Let's all read JLApe: The Complete Collection together, shall we?

The 1999 storyline JLApe: Gorilla Warfare asked a question I don't think had even occurred to most people previously: What if the heroes of the Justice League were transformed into gorillas? 

If so, would the members of the Justice League still be the noble and courageous heroes we had come to know and love, or would they perhaps give in to their new, animal natures? And, if it came down to it, would they continue to protect humanity, or side with their own species in a human vs. gorilla war?

The epic, 300+ page adventure played out over eight summer annuals, that for JLA and one from each of the books starring a Justice Leaguer at the time: Aquaman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter. Len Kaminsky wrote the bookends, JLA Annual #3 and Martian Manhunter #2 and thus seems to have been the mastermind of the event. The six books occurring between each featured on a single character and was produced by a different creative team. Essentially, these were side adventures embarked upon by the characters when they split up between the beginning of the crisis, which involved them all, and its resolution. It was the original JSoA or JLoA formula, expanded into an event.

Tying all these annuals together? Beautiful Arthur Adams covers featuring super-gorillas in familiar costumes in conflict. 

DC finally collected the entire event in a 2024 trade paperback entitled JLApe: The Complete Collection. I couldn't find it at any local libraries (nor could I find the annuals among my long boxes; I thought they would be with the DC crossover events, but now I wonder if maybe I filed them with the JLA tie-ins, which I haven't been able to locate the last few times I looked). But luckily, it is available via Hoopla, so that's how I'm reading it here.

I'm going to go through it chapter by chapter, which is a good excuse to post all the Arthur Adams covers. But the very first chapter of the trade is actually not a JLA-related annual but, instead, an Impulse-starring issue of the anthology series Legends of the DC Universe, which was labeled as "A Primate Prelude"; I am guessing that it is this book's presence which led to the trade being entitled "The Complete Collection."

Legends of the DC Universe #19

By Jason Hernandez-Rosenblatt, Pop Mhan and Romeo Tanghal

I don't think I've had occasion to mention this particular title at any point over the course of my blog's life before. It was a monthly running between for 41 issues between 1998 and 2001 (plus a pair of excellent 80-Page Giants). The basic idea seemed to be to do what Legends of the Dark Knight did for Batman for the rest of the DCU, with top-tier talent on each arc, the difference here being that while many (most?) of the stories would be set in the past, some would be set in the present day, like a four-issue arc featuring the Hal Jordan Spectre by J.M. DeMatteis, Michael Zulli and Vince Locke, or, um, this particular issue.

(Looking back at the gallery of covers on comics.org, I see that I read the book quite inconsistently, and it's one of those titles I now wish I had picked up each month. I read the JLoA arcs by Christopher Priest and Ken Lashley, the Zulli-drawn Spectre arc and two particularly weird arcs, one a Western starring Green Lantern Abin Sur and the other a Batman/Aquaman team-up that was an unlikely sequel to the classic Joker fish story. I skipped a lot of stories that I am now pretty interested in, though.)

I honestly can't remember if I had read this one or not. The Duncan Fegredo cover looks quite familiar, but that may be simply because I remember seeing it in the comic shop at the time (Legends always had pretty great, often portrait style covers). 

Having just re-read it, I can see why it's possible I might have read it 27 years ago and then proceeded to completely forget doing so. Not only is it not terribly memorable, but it has almost nothing to do with the JLApe saga. Indeed, it is only the second-to-last panel of the entire 22-page story that has anything at all to do with it, and that panel is merely one of Gorilla Grodd, JLApe's chief villain, reading about the Impulse/Max Mercury adventure involving another Gorilla City-born villain in the newspaper, and saying out loud that that villain's plans were "FAR too SMALL", followed by a tag reading "See Grodd's BIGGER Plans in This Summer's JLApes annuals!"

As for the preceding 21-and-a-half pages? Well, the story opens with a page about how nobody at Manchester Junior High, where Impulse goes in his civilian identity of Bart Allen, likes brainy, arrogant new kid Gordon Matthews, for reasons "no one could put their finger on."

Then Max and Impulse investigate a mysterious breakout at the Manchester Monkey Business School, where apes are trained for show business. Apparently, a gorilla, an orangutan and two chimps are missing. 

Bart, who has a big chemistry test coming up, goes to study with his friends Preston and Carol, while Max meditates, entering The Speed Force and finding that it seems to be being siphoned off by some animal intelligences, and no animal has attempted to do so before, "aside from China's legendary fourth-century super-fast panda Xong Tsai," which, honestly, sounds like a more interesting story that this Impulse one.

As will soon be revealed, all is related. The mysteriously unlikable Gordon Matthews rescued the apes, affixed Speed Force-siphoning hats atop the chimps and I guess the orangutan as a distraction for Manchester's hometown heroes (Although Mhan doesn't draw the organgutan like an orangutan, nor does colorist Daniel Vozzo color it like one in its first appearance; it just appears as a third chimp. Later, when captured by Max and tied up, it does look like an orangutan). Matthews then captures Carol, intent on placing her mind within the body of the gorilla so she can be his bride.

And why might he want to marry a gorilla with a human mind? 

Well, as he reveals by touching a device on his belt when Impulse confronts him, he is not, in fact, Gordon Matthews, human boy, but rather Gorbul Mammit, son of Gorilla Grodd!

While the son of one of Barry Allen's rogues, a loquacious super-gorilla scientist with a big vocabulary and a tendency to rant, might seem like a good villain for Impulse, as far as I can tell, this is Gorbul's only appearance. 

Things shift in Impulse's favor when the female gorilla, thinking a nearby yellow component of a high-tech device creating an anti-speed field is actually a banana, plucks it out. While Impulse and Gorbul do battle, the gorilla goes after Carol. Somewhere off-panel, the gorilla must have ripped her shirt off—that, or she is caught in an explosion caused by Impulse pulling wires from a machine at super-speed—as when he asks if she's alright, there's a panel of her saying, "Never better," in which Mhan draws her in her bra, the red shirt she was wearing previously in tatters.

Why did Mhan draw a junior high girl in her bra here, and why did DC publish it? Good question! I thought about putting the image in this post, as I did of the splash introducing Gorbul, since maybe you wouldn't believe me that the panel exists, but then I realized I shouldn't be reproducing an image of a junior high girl in a bra, even if DC did publish it.

Maybe it snuck through editorial somehow though, as the handful of panels featuring Carol throughout the rest of the book show her with her red shirt on and intact, save for a rip in the sleeve. (Maybe the gorilla pulled her shirt off when trying to grab her, and then she put it back on afterwards...? Unclear...but weird!)

Anyway, not much to do with JLApe, but maybe it succeeded in bumping up sales for Legends little that particular month...?  

JLA Annual #3

By Len Kaminski, Jason Orfalas and Jordi Ensign

Two things of note on Adams' cover of the JLA annual, which was used as the cover for the eventual collection. First, while it depicts Batman as a gorilla along with the rest of the heroes who founded this particular iteration of the League, Batman does not get turned into a gorilla alongside his teammates here. I'm not 100% sure why; maybe the Batman office at the time drew a line about turning Batman into a gorilla and held firm on the point.

The other? Well, as you may notice, The Flash is not wearing his regular costume. This was because, at the time, Wally West was replaced by a mysterious "Dark Flash", one who had an admittedly quite cool and different costume, one that was a darker scarlet color with a big silver lightning bolt that stretched diagonally across his chest and had other silver highlights. It is this Flash who appears throughout JLApe; he appeared elsewhere in the DCU while this storyline was ongoing in the then Mark Waid-written Flash title, although he never appeared in JLA proper. (Given that it's been over 25 years at this point and I'm not even sure those Flash issues are available in trade, I guess I could go ahead and spoil this Flash's identity here, but I'll let you Google it, as it doesn't really impact this storyline at all; suffice it to say that Kaminski and, later, Brian Augustyn characterize this Flash as if he's basically the same one who has been appearing in JLA all along.)

Now, Kaminski and the art team have a lot of space to work with here, what with the annual being 38 pages long (In fact, they seem to be working to kill space near the climax, as there are three two-page splashes in a row at the climax, as our gorilla-ized heroes try to quell a massive riot involving humans similarly transformed.

Because of this, they take their time in getting to the gorillafication of the Justice Leaguers, and are then able to dwell on the transformation, what it means for the characters, how it was accomplished and how it might be cured. 

The tone is relatively light throughout, with several jokes of varying degrees of effectiveness, but the threat is taken seriously. Taken altogether, this chapter at least reminded me a bit of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis Justice League run, which so effectively balanced comedy with straightforward superhero action. 

Given "the current age of ecological and geopolitical turmoil", Gorilla City's leader Solovar has decided to start engaging with the rest of the world, revealing the existence of his civilization of super-gorillas to the world and petitioning to join the United Nations so that gorillakind can start working with humanity to better the world for the betterment of both species. 

To this end, Solovar dons a gorilla-sized suit and tie and begins a whirlwind public relations blitz, including a meeting with President Bill Clinton, but a very busy week for him ends in tragedy: His limo is destroyed in a bombing. 

A new group calling itself "the Human Supremacy Movement" claims responsibility, although the Department of Extranormal Operations suspects it's a front ("Monaghan?" Sarge Steel asks Chase Cameron, referring to the star of Hitman, but she responds, "Not his style.") Meanwhile, back in Gorilla City, the super-gorillas start calling for "Death to the hu-mans!"

This is the position taken by "the Simian Scarlet Cultural Purity Movement" anyway, led by an inner circle of new gorilla villains that seem specifically designed to fight various Justice Leaguers (a gorilla gangster for Batman, a gorilla admiral for Aquaman, etc.). And they, in turn, are led by Grodd. Their pawn is Prince Regent Ulgo, nephew of Solovar, and he has a plan.

Gorilla City calls the JLA and asks for Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and The Flash to visit them, and act as interspecies intermediaries to help prevent a human vs. gorilla war, but the Leaguers are ambushed and subjected to a gorilla bomb, which turns them into gorillas.

While they fight the mental side-effects, it soon becomes clear that their new gorilla brains instinctively cause them to side with gorillas over humans, and, despite a mighty struggle, even Superman succumbs and declares "Death to all hu-mans!"

Luckily, while the invisible Martian Manhunter was similarly turned into a gorilla, he is immune to the psychological effects of the transformation, and, using his mental abilities, he's able to straighten out his fellow Leaguers before they can return to human civilization and start slaughtering people with their powers. (As to why J'onn, a shapeshifter we've been repeatedly told can control his body on a molecular level, doesn't just simply change shape back to his normal appearance, it's never brought up in this issue.)

In what I thought to be the most effective of the jokes in this issue, the League assembles on the Watchtower, and calls Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in. Though stunned by their transformation, which none of them immediately explains, he tries to play it cool and not say anything, which lasts only for a few panels before he shouts, "What the screaming blue heck is going on here?!" a delightful exclamation in a world where "blue blazes" and "Great Krypton" and "Merciful Minerva" usually take the place of swear words. (Other, less effective attempts at humor include the implication that Solovar and Clinton discussed something dirty during a private meeting, and homages to first the Marx Brothers and then the Three Stooges...and hey, I'm a Marx Brothers fan!)

Batman shows up next. He and J'onn analyze a "gorilla bomb", which they decide works with an "unusual metaphysic harmonic" similar to one J'onn has sensed in former Justice League Europe member Animal Man, and he goes off to check in with Buddy Baker.

Oddly, Kaminski writes Animal Man as if Grant Morrison's run on the character had just concluded, as he mentions "an anthropomorphic coyote being the savior of mankind", referring to 1988's Animal Man #5, "The Coyote Gospel." He also rants about what appears to be the revelation that he and the DC heroes are all characters created by writers. "Explanations are meaningless...God's way of making his deadline!" Animal Man shouts at J'onn in one panel, following up shortly afterwards with "Universes live and die by committee!"

It's not necessarily a bad characterization of a post-Morrison Animal Man (I thought it was funny, for example, when J'onn says the League needs his expertise, and Animal Man sighs, "Oh God...I'm important to the plot..."). But it was ill-timed. Remember, this story came out in 1999, and Morrison's run on Animal Man ended 1990. 

(As for how Morrison might have written Animal Man in 1999, Buddy shows up in JLA arc "World War III," where his knowledge of the morphogenic field is integral in helping Wonder Woman, Steel, Blue Beetle and Black Lightning create what Wondy refers to as "an anti-war ray", a purple ray that evolves every human being on Earth into a superhero...at least temporarily.)

Anyway, as Batman and J'onn work on a cure, the Leaguers notice Ulgo and his fellow super-gorillas are carrying a gorilla bomb into the U.N., and, despite their current appearance, Superman and the others join GL in teleporting down to save the day.

They are seconds too late, however, and the entire U.N. transform into gorillas (as does Kyle), their new instincts paired with their traditional enmities leading to utter chaos, as gorilla fights gorilla. J'onn and Batman have the cure, but there's a convenient-to-the-plot hitch: There's just enough to restore the entirety of the U.N., but not enough to spare in order to cure the affected Leaguers. Selflessly and heroically, they all agree to use the cure on the other victims and remain in ape form themselves. 

While the U.N. is saved, Ulgo and his followers were allowed to walk thanks to their diplomatic immunity. J'onn was able to glean that this was just the beginning of their plot, not the end, however, and he picked up six locations during his brief mind scan of Ulgo, though not what is supposed to happen at those locations. Conveniently, these are places familiar to each of the Leaguers: Atlantis, Themyscira, Central City and so on.

And so the team splits up, each to go star in their own annual, before they will regroup in the Martian Manhunter annual. 

As for the visuals here they are, obviously, fairly bonkers. I'm not familiar with the name Jason Orfalas, whose handful of DC work included issues of Supergirl, Hourman and Birds of Prey. Rereading this comic now, his work reminds me quite a bit of that of Val Semeiks, who drew some excellent JLA adventures. Most prominent among them was, of course, 1998's DC One Million, but he also drew JLA/WildCATs, JLA: Foreign Bodies (also written by Kaminski) and the excellent, unfortunately uncollected DC 2000, a two-part JLA/JSoA team-up written by Tom Peyer. 

Batman Annual #23

By Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan and Mark Pennington

Time for your semi-regular reminder that Chuck Dixon is an excellent writer of Batman comics and Graham Nolan is an excellent artist of Batman comics (and, indeed, seems to draw the hell out of every character and book he's worked on) but, despite that, they seem to have pretty shitty personal politics. Both proudly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (although, like a lot of Donald Trump supporters, I wonder how they feel about the guy now, given we're at the anonymous, masked agents of the federal government literally murdering innocent civilians in the streets part of his fascist takeover of the government). Also, Comicsgate claims Nolan as one of their own. 

So, you know, you probably don't want to buy any comics those dudes are making these days...not that you'll see either working for a mainstream publisher at this point in their careers anyway. 

Their JLApe tie-in story called "Jungle Rules" and it opens with Batman and Nightwing questioning a badly banged up guy in a hospital bed, the survivor of a gangland massacre in which a huge guy "ten feet tall and almost as wide" was tearing a joint apart with his bare hands. The mysterious assailant then whipped out what the cops later said was a 20mm anti-tank gun, which he was able to hold as if it were simply a rifle.

In the few panels in which this giant gangster appears, Nolan obscures his face and feet and every inch of his skin but, despite the fact that there are no visual signifiers, the readers of the annual have already seen the cover (or, in our case, read the first installment of the JLApe storyline), and thus already know what Batman suspects but Nightwing does not: This giant gangster is actually a super-gorilla from Gorilla City.

Dixon and Nolan actually play coy with revealing the giant's identity for a while, including a scene in which a bellboy brings an unusual dinner order to his hotel room while he's in the shower and thus off-panel. It's only in the final panel of the sequence, in which the bellboy asks if he needs anything else, that we get a clue to his identity—"I'm gonna need lots of shampoo"—and see his big, hairy hand.

This is Grimm, the gorilla gangster in Grodd's inner circle introduced briefly in the JLA annual. His job is to have a mysterious shipment that turns out to be high-tech weapons stuff delivered to Bludhaven, and to pave the way for that, he's muscling in on the turf of Roland "Blockbuster" Desmond, the city's...well, it's kingpin of crime. (Dixon's Nightwing was pretty Daredevil-y.)

That also explains Nightwing's presence...well that, and Batman needs someone to talk to, of course (Oracle, who was then also a member of the League, makes a brief appearance as well). In fact, though this is a Batman annual, its events will prove of some importance to Nightwing, to the extent that a blurb on the last page directs readers to the Aquaman annual containing the next chapter of JLApe and adds, "For more on GRIMM and BLOCKBUSTER check out NIGHTWING every month!"

There are a fair amount of jokes in here, and while Dixon isn't a writer I typically think of as being good at comedy, there are a couple that land pretty well here (Although there are also several that feel lazy or off, like the presence of a pair of hit-apes based on John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction). My favorite gag was probably Batman looking around Nightwing's new "lair" disappointedly and then dismissing it as merely "a garage."

While reading and enjoying it today may require one to do a fair degree of separating the artist from the art, this is a very solid comic, and maybe the best of the tie-ins in that while it is technically a part of the overarching crossover plot running through the annuals, it reads perfectly well on its own as a Batman and Nightwing story. It's not even until the penultimate scene that the events of JLApe are referred to, during a five-panel sequence in which Blockbuster watches a TV news report on Solovar's reaching out to the rest of the world and the events at the UN.

Aquaman Annual #5 

By John Ostrander, M.D. Bright and Dick Giordano

The creators lean more heavily into comedy here than Dixon and Nolan did in the previous chapter, but then, their protagonist has been transformed into a gorilla, so that is perhaps natural. 

Entitled "20,000 Apes Under The Sea", the story involves Admiral Trafalgo, the pirate-looking ape from the JLA annual, and his crew aboard the super-submarine The Kong attacking Atlantis. Their target is a giant gemstone called The Eye of Poseidon. Their plan is to use it as a sort of lens, which will allow them to gorillaize whole continents at once with their ray weapons that turn humans into gorillas (Given their small numbers, the bad-apes' plans aren't to conquer humanity outright, but to convert them into gorillas, you see).

Oh yeah, here the apes are armed with ray guns that can turn humans—and apparently anything else—into gorillas. In the JLA annual, they used gas, but I guess gas wouldn't work in this book's underwater setting, huh? The other annuals would similarly focus on gorilla ray rather than gorilla gas.

Weirdly, the rays don't just affect humanoids like the Atlanteans, though. The Landlubbers—Lagoon Boy, mermaid Sheeva and whale-with-robot-limbs Blubber—are all turned into gorillas as well. Blubber is just a really big gorilla, and Sheeva is a gorilla from the waist up, but a fish from the waist down.

And then when Aquaman rides a whale into battle against The Kong, it fires on the whale, and we see it turn into a giant gorilla as well.

In addition to the battle between the gorillas and The Atlanteans, in which Aquaman's supporting cast of Mera, Tempest and Dolphin all play parts, Aquaman must also struggle mightily against his new gorilla instincts, and, at one point, he and a gorillaized Tempest battle in order to establish which of them is the true alpha male.

For all the comedic elements—Ostrander has Trafalgo speak in over-the-top pirate dialogue, and there are of course multiple instances of the word "sea monkeys"—there's also a fairly strong bit of characterization, when Mera and Aqua-Ape discuss how the latter feels about being king, being Aquaman and being with the JLA, and how he realizes he's probably better at all of those things than he is at being a husband and father (Of course, that was in 1999; today, he is once again both a husband and father). 

During the adventure, Aqua-Ape retrieves the trident of Poseidon and, during a pitched battle, he tries to unleash its magical energies through the Eye, as the gorillas had planned to do with their ray weapons, and the unexpected but convenient result is to restore all of the gorilla-ized Atlanteans, Aquaman included, back to their regular forms (One assumes the whales became a whales again, too). Perhaps surprisingly, all the gorillas caught in the blast found themselves turned into Atlanteans. 

Trafalgo and what's left of his force retreat, while Aquaman swims off, vowing "This isn't over yet...But I swear it will be!" 

Bright's art is just realistic enough that even when the events are being played completely straight, as they mostly are throughout this annual, there's a humor in the sheer surreality of Aquaman in the form of a big red ape.

Wonder Woman Annual #8

By Doselle Young, Brian Denham and Jon Sibal

Of all of the creators involved in this crossover event, it was the Wonder Woman annual that seemed to have the most unfamiliar names to me. In fact, of the three primary creators, the only name I recognized was that of inker Jon Sibal.

Looking up the others though, I see that I actually have read a series by Doselle Young, the 12-issue, 2001-2002 WildStorm series The Monarchy, which I bought just because it was drawn by Hitman's John McCrea (If I recall correctly, it was something of an Authority spin-off). 

And Denham, it will come as no surprise once you see his art here, had previously drawn a bunch of Image comics featuring Rob Liefeld characters, as well as some comics for Chaos, Antarctica and a couple for Marvel (In the years since this annual, he's gone on to do plenty of work for all of those publishers, as well as DC, IDW and Dynamite).

Anyway, here are some of the earlier pages from the annual, so you can get a sense of what it looks like, and how hard it is to read.

First, here's the second page, in which some of the enemy apes ambush and try to re-kill Charon, the ferryman of the underworld:

Second, here's the first panel to feature Wonder Woman and some of her allies, Shim'tar (left) and Artemis (right):

They're not the only Amazons to appear. Hippolyta briefly appears, Nubia makes a surprise (to me, anyway) appearance near the climax, and Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark, still wearing her wig, glasses and denim jacket, appears for a few panels before saying she needs to go help Young Justice. (If you're curious, this was about eight issues into writer Eric Luke's run on Wonder Woman, which fell between John Byrne's and Phil Jimenez's).

Anyway, the whole book basically looks like this, although there's a few decent images of the title character, including a double-page splash near the climax.

The story, "The Thin Gold Line", is narrated by Luk-Nutt, who once belonged to the harem of Priestess Abu-Gita, a sorceress member of the Simian Scarlett, who is here pursuing her own agenda. Instead of relying on the morphogenic weapons, which Luk-Nutt's narration tells us will eventually wear off where super-humans like the carved-from-clay Wonder Woman are concerned, she invades Themyscira and makes through the Gates of Tartarus to the River Styx, all in an attempt to raise what she calls the gorillas' gods.

A fully human Wonder Woman, along with her allies, are following a trail of banana peels to the gates, and, once they enter, she uses the Wonder Dome to take the shape of a ship upon which they can pursue the apes. 

As to why Wondy is in her natural form rather than that of a gorilla, a brief flashback shows Artemis entering a New York City skyscraper, where the Wonder Dome is going crazy. She enters a feature-less room and is confronted by random-looking green humanoids that don't really seem like they are meant to be apes:

What's going on here? No idea. I think that's the bare minimum a comic book should have to achieve; one should be able to figure out what the hell is going on by looking at the pictures and reading the words in it (My best guess is that these green monster creatures are maybe creations of the Wonder Dome, summoned by Diana's gorrillaized mind...? But, if that were the case, I'm not sure why they are green and not translucent).

Artemis aims a flaming arrow at Wonder Ape, and in the time it takes to fly from Artemis' bow to Wondy's bracelet, Wonder Ape has transformed back into Wonder Woman, having apparently shed or fought of the effects of the gorilla gas she was subjected to.

As to why Wonder Woman is wearing this particular get-up in this book, with the straps on her bustier and the star-spangled loin cloth...? No idea. Maybe she changed clothes when she got back home. I suppose it's even more pointless to wonder why Artemis is wearing a costume composed entirely of leather studded straps, huh...?

Ultimately Wonder Woman and her allies are able to defeat the gorillas, thanks mostly to Luk-Nutt betraying his species by pointing out—while tied in the lasso of truth, so no one could doubt him—that Gorilla City's culture, including the religion Abu-Gita professes, is actually manufactured and based on concepts from human civilization that was appropriated by the apes after they got their smarts not really all that long ago. 

There's something kind of interesting in that, and certainly there is a lot of energy in the art, but ultimately the book is pretty poorly constructed, and sticks out as a particularly weak link in this crossover. 

Young seems semi-embarrassed about writing a chapter of JLApe, and throughout the script characters as various as Wonder Woman and Luk-Nutt continually point out how ridiculous the premise and the plot are, as if they too are embarrassed to be in the comic. 

Is it a bit goofy...? I mean, I guess, but then, so were Wonder Woman and Justice League of America for, like, decades. Maybe this gorilla-centric crossover seemed silly and Silver Age-y to some in the 1990s, but hadn't Grant Morrison and company's JLA run proven how compelling Silver Age strangeness could be when presented with straight-faced, deadpan seriousness and a high degree of craft...? 

The Flash Annual #12

By Brian Augustyn, Doug Braithwaite and Robin Riggs

The story in the Flash annual is given the title "The Apes of Wrath"; I suppose someone had to use that title in one of these comics. 

Here the gorillaized Flash has already succumbed to his new gorilla instincts, and, between the last pages of the JLA annual and the first scene here, allied himself with the event's main villain, Gorilla Grodd (Grodd, like Solovar and Gorilla City, all originally came from Silver Age Flash comics, after all). 

He leads his speedster allies—Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick, Jesse Quick, Max Mercury and Impulse—into a trap, where Grodd and his soldiers shoot them with their gorilla guns, turning them into apes. 

They too immediately ally themselves with Grodd, whose scientists hook them up to special treadmills in a skyscraper with a huge satellite dish atop it. The plan is to harness the Speed Force energy they generate by running and then beam it up to a satellite, which can then bathe the Earth in a gorillaizing ray. 

A surprisingly philosophical Impulse—who has renamed himself Chimpulse, as the cover says—finds himself wondering what they are actually doing, and he is eventually able to break the spell. It seems to be a joke of Augustyn's that once Impulse is transformed into an ape, he's actually much more intellectual than he was as a human teenager. (And as to why he is drawn as a chimpanzee instead of a gorilla? Your guess is as good as mine. Jesse Quick sports a tail, which would make her a monkey rather than an ape. I assume this is one of those things we shouldn't dwell on, as this certainly isn't the sort of comic story we're meant to think too much about.)

It's also Impulse he discovers a way to reverse the transformation, when he vibrates though a wall at super-speed, and comes out the other side human again. The Flash offers an explanation after he too restores himself in the same manner: 

Interestingly, each of the transformed Leaguers is able to return to their normal form in a completely different way.

Freed from the species loyalty that being a gorilla instilled in him, it is only a matter of time before The Flash is able to defeat Grodd and destroy the building before it can transmit the energy it had stored. Grodd disappears in the explosion, but totally isn't dead, as JLApe is still far from over. 

Superman Annual #11

By Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Joe Phillips, Rich Faber and Rob Stull

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said it was inevitable that someone would use the title "The Apes of Wrath" in this crossover? Well, it was used twice; this story is also entitled "The Apes of Wrath". It's becoming increasingly apparent that the communication between the involved creative teams wasn't as strong as it could have been. The most glaring example of this will be in the final chapter, the Martian Manhunter annual. 

Metropolis, like Central City, is in chaos, as Gorilla City's army invades, turning their victims into gorillas. Superman, or Supergorrilla, is on the scene, reenacting the cover of Action Comics #1 with a news van containing Lois Lane, complete with a dazed gorilla in the foreground, holding the sides of his face. 

Things get worse when a giant ape with eyebeams (thus recalling Titano) appears, but it turns out that this is actually a giant robot gorilla (see the cover above) named Grogamesh covered in gorilla hides for some reason. It is piloted by Prince Regent Ulgo, who was eager to join his people's war against the humans to avenge his uncle.

Supergorilla is able to restore himself to his normal form here by flying into space and towards the sun, the solar energy purging the effects of the gorilla ray from him.

There is, of course, a fight, but ultimately Superman and Lois are able to convince Ulgo that he has been manipulated into this war, and he stands down.

Young Justice makes a very brief appearance at the end, which kind of made me wish the event might have actually been a bigger, wider one, rather than just confined to the Justice League-related annuals. After all, the sense of silliness that pervades JLApe seems to be tonally of a piece with Young Justice, and the storyline certainly seems like it would have been right up Peter David's alley....

Green Lantern Annual #8

By Keith Giffen, Octavio Cariello, John Nadeau, Marcello Campos and Jordi Ensign

To his credit, writer Keith Giffen tries to do something a little different here, with sections of the story (entitled "Grunts", and not "The Apes of Wrath" for a change) reading like those from a war comic...albeit one in which the soldiers are all gorillas.

I didn't much care for it when I originally read it in 1999—it was awfully wordy and spent a lot of time on the Gorilla City soldiers that I thought should have been spent on the guy whose book this was—but I certainly appreciate it a lot more now. While I don't think it's the best of JLApe annuals, it's certainly the most ambitious. 

Like The Flash in his annual, Green Lantern has already succumbed to his ape mind when this book opens, and though he seems a bit out of it and confused, he's a loyal soldier in the gorilla army, his more experienced comrades showing him the ropes. 

These soldiers are ordered from their current duty to space, where they will essentially be used as cannon fodder for Gorilla City's more valuable space marines. 

What's going on in space? Well, that's where Simian Scarlet's General Zolog is in command of a huge orbital satellite base. This is where the ray apparatus that the giant gemstone from the Aquaman annual and the Speed Force energy from the Flash annual were going to be utilized.  Since the gorillas were unable to get the gem or transmit the energy, Zolog is going to proceed with firing the gorillaizing rays down to Earth with a lower rate of efficacy, and, to do so, the gorillas will have to drop their cloaking, which means they are to expect an attack from the superheroes.

And it's their grunts—like Kyle and his new teammates—who are going to soak up the damage.

The attack on the gorilla satellite base is orchestrated by Martian Manhunter in the Watchtower's monitor womb. For some reason, he is drawn in his normal appearance here, rather than as a big, green gorilla. Given his shape-changing abilities, there is no reason why he couldn't just shape-shift back into his more humanoid form, of course, but it seems a little odd that he's done so off-panel since he didn't do so at all in the JLA annual, and Giffen doesn't explain that he did so here. 

Who is J'onn sending against Zolog's forces? Occasional Green Lantern supporting characters Sentinel Alan Scott and Warrior Guy Gardner (still in his unfortunate morphing phase, with the garish design, although Giffen does write a good boorish Guy), as well as The Metal Men. 

Why these guys? Well, Alan and Guy are probably there because this is a Green Lantern comic (you'll note all of the annuals save perhaps the Superman one has featured each hero's respective "family" of sidekicks and supporting characters), and the Metal Men are immune to being gorillaized, although Giffen never makes this explicit.

When J'onn detects Kyle's mind among those in space, he uses a JLA teleporter and his own psychic abilities to pluck him from the battlefield and try to subtly manipulate him. When that doesn't work, J'onn uses psychic "shock therapy" to remind Kyle of who he is, at which point the ring purges him of the effects of the gorilla gas that transformed him, and he immediately returns to the fray, intent not just on stopping Zolog, but also on saving his former gorilla allies from being killed (By their own forces, who view them as expendable, not by the heroes, obviously).

There's a pretty striking epilogue, in which Kyle visits his former gorilla teammates behind bars. While strange to read and maybe misplaced, it's still quite effective character work on some extremely minor characters in the overall plot. 

Martian Manhunter Annual #2

By Len Kaminski, Gus Vasquez, Mark Propst and Claude St. Aubin

And finally, we get to the last chapter, the Martian Manhunter annual. It's the most appropriate annual to serve as the other bookend to the crossover, as the Martian Manhunter title often read like a JLA spin-off, as Martian Manhunter didn't have the same "family" of characters that his fellow Leaguers did in the late '90s; rather, the JLA were his supporting cast. 

Still, he remains the protagonist throughout the story, "Fear and Loathing on the Planet of the Apes". 

It opens and closes with J'onn thinking about the nature of human beings and of apes and how the former relate to the latter (And, honestly, these are some inspired passages, offering more interesting insight than one might expect from a comic book in which the Justice League gets turned into a bunch of gorillas).

After fixing his own turned-into-a-gorilla problem, which is here so simple I again find myself wondering why he spent most of the JLA annual as a green gorilla, J'onn teleports up to the Watchtower, where he and Batman compare notes...and recap the events of the previous seven annuals in an extremely tedious conversation spread over a two-page splash that is completely skippable.

Kaminski doesn't write the pair as collegial as many other writers have. Instead, he has Batman maintaining a dismissive, hard-ass attitude which seems misplaced when addressing J'onn, one of his oldest allies, although Kaminski does have J'onn repeatedly sassing Batman here, which is fun (Every time J'onn takes a dig at Batman, the Dark Knight responds with an "Mmn-hh" or "Hhh").

Both of the detectives have come up with the same suspect when it comes to determining who has manipulated the gorilla vs. human war, but Kaminski has them both playing incredibly coy about it. J'onn even goes off to interview potential sources in an effort to help confirm the villain's identity, although no one actually says his name until he appears near the climax.

This is very strange because readers already know who this is. The Impulse prelude story shows and names him, as does the JLA annual and he's on the cover of this very comic. And, of course, he's the gorilla villain in the Flash annual, so by this point, the heroes themselves know who is behind the plot. Hell, J'onn even names him during the tedious recap splash with Batman.

It is, of course, Gorilla Grodd, the only super-villain to ever hail from Gorilla City. (Except for his son, I guess, who was just introduced in that Legends of the DC Universe story starring Impulse discussed above.)

Still, J'onn's conversations with those who might know something about Grodd are fun. These include several of DC's other ape characters: Detective Chimp, Monsieur Mallah, Sam Simeon (the ape half of Angel and the Ape) and Congo Bill, the very last of whom discusses an event he witnessed while in Congorilla's body. As we've been talking quite a bit about Detective Chimp of late, here is the page featuring him:

Note that he is talking out loud here and, unlike with the panel in Warrior #29, he's talking to a human (well, a Martian disguised as a human), rather than another ape. Here Bobo seems to have retired from the Bureau of Amplified Animals from that Green Lantern/Flash crossover and gone into the private eye business. 

Finally, note the sign on the door. Is this the first instance of Bobo's full name? The door on his BAA office, for example, read simply "Bobo."

Oh, and if you're wondering where the rest of the JLA, those other than the seven founders of this iteration of the League, have been throughout this crisis, as I have, well some of the others are finally mentioned in this annual:

Steel is now on the Watchtower, where his technical know-how will help the League cure all of the people who have been turned into gorillas so far, and Zauriel, Plastic Man and Huntress are dealing with the resulting chaos of the human vs. gorilla panel in various side adventures that are mentioned but not dramatized. We saw Oracle briefly in the Batman annual, so only New Gods Orion and Barda are unaccounted for. 

The annual is thus divided between J'onn's investigation and the rest of the League doing League stuff. At the climax in Gorilla City, J'onn names Grodd as the villain behind it all (as we all knew), but there is a twist: The specifics of Grodd's masterplan. 

Grodd didn't want to just turn all of humanity into gorillas in order to decide some kind of contest of species, but rather because his "force of mind" psychic abilities apparently allow him to drain mental energies from other gorillas, so the more gorillas there on Earth, the more powerful he can become.

Grodd immediately demonstrates his newfound powers by taking down J'onn, but J'onn is ultimately able to defeat him, not through brute psychic strength, but through a clever bit of trickery. 

With Grodd behind bars, Simian Scarlet manacled and all of the affected human de-gorillaized, the threat of the human vs. gorilla conflict is finally over, and Ulgo pledges to continue his uncle Solovar's work of making Gorilla City a responsible, peaceful partner in the community of nations.

And maybe join the Justice League himself someday...

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JLApe was the only time Gorilla Grodd faced off against the League during Grant Morrison's run on JLA. But if you're wondering how Morrison might have handled the villain, Morrison used Grodd in his three-part 2005 JLA Classified arc (As you can see, Morrison would have Grodd try to eat Batman). It's not a simple Grodd vs. the JLA story, but also involves another superhero team and Morrison's version of The Nebula Man, but it is quite good (and far, far better than JLApe). 

If you haven't read it, the arc has been collected in 2007's JLA: Ultramarine Corps and 2010's JLA: The Deluxe Edition Vol. 4.