When I first started blogging and was still trying to find my place in the blogosphere, I tried a recurring feature called 'Monkey of the Week' where I spotlighted one cover from that week's releases that featured a monkey or ape on it. It was a spin on the old notion that simply adding a monkey/ape to the cover of a comic would help boost sales. The idea is attributed to DC editor Julie Schwartz, but it's not quite what he had said. His idea was that it needed to be a gorilla (not just any primate) AND that they were doing something "un-gorilla like." Schartz attributed the idea very specifically to the sales of
Strange Adventures #8, but that title doesn't feature another gorilla appearance for another two years after that issue, so I'm thinking Schwartz made that part up just to have a good story to tell fans. In any event, it was a real thing of sorts and pubishers still do it, although mostly in a tongue in cheek manner.
I tried running a 'Monkey of the Week' feature for a while but it got a bit dull since
Y: The Last Man was still ongoing at the time,
Tony Millionaire was still producing new
Sock Monkey stories,
a
Planet of the Apes comic was just winding down and Marvel had just launched a
Marvel Apes title. So it was pretty easy to pull out the same titles week after week. But on a whim, literlly this morning, I decided I'd take a look to see if there were any monkey covers for this week. It didn't take much to come across this...
Blip the space monkey, right there under the title character, getting about as much promimence as the two sidekicks.
Kind of amusing to know the idea is alive and well, almost 75 years after Schwartz first hit upon it and a decade and a half since I checked to see if it's still a thing.
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