Every Ape I See: The Best Gorilla Comic Book Covers

For as long as there have been comic books full of men and women dressed in bright colors performing heroic deeds, there have been comic books involving giant mutant gorillas standing in their way. It was established in the Silver Age that if you put a gorilla on the cover, you would sell more copies of that comic, so there's a wealth of amazing covers with noble apes front-and-center. This gallery collects some of the best.

Gorillas make great comic book characters, because until recently, it was the sort of visual you could only pull off convincingly in the pages of a comic book. It was awe-inspiring to see Grant Gustin's Flash go up against an interdimensional army from Gorilla City, but The Flash has been fighting Gorilla Grodd and his psychic whammy in comics for over sixty years.

While some of the best supervillains are gorillas (and vice versa), giant apes are also great for subverting expectations. Charming erudite gorillas such as Solovar or Art Adams' Monkeyman share a similar space in comics as someone like X-Men's Beast, who is giant blue hairball that can quote Chaucer.

This gallery is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gorillas in comics, which sadly isn't quite the genre it once was. Hopefully with appearances by Grodd in The Flash, and the new Kong: Skull Island film, comic creators will once again have the urge to fill their titles with as many giant primates as 20 pages will allow.

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