Grease Monkey


Grease Monkey is a comic book created by Tim Eldred. There were two issues published in color by Kitchen Sink Press in 1996, then Image Comics reprinted the first four stories in black and white in 1998. Currently Tor Books has released in book form: the first six stories, with previously unpublished material, and three vignettes. A second book, A Tale of Two Species, was published on the internet in 19 chapters, approximately monthly, starting in October 2007. Both volumes depict life aboard the military space station Fist of Earth, or adjacent smaller spaceships.

Main characters

The prologue states that an extraterrestrial armada having destroyed sixty percent of the human population, a society of godlike 'Benefactors' rebuild Earthly civilization, in exchange for military help against the attackers. To replace the missing sixty percent, the Benefactors bestow humanlike intelligence and habits upon Earth's gorillas, and thus produce a combined civilization on Earth. Thereafter the first book depicts a series of anecdotes, dialogues, and misadventures featuring crew of Earth's interstellar military establishment: the immense space station Fist of Earth. Here, the conflict and comic relief of the story arises from the protagonists' dislike of middle management and blind enforcement of rules, and the insistence thereon by senior officer 'Benjamin Henniker'.
In the second book, the hostile fleet attack the Fist of Earth after 50 years' absence, and are opposed by the Fist's crew and scientists in a short series of dogfights. Following the first such sequence, the Benefactors identify the fleet as renegade creations of their own, under the command of a single rogue of the Benefactors' own species. In the second sequence of fights, this rogue's own battleship nearly cripples the Fist; but Mac, wielding an immense directed-energy weapon equipped with the enemy's technology, destroys part of the battleship, and thus provokes a retreat.

Footnotes