The company promises an explanation tomorrow, but fan rumors already have the gun-toting monkey as either a new character from Marvel's Marvel Apes franchise, an oddly-primate version of a potential comic adaptation of the Hitman videogame or, most surreally and excitingly for us, a new character from Jeph Loeb's upcoming New Ultimates series rebooting Marvel's Avengers franchise one more time. Until then, just appreciate the image for what it is: A monkey, in a suit, with two guns.

If you really want to ignore collections in favor of single issues, there're really only four new launches worth paying attention to this week, and they all have movie and/or TV connections.

Marvel's Rampaging Wolverine is an oddity; a pretend issue of an imaginary series that would, theoretically, have been published in the 1970s, but starring Marvel's most lucrative mutant.

You're on much safer ground with IDW's Terminator Salvation Movie Adaptation #0, a prologue to the comic version of the next chapter in Skynet's plan to take over the world of media.

TV, meanwhile, is well represented with Dynamite's Battlestar Galactica: The Final Five (Apparently about the history of our favorite five cylons) and Boom!'s latest Farscape series, Strange Detractors.

However, I'd be remiss if I didn't really point you in the direction of some of the great trade-paperback collections hitting stores tomorrow. J. Michael Stracynski's first attempt at Watchmen-influenced superheroics, Rising Stars gets a complete compendium from Image. Image is also releasing a collection of the "Hellboy but without the sense of foreboding" fun series Perhapanauts.

Marvel Comics, meanwhile, is putting out a hardcover of the surprisingly successful (and surprisingly fun) Marvel Apes, along with a new collection of the first year of the original Exiles series that crosses the X-Men and Sliders into one new reality-hopping idea.

Meanwhile, DC is doing its bit for the good of comics with 100%, a new hardcover edition of comic genius Paul Pope's most coherent and complete work to date; I'm going to be writing more about this tomorrow, but I've gone on about my love for this story already and can definitely say that, if you haven't read this before, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. It's easily the comic release of the week, if not the month.

(Runner-up for that title? Essential Dazzler Volume 2. It's nowhere near as good as 100% - or even that good at all, really - but the 1980s comics featuring Marvel's Disco Diva - who only got her own series after the disco fad had faded - has a weird charm all of its own. For those seeking camp romance comics with added angst and fights, this is definitely for you.)

All of these books and more can be found on the complete shipping list of what's making it to stores this week, and once you've worked your way through that, you'll want to head to the Comic Book Store Locator Service to find out where to find such fine pictorial entertainment. Just remember: Paul Pope and I both say that 100% is a must for your shopping list.

Marvel Apes launches next month, with ape variant covers for many of September's Marvel Comics also available.

Behold The Invincible Iron-Monkey [Comic Book Resources]

The series - long mentioned by Marvel head Joe Quesada and assumed to be a joke - will be written by former Superman writer Karl Kesel, who was the first to admit that the project doesn't exactly sound real:

Of course, the first things that come to your mind are the jokes and bad puns— Spider-MONKEY is a hero in MONKhattan in the United SIMIANS of America. It's a Cocktail Party Idea— one you can toss around funny one-liners about with your friends as you sip drinks (in this case: banana daiquiris). But to have a STORY you need more than jokes. You need conflict, you need characters readers can admire and root for, and you need something real at stake. That's when you start looking past the banana peels and asking yourself: Okay, how does this society really work? What's important to these characters? For all its similarity to the mainstream Marvel Universe, how is it different? Once you figure that out, the story almost writes itself.

The thing about monkeys and apes is that they look like us, but they're not us. So you put them in clothes and they look funny. But it's more than that because monkeys-in-clothes (or apes-in-capes, in this case) allow people to laugh at themselves without really laughing at themselves. You don't laugh at a monkey dressed as George W. Bush because he's doing the same stupid things the real Bush does— no no no. You're laughing at him because a monkey dressed as George W. Bush looks FUNNY! (At least, that's what we tell ourselves.) And there's a touch of that "court jester" comedy/commentary in this story, too. You almost can't avoid it.

Marvel Apes [Newsarama]