Tracking The Gorilla-Man Across The Covers

I've been thinking about the covers for last summer's Gorilla-Man mini-series for awhile now. They're by three different artists, but I feel like they have an increasingly savage portrayal of the character.

The first issue, Dave Johnson draws the cover, and we have Gorilla-Man as the Bond-style secret agent. He's wearing a nice suit, albeit with rolled-up sleeves, to accommodate his large forearms I assume. He has a satisfied look on his face, a smile (or smirk) accompanied by a raised eyebrow as he regards the audience. His weapon of choice is a silenced handgun. Of course, there are the ladies surrounding him, most leaning casually against him, or draped over him, with whom he seems perfectly at ease. The other presence on the cover is an old enemy of his, Omega Borgia, who seems to have used science to empower himself, where Ken Hale used curse. Borgia is the sort of ridiculous-looking villain a super-spy might encounter, what with having a head within his head.

Issue #2's cover is courtesy of Leonard Kirk and Dave McCaig. It's an action shot, with Mr. Hale leaping out of a plane, two guns blasting in rapid-fire as he descends towards us. The weapons are louder, less precise, and Hale is certainly less friendly looking. He's glaring, and possibly yelling. At the least, he's baring his teeth at us. A slightly wild, certainly dangerous look. Still, he's using a parachute, and was at least riding in a plane (could have been flying it), so he hasn't abandoned skills he learned as a human. He's alone on this cover, though, no other people or creatures visible.

By Gorilla-Man #3 (by Gabriele Dell'Otto) there's hardly anything on the cover except Gorilla-Man. He's closer to the audience than ever, but also looks more savage than ever. The canines are more pronounced than they were in Kirk's rendition, and there's saliva dripping from his teeth, adding to his "wild" aspect.

Then there's the eyes. On the first two cover, the pupils were black, and in Dave Johnson's cover, Hale's eyes aren't different from those of the girls. In Kirk's the pupils seem smaller, but that could be the result of the eyes being more open, or because his Gorilla-Man is looking directly at us, while Johnson's is observing us from 3/4 perspective. With Dell'Otto's, Hale's pupils have a reddish-golden glow, from the light source behind his left shoulder. It brings to mind phrases about "eyes burning like coals in the night", or something similarly designed to suggest predatory threats. Because of the light, he doesn't have whites of eyes, so much as yellows, which adds to the otherness factor.

Both Kirk and Dell'Otto's Gorilla-Man wear a featureless shirt with buttons, (though Kirk's opts for more of a polo shirt, Dell'Otto's a full button down) in Dell'Otto's version the shirt seems to be straining to hold. Part of that is we can see the top buttons are undone, which isn't something we can determine with Kirk's cover. But part of it is simply how Dell'Otto draws it, suggesting the shirt is strained at the seams to contain all the raw power of the wearer. Certainly the suit Johnson drew him wearing fits comfortably, no sign of stress on the material. Though he's carrying a gun, Dell'Otto's Hale has opted to wield a very large knife instead. On the one hand, it's a potentially more silent weapon than the dual firearms of #2, but it could also be used to inflict pain slowly, and in great quantities, if the user so desired.

OK, having blathered on about all these details, whether they're real, or merely perceived by me, what's my point? The big revelation at the end of the mini-series is that Ken Hale doesn't want the curse undone. Prior to this, it was acknowledged in other Atlas stories that Ken had eventually come to grips with being a gorilla, but this is the first time I can recall reading that being human holds no appeal to him. It's not resignation, or even simple acceptance, it's an embracing of who he's become. He used the holographic emitter in the mini-series, simply because he might attract less attention on a mission as a human, than as a talking gorilla. He's perfectly comfortable being a gorilla around Banda. He speaks gorilla as fluently as he does English. So the cover could represent Ken Hale moving away from a gorilla who used to be human, still trying to be human, to simply being a gorilla who used to be human. There are things he learned as a human that can be useful, but he's not human, in the sense of being Homo sapiens anymore. However, he can combine what he knows as a human, with what he knows and can do as a gorilla.

As for why he's increasingly aggressive looking over the course of the covers, he told Banda is #3 that gorillas aren't violent, unless they feel threatened. He didn't seem to regard Borgia as much more than a nuisance, but Bastoc and his forces were more of an issue, so he'd have to respond with fewer witty one-liners, and more direct aggression.