Guerilla Marketing: DC Comics & Their Gorillas

Welcome to Super Blog Team Up. This time out, we are looking at comics with gimmick covers. Instead of covering a die cut, chromium, glow in the dark cover, I decided to look at my favorite cover gimmick of all time – Gorillas. If this is your 1st time visiting Between the Pages, this is a pop culture cake blog, so I’ll also be serving some yummy cakes that you don’t want to monkey with.

My husband loves baseball. One thing I’ve learned from him is that analytics plays a major role in managing and coaching baseball teams. Long before the Oakland A’s, DC Comics was the king of analytics. DC Comics had two comics books, Showcase and Brave and the Bold, which were just for trying out concepts. Justice League, Suicide Squad (originally a war book), Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman all had to pass their try outs before getting their own titles. The original Suicide Squad didn’t make the cut.

While doing analytics on which comics sold better, DC Comics noticed a bizarre trend. Comics with gorillas on their cover sold better than comics which didn’t have gorillas on them. Because of this, DC Comics did two things – they published a ton of comics with gorillas on them and they created a bunch of characters who were gorillas.

For this post, I’ve picked a bunch of great gorilla covers from the 1950s up till now.

Monsieur Mallah monkeys with the Doom Patrol.

Here he is menacing those meddling kids.

I don’t know if the Ultra-Humanite is a gorilla or an ape. But he is too well know to leave out.

Planet of the Apes Cake

Here is the first of four cakes I’m serving today. This terrific Planet of the Apes cake was made by Jatt Gourmet in Mexico City. This awesome cake features Dr. Zaius who was sculpted from fondant. The cake itself was a lemon cake with a lemon crème filling.

This is such an eye catching cover. I really like Hawkman on the bird swing.

A rare issue where Supergirl was hanging out with the Justice League.

This groovy cover is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. If you saw this on the newsstand, it would be really hard to pass it up.

King Kong Cake for Broadway Musical

I’m not sure if King Kong is a gorilla, but I couldn’t pass up featuring the king of the apes. This wonderful cake was made for the cast of the Broadway musical of King Kong. It was made by Jean Schapowal, from Cakes With Character, to celebrate the 100th performance.

JLApe was a crossover with ape versions of the Justice League.

Donkey Kong Cake

Wow! I can’t tell if you are supposed to eat this stunning Donkey Kong Cake or play it! It looks more fun than the arcade game.

Dirk from Cakez ‘n’ Fun made this geektastic Donkey Kong Cake for the Game On Cake Collaboration. This cake collaboration tries to bring those video games that we loved as kids to life as sugar art.

Grodd is so popular that he has been in the live action Flash TV show.

Celebrating your 25th anniversary? Invite a gorilla.

King Kong Cake

This lovely King Kong Cake was made by Jessica Atkins from Rosy Cakes as part of the Cakes From Middle Earth collaboration. Cakes From Middle Earth is a Sugar Art Collaboration done by thirty one talented cake decorators and sugar artists from New Zealand who have joined together to celebrate the film works of Peter Jackson.

There were two monkeys in Superman comics, but they weren’t gorillas. Beppo the super monkey was a monkey from Krypton and one of Superboy’s pets. Titano was a chimpanzee who transformed into a King Kong knock-off with kryptonite eye beams.