First Look: 'Marvel Apes'!

King Kong. Curious George. Clint Eastwood's buddy in Every Which Way but Loose. All pioneering simians, all troublemakers. Come Sept. 3, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Daredevil, and their compadres will join these ranks when Marvel Comics, in a bid to duplicate the success of the Marvel Zombies franchise, re-envisions its marquee superhumans as...apes. Creepy apes.

It begins when Marty ''The Gibbon'' Blank, a mutant chump with chimp-like powers, is ensnared in a science experiment gone wrong. He's jettisoned into a sinister alternate reality devoid of humans; here, all of our crime-fighters are now hirsute anthropoids. Joined by the fetching human scientist Dr. Fiona Fitzhugh, this wannabe villain (the Gibbon founded the Spider-Man hating/baiting Legion of Losers) is, in fact, recruited by the seemingly upright Ape-Vengers as he searches for a way back home.

As writer Karl Kesel (Fantastic Four) said in an interview at New York Comic Con earlier this year, this is ''a sprawling epic like Lord of the Rings, and the Gibbon is our Frodo — one small person dwarfed by the overwhelming forces....'' But who are we kidding? At heart, Marvel Apes — with illustrations by Ramon Bachs (World War Hulk: Frontline) — is a four-issue miniseries about spandex-clad paladins acting uncivilized because they're apes.

Since we're only human at EW.com, we couldn't resist sharing/gawking at these first-look images: the alternate cover for issue 1 of Marvel Apes (above), plus six ''ape variant'' covers from sundry other comic-book titles touting this most peculiar project.