http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20208522,00.html
King Kong. Curious George. Clint Eastwood's buddy in Every Which Way but Loose. All pioneering simians, all troublemakers. Come Sept. 3, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Daredevil, and their compadres will join these ranks when Marvel Comics, in a bid to duplicate the success of the Marvel Zombies franchise, re-envisions its marquee superhumans as...apes. Creepy apes.
It begins when Marty ''The Gibbon'' Blank, a mutant chump with chimp-like powers, is ensnared in a science experiment gone wrong. He's jettisoned into a sinister alternate reality devoid of humans; here, all of our crime-fighters are now hirsute anthropoids. Joined by the fetching human scientist Dr. Fiona Fitzhugh, this wannabe villain (the Gibbon founded the Spider-Man hating/baiting Legion of Losers) is, in fact, recruited by the seemingly upright Ape-Vengers as he searches for a way back home.
As writer Karl Kesel (Fantastic Four) said in an interview at New York Comic Con earlier this year, this is ''a sprawling epic like Lord of the Rings, and the Gibbon is our Frodo — one small person dwarfed by the overwhelming forces....'' But who are we kidding? At heart, Marvel Apes — with illustrations by Ramon Bachs (World War Hulk: Frontline) — is a four-issue miniseries about spandex-clad paladins acting uncivilized because they're apes.
Since we're only human at EW.com, we couldn't resist sharing/gawking at these first-look images: the alternate cover for issue 1 of Marvel Apes (above), plus six ''ape variant'' covers
― Oilyrags, Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:19 (sixteen years ago) link
wait, who put me in a time machine and sent me back to April 1
― HI DERE, Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:22 (sixteen years ago) link
luv
― David R., Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:32 (sixteen years ago) link
^^^^^^^^ otm
― HI DERE, Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:34 (sixteen years ago) link
While I'm never going to argue with superhero apes, didn't DC do this years ago with the JLApe crossover?
That said, the monkey Punisher firing pistols with his feet is genius.
― arango, Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:40 (sixteen years ago) link
OMG. So has Liefeld finally got his own joke and become the Shatner of comics?
― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 26 June 2008 21:43 (sixteen years ago) link
Or am I reading too much into that cover?
I think he just found some 90s Art Adams covers to trace.
― energy flash gordon, Friday, 27 June 2008 00:29 (sixteen years ago) link
Yeah, or you're wrong and he's actually just copying himself.
http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/new-mutants/87-4.jpg
― David R., Friday, 27 June 2008 00:57 (sixteen years ago) link
Strangely, Liefeld's apes seems much more plausible than his humans. I think the fur must cover up the inhuman musculature. I wonder if he can draw ape feet...
― arango, Friday, 27 June 2008 01:00 (sixteen years ago) link
I dunno, the mouths and feathering in particular are really reminiscent of Monkeyman, rather than traced from his old drawing.
― energy flash gordon, Friday, 27 June 2008 07:56 (sixteen years ago) link
though those inset faces are obviously more McFarlane than Liefeld so who knows, maybe he's correcting the input from 17 years ago
― energy flash gordon, Friday, 27 June 2008 08:03 (sixteen years ago) link
Ah, seeing that old cover makes the new one seem less funny.
― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, 27 June 2008 11:57 (sixteen years ago) link
I guess this is as good a place as any to post this... I just found out that in the early 90s Marvel published a miniseries called Brute Force, and here's what it looked like: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/4013_4_001.jpg
Holy crap, I wish could read this somewhere! An environmentalist comic series with a dolphin in an antropomorphic robot suit wielding a machine gun!!! That's pretty bad-ass! I wonder how they ever came up with the whole idea...
― Tuomas, Friday, 27 June 2008 13:39 (sixteen years ago) link
The rest of the covers for the miniseries can be found here.
― Tuomas, Friday, 27 June 2008 13:40 (sixteen years ago) link
I REMEMBER THAT COVER
― HI DERE, Friday, 27 June 2008 13:43 (sixteen years ago) link
Brute Force is genuinely fantastic, it was obviously a pitch for a toy line or cartoon or something, and Simon Furman knows EXACTLY HOW RETARDED the robo-animals fighting environmental damage concept is, and gloriously takes the piss throughout.
― energy flash gordon, Saturday, 28 June 2008 01:27 (sixteen years ago) link
can't wait for the Brute Force nostlolgia movie 10 years from now
― Curt1s Stephens, Saturday, 28 June 2008 02:35 (sixteen years ago) link