In an interesting turn of events, I found the original comic that Monkeybone is "based" on, a work called Dark Town by writer Kaja Blackley and artist Vanessa Chong from a Canadian comic publisher called Mad Monkey Press. Only one issue was published, and the character of Monkeybone is nowhere to be found.

There are some similarities to the film in the comic. The main character is in a coma. The wife/girlfriend wants to turn off his life support. The spirit of the man wants to escape back into the real world. But that is where the similarities end.

The story sets out that the lords of Dark Town have been taking over the bodies of coma victims with people from their world to attack the normal earth with strangeness. The book starts out with the lords of Dark Town sending a note by messenger to taunt the coma victim's wife that they've trapped him and he will never return, a point that is not referenced again. In Dark Town, the writer himself has been turned into a marionette, and he has a suitcase full of his "imagination", which has made him unmanageable by Dark Town standards. His suitcase is able to manifest things from his imagination to kill any assassins that Dark Town sends against him. Death shows up (as a traditional death, not Whoppie Goldberg as in the film) who offers him tips on escape. When creatures try to attack the marionette, the dialogue is drawn like the words are part of the landscape, a little like a 90's gothic Yellow Submarine. He uses a Dark Town phone to call his wife, but she doesn't believe it's him. It ends with the marionette being lanced by a knight on horseback. There were no other issues produced, so that was all there was until the film happened.

Is it good? I think the dreamworld art is pretty striking, but I think I would have wanted more story to see if the work would have really come together. An art comic to be sure. It would also be interesting to see exactly how this comic became the movie Monkeybone through the Hollywood creative process.