How can you miss with a monkey comic book character? Monsieur Mallah, Sam Simeon, Titano the Super-Ape, The Mod Gorilla Boss, Gorilla-Man… Okay, so you can miss — and miss big.

For some reason, the intelligent (and not-so-intelligent) simian has been used throughout comics history with ridiculous frequency. And no one seems to know why.

Artist and writer Richard Stahnke adds another primate to that infamous list with his independent comic FURIOUS FIST OF THE DRUNKEN MONKEY: ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, the first in a three-comic mini-series.

The monkey — excuse me — the chimpanzee in question is named Chip, a wife-beater-wearing, beer-swilling loser with a robotic gauntlet (the furious fist) that packs a wallop. After getting thrown out of a porn theater, the chimp, along with his toad buddy Al, save a full-bosomed stripper named Bunny from an obsessed fan with a really big gun. Thus begins a love affair between stripper and simian. But a bi-species romance is doomed to fail, right? When Bunny dumps the chump, Chip decides to “do something about being a chimp.” And that can’t be good.

Stahnke’s artwork shines in Chip’s highly emotive face. The chimp comes across as more human than any other character in the book. He’s a lovable loser that will certainly go down in history as one of the better comic book monkeys. Many of the jokes in the book are old and there’s not much of a plot, but Stahnke somehow makes it all work. FURIOUS FIST is good, simple fun, and I can’t wait to read the next comic.