DC to Introduce a Surprising New Version of the Justice League

DC’s premiere superhero team is about to get an unexpected — and hilarious — remix. On Wednesday, the publisher announced Ape-ril Special #1, a one-shot that will be available wherever comics are sold on March 19, 2024. As the pun-filled title suggests, the issue will spotlight a number of ape-themed characters from the DC Universe, leading to the forming of the “Jungle League.” As the cover for the issue suggests, characters like Beppo the Super-Monkey, Detective Chimp, Monkey Prince, Gleek, and Sam Simeon / Ape will make up this new ensemble.

Ape-ril Special #1 will be written by John Layman, Joshua Hale Fialkov and Gene Yang with art by Karl Mostert, Phil Hester and Bernard Chang. In addition to a main cover from Dan Mora, the issue will have a Crisis on Infinite Earths-themed variant cover from Bernard Chang, and a “Banana Scent” scented variant cover by Hayden Sherman.

What Is DC’s Ape-ril Special #1 About?

In Ape-ril Special #1, Gorilla Grodd’s recent incarcer-ape-tion in the pages of DC’s The Flash comic book series has left a void that Monsieur Mallah is more than happy to fill. Ape-sembling a group of the DCU’s most sinister simians, Mallah forms the Legion of D(oo-oo-ah-ah)m, with an eye toward world domin-ape-tion. But the world won’t be conquered that easily! Enter the all-ape JUNGLE L(ee-ee)gue.

Can this team of hero-eek anthropoids be the salv-ape-tion we need, or will Mallah’s team of maniacal monkeys bring forth the ape-pocalypse?

Why Does DC Have so Many Gorillas?

If the trend of DC’s comics featuring gorillas can be traced back to a specific point, it might be 1951’s Strange Adventures #8, which featured cover art of a gorilla holding a note to a horrified public about how he was really the victim of a “terrible scientific experiment.” As former DC editor Julius Schwartz explained in his 2000 biography Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics, the implied story behind the gorilla’s predicament fascinated readers, and ended up boosting sales for the book significantly.

“It must have been that this idea – a gorilla who was once a man, pleading with his girlfriend to help him out of this horrendous situation – appealed to our readers,” Schwartz revealed at the time. “They wanted to know how such a thing could possibly happen and what could be done it. We decided that the magazine sold well because the gorilla was acting like a human being. So we decided to try it again… and every time we tried it, it sold fantastically well, with sales shooting sky high! In due time every editor wanted to use a gorilla on the cover. Even on Wonder Woman! Eventually the law had to be laid down: no more than one DC cover that had a gorilla on it a month (except, of course for the occasional ‘gorilla month’, where every title had to have a gorilla on its cover).”

This trend of gorilla-related covers stretched through 1967, and (either intentionally or unintentionally) dropped off just around the release of Planet of the Apes in May 1968. Later that year, when company-wide staffing shakeups led to editors and writers either being fired or reassigned to other books, the active effort to include apes on DC’s covers seemed to go away.