-fi, storytelling songs as a jumping off point. And those are really a small piece of my larger body of work, but obviously they’re the most famous part. I like to think I am well-rounded enough to have written a couple of really good love songs and breakup songs in there as well. But it’s a lot harder to make a comic book about a man who is sad. Who cares, you know?”
