Welcome to the "Gorilla Age of Comics!"

Strange Adventures #8- the one that started it all! Art by Win Mortimer.

If you start looking at the covers of comics (mostly DC Comics) published in the fifties and all through the sixties, you will notice that gorillas appear on many of the covers. Les Daniels' book, DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes explains this phenomenon:

The eighth issue of Strange Adventures achieved some sort of cult status. The cover showed a gorilla in a zoo holding up a slate that read, "Please believe me! I am the victim of a terrible scientific experiment!" This "Incredible Story of an Ape with a Human Brain" had strong sales, and [DC editor, Julius] Schwartz recalls that "Irwin Donenfeld called me in and said we should try it again. Finally all the editors wanted to use gorilla covers, and he said no more than one a month."

"It was a question of trying to find something that sold, and if one issue came out and it happened to sell, then immediately they would follow that type of story. Now, it didn't neccessarily follow through that they were going to sell. Now, I know Jack Schiff, when he was the editor of Batman, he followed sales very well. When he found that a gorilla on covers sold, then you could be damn sure that in an issue or two you're going to have another gorilla story."

Even into the seventies, possibly because of the popularity of the Planet of the Apes movies, gorillas kept showing up on covers, even though it tended to be on the covers of books like Tarzan instead of Superboy. But as you will see, even recent comics like Spawn have not been able to ignore the call of the gorilla.

My Collection

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy that they're actually doing such a storyline, especially one involving their top characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. I just wonder why they would do such a storyline. Hopefully, they've decided to actually not take everything so seriously, and have some fun with their comics. Or maybe they're actually acknowledging part of their publishing past. My more cynical side thinks that doing such a crossover was the only way they could get Arthur Adams do do covers for them. In the last fifteen years, annuals have been a showcase for some of the weaker talents in comics, and I feared that the JLApe crossover could be a total trainwreck,a nd another case of a big publisher producing totally unreadble comics. So far, JLApe has had it's good moments, but hasn't been without an issue or two of total crap.

• JLA Annual #3
• Batman Annual #23
• Aquaman Annual #5
• Wonder Woman Annual #8
• Flash Annual #12
• Superman Annual #11
• Green Lantern Annual #8
• Martian Manhunter Annual #2