7. Sam Simeon was delightful in his way as a partner with Angel O'Day. They were a dandy and entertaining pair in the relatively few issues of DC comics which featured them. Sam himself was a comic book artist as well as a detective of sorts and the fact he was a gorilla seemed of less concern to him and others as one might've thought.
6. M'Baku the Man-Ape is really an ape I know, but he made a tremendous impact on this Marvel Zombie from the very fist time he showed up to challenge the rule of T'Challa The Black Panther. The Panther had just become an Avenger and needed a villain and Man-Ape filled the bill with gusto. I guess based on the movies he's something of an ally for T'Challa these days, but it's the Man-Ape of yesteryear that makes me happy.
5. Kerchak is maybe the most important ape on this list. Without the ferocious Kerchak and his impact on the life of the one and only Tarzan of the Apes, pop culture as we know it might look quite different. In the earliest tales of Tarzan we see him grow and become a thorn in the side of Kerchak, but when he finally challenges the leader of his tribe to the right to rule he became a king of sorts in the dark territories of the mythical Africa.
4. Another bad ape is Grodd, the infamous member of the Flash's rogues gallery who seeks nothing less than the subjugation of mankind itself. While considered technically a rogue, you always knew that Grodd was something else, something more dangerous and deadly. The Trickster wanted to make you look foolish and get booty, Mirror Master wanted to prove his mettle in battle against the most potent enemy he could locate, but Grodd just wanted to kill you.
3. Gorilla Man is a delightful character erupting from the depths of Marvel's horror past when the company was dubbed "Atlas". He was a man who was transformed into a gorilla by dint of a curse and that was his tale of morality until he was rediscovered by Roy Thomas and Don Glut and made a part of the 50's Avengers in an issue of What If?. He proved to be a fascinating character and even rated his mini-series at one time.
2. Perhaps the most successful comic book ape was Konga. Based on a British monster flick which wanted to capture a wee bit of the old King Kong magic, Konga landed at Charlton Comics where the ape fell into the hands of the late great Steve Ditko. Ditko imbued Konga with a charming personality, perhaps a bit too broad at times, but the stories have been reprinted time and again since proving that they have a lasting appeal.
1. And finally at last we have the number one ape in comics, in fact he's the number one ape in any list of any kind. King Kong is the well-spring of modern pop culture, a tale in which for the first time a thing which never lived demanded the empathy of the world and proved that all that hokum could be used to tell stories of lasting lingering power. While it's been many decades since Kong fell from the Empire State Building, he's never ever lost his lofty perch on top of the modern imagination.
Special Note: As we get well into the second half of October and continue the countdown to Halloween, the focus on reviews will be on many things Kong. Expect some reviews of comics but mostly of the classic films themselves, as well as a host of the sometimes hapless imitators which hoped to capture a little of the Skull Island glory.
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Yes, King Kong is the worthy winner but Planet Of The Apes should have been at #2 not down the bottom at #21 :)
ReplyDeleteBut they have a whole planet to make up for my oversight.
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