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Comics Gone Ape!
They may be only one notch below humans on the evolutionary ladder, but gorillas and monkeys have for decades climbed to the top of the comic-book world as monsters, super-villains, sentient masterminds, soldiers, aliens, buffoons and super-heroes. Comics Gone Ape! is the definitive missing link to everything you need to know about these popular primates, including Gorilla Grodd, Beppo the Super-Monkey, BrainApe, King Kong, Titano the Super-Ape, Cy-Gor, Konga, Magilla Gorilla, Detective Chimp, Blip, Gleek, the Gibbon, Lancelot Link Secret Chimp, Mojo Jojo, Angel and the Ape and a barrel of others. Comics Gone Ape! is loaded with comics artwork, a chest-thumping gallery of comics covers featuring apes. Also includes behind-the-scenes looks at Planet of the Apes, Arthur Adams' Monkeyman and O'Brien and Joe Kubert's Tarzan. With its all-new Avengers-as-gorillas cover by Arthur Adams, you won't be able to keep your filthy paws off this book!
- GenresComics
128 pages, Paperback
First published April 18, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 3, 2020
Comics Gone Ape is a collection of articles and interviews about apes and other primates in comics.
The cover of this book is iconic and I've admired it from afar for years. When TwoMorrows had a sale in order to help them weather the pandemic, I decided to take the plunge.
Michael Eury conducted interviews from everyone from Arthur Adams to Anne Timmons for this. There are lists of primate characters as well as articles. I had no idea Carmine Infantino listed Detective Chimp as his favorite strip. King Kong and Tarzan get a lot of pages devoted to them and there is a Planet of the Apes article.
Some of these properties could be award winning if DC and Marvel focused on something besides their usual vanilla content. Mark Russell on Angel and the Ape sounds like money in the bank to me. I had no idea how often gorillas were featured on covers during the silver age.
If you like apes and monkeys in comics at all, you'll go bananas for Comics Gone Ape! Three out of five crap-flingers.
The cover of this book is iconic and I've admired it from afar for years. When TwoMorrows had a sale in order to help them weather the pandemic, I decided to take the plunge.
Michael Eury conducted interviews from everyone from Arthur Adams to Anne Timmons for this. There are lists of primate characters as well as articles. I had no idea Carmine Infantino listed Detective Chimp as his favorite strip. King Kong and Tarzan get a lot of pages devoted to them and there is a Planet of the Apes article.
Some of these properties could be award winning if DC and Marvel focused on something besides their usual vanilla content. Mark Russell on Angel and the Ape sounds like money in the bank to me. I had no idea how often gorillas were featured on covers during the silver age.
If you like apes and monkeys in comics at all, you'll go bananas for Comics Gone Ape! Three out of five crap-flingers.
October 14, 2007
As mainstays of comic book literature, apes and monkeys have appeared regularly in comics since 1939. Following the 1951 publication of the first ape cover on DC Comics' Strange Adventures #8, the comics industry realized that issues with simians on the cover sold more than those without -- a truism still evident in today's supposedly more sophisticated graphic novel market. In Comics Gone Ape!, Michael Eury lovingly explores this phenomenon and assembles a cornucopia of comic book ape knowledge for gorilla lovers.
There exists a large covert subculture of simian fans -- usually men -- fascinated with popular culture depictions of apes and monkeys. Eury spends little time analyzing the hows and whys of this group, but rather focuses on the whos and whats.
While the histories, especially of the individual simian characters, often intrigue, his meager attempts to explore and explain the ape curiosity fail to offer any satisfying conclusions. Eury shows moments of clarity and style, but his feeble attempts at humor distract the reader. Clunky interviews of eleven prominent ape creators fall especially flat, offering little information of note.
Copiously illustrated with black & white simian reprints and previously unpublished work from popular artists such as Arthur Adams, Bruce Timm, Joe Kubert, Tony Millionare, Sergio Aragonés, and Jack Kirby, Comics Gone Ape! provides a tantalizing package for any ape fan. Littered throughout with art, each of the six chapters concludes with two pages of related ape covers and, as expected, the interviewee's work decorates their interviews. As a pictorial account, Comics Gone Ape! succeeds.
Eury's book disappoints this ape fan -- a gun-toting gumshoe gorilla graces the cover of my own collection of essays Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century -- and presents little new information to any but the most casual fan. Comics Gone Ape! fails to interest readers outside this sub-genre and beyond the images, ultimately bores the simian fan.
(The review originally appear at RevolutionSF.)
Link: [http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.h...]
There exists a large covert subculture of simian fans -- usually men -- fascinated with popular culture depictions of apes and monkeys. Eury spends little time analyzing the hows and whys of this group, but rather focuses on the whos and whats.
While the histories, especially of the individual simian characters, often intrigue, his meager attempts to explore and explain the ape curiosity fail to offer any satisfying conclusions. Eury shows moments of clarity and style, but his feeble attempts at humor distract the reader. Clunky interviews of eleven prominent ape creators fall especially flat, offering little information of note.
Copiously illustrated with black & white simian reprints and previously unpublished work from popular artists such as Arthur Adams, Bruce Timm, Joe Kubert, Tony Millionare, Sergio Aragonés, and Jack Kirby, Comics Gone Ape! provides a tantalizing package for any ape fan. Littered throughout with art, each of the six chapters concludes with two pages of related ape covers and, as expected, the interviewee's work decorates their interviews. As a pictorial account, Comics Gone Ape! succeeds.
Eury's book disappoints this ape fan -- a gun-toting gumshoe gorilla graces the cover of my own collection of essays Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century -- and presents little new information to any but the most casual fan. Comics Gone Ape! fails to interest readers outside this sub-genre and beyond the images, ultimately bores the simian fan.
(The review originally appear at RevolutionSF.)
Link: [http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.h...]
March 31, 2008
If you've ever been a fan of Beppo the Super-Monkey or Gorilla Grodd, you'll love this book. For anyone else, it's an education in how a silly idea takes hold of a genre and never lets go....in the best of senses.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews