Space Monkeys! The Re-Up

Way back in early 2004, my brother Pablo and I started an online comic called Space Monkeys!

It was built on a very simple premise. Meany, his second-in-command Bobbo, and a ragtag crew of space-faring simians are bent on defeating the stupid humans on Earth and taking over the planet. In the history of the comic, they had very little success doing so.

We produced the comic, in the background of various other projects we were working on, until 2009. That year, we started doing the Trailers Without Pity videos and that took all the extra time we had to work together.

Space Monkeys!, as much as we loved it, went on hiatus and never came back. We posted one last comic in 3-D right after Avatar came out and that was it.

But we missed our monkeys. As we were working on the videos, we kept promising that if we ever stopped doing those, we’d go back to working on the comic.

Last summer, we ran out of steam with the videos and gave up a paying gig due to logistics. A few months later, as things were slowing down for me creatively, I approached my brother about getting the comic going again. He was excited about the idea, but we both knew we had a lot of work ahead of us.

So, quietly, we’ve been doing just that.

We built an entirely new website using WordPress, transferred (manually, due to the flakiness of our old database software) more than 250 archived comics and hundreds more blog posts and began working on new comics.

We registered a new domain name, spacemonkeys.me, which will be the new home for the site. Our old website, actiongravy.com, still works, but we’ll be phasing it out over the next few weeks and eventually it’s going to redirect to the new URL.

There’ll be new comics once a week and we’ll keep expanding and adding things as we get our feet under us. We added a Facebook page, even! The first new comic in nearly three years was published late last night. There’s also a “Story so far…” page to catch you up on the story and all the characters.

Part of the whole process of moving over the archive — a task I took on while Pablo worked on the web design — was that I got to reintroduce myself to these characters we love and this weird universe we created. I was thrilled to learn that there was much more possibility in it than I remembered.

In fact, in a few months, after the comic is back on its feet with regular updates, we hope to announce something in addition that will help flesh things out even more. It’s something I’ve been working on every day that I’m enjoying as much as anything I’ve done creatively in a really long time.

For now, we hope you enjoy the comic. We’ll be posting new strips on Wednesdays.

The new site:

The old site: