tales to astonish

Comics and gorillas have gone hand in furry hand since the earliest days of the medium, and this statement goes beyond simply superhero comics. While these great apes have certainly flourished within the superhero genre, they can also be found in numerous jungle action, science fiction, and horror stories in every era of comics. With the release of a new King Kong movie in theaters this week, it's a perfect time to take a survey of the history of gorillas in comics.

While the Golden Age established comics as a medium, the Silver Age was when comic book art really came into its own. And it's worth noting that comics' Silver Age corresponded with a wider cultural fascination with science fiction. The actual Space Race was in full swing, and everybody was thinking about rocket ships, alien monsters, and the wonders of science. This gallery collects some of the best sci-fi comic book covers of the Silver Age, featuring strange invaders, curious tech, and multiple threats to life as we know it.

The Marvel Unlimited app is a gigantic, messy cache of awesome and terrible old comic books: a library of 13,000 or so back issues of Marvel titles, available on demand for subscribers with tablets or mobile phones. Like any good back-room longbox, it’s disorganized and riddled with gaps, but it’s also full of forgotten and overlooked jewels, as well as a few stone classics. In Marvel Unlimited Edition, Eisner-winning critic Douglas Wolk dives into the Unlimited archive to find its best, oddest and most intriguing comics. Two spin-offs of Guardians of the Galaxy launch in recent weeks: The Legendary Star-Lord and the already-surprise-hit Rocket Raccoon. Marvel Unlimited's got a fairly thorough, if not quite complete, selection of most of the Guardians' previous appearances, especially the ones in the Annihilation/Annihilation: Conquest/Annihilators sequence. But their prehistory is worth digging into, too, and there's some choice proto-Guardians material in the archive.