Last week, Scip posed a rather interesting question to me, "Are cows the Marvel equivalent of the MONKEY?"

Interesting question, that. "Are COWS the Marvel equivalent of the DC MONKEY?

The list of DC's monkey/gorilla emissaries is a long and glorious one: (Heh! I said, "long and glorious.")

Bobo, The Detective Chimp (Leader of The Shadowpact)
Gorilla Grodd (Preeminent Flash villain)
Congorilla (Great White hunter who turns into a Golden ape)
Titano, The Super-Ape (Misunderstood Superman villain)
Sam Simeon of Angel & The Ape (Crime solving, comic book artist ape)
Beppo (Kryptonian monkey in a little Superman suit.)
Monsieur Mallah (Gay terrorist ape, I simply must work that into a sentence someday.)
Ultra-Humanite (Crazy genius albino ape, I simply MUST work that into a sentence someday.)

Yes, we put our monkeys on pedestals but at Marvel they do the same but with the cow.

Notable Marvel cows:

Bova (Hybrid cow who raised Magneto's children, Quicksilver & Scarlet Witch. Side effects of being raised by Bova are this: your daughter will marry her vibrator and destroy the world. Your son will constantly be short-tempered, acting creepier and creepier around his sister the closer she gets to puberty. Fair trade for being raised by a cow.)

Hellcow (Howard The Duck foe. A vampiric cow in a silken cape.)

Those Four Skrulls that Reed Richards turned into cows (Realizing that these four Skrulls were going to forever plague him, Mr. Fantastic hypnotized the shapechanging Skrulls, forcing them to turn into the most content animals on Earth, dairy cows. They later got milked, ground up, turned beef, sold. They know how to party, Grant Morrison-style, over at Marvel.)

My vast research involving the gorilla/cow conundrum has yielded these simple results:

DC fans, we do love us some monkeys. We had it hard-wired into our DNA. It is well known that DC's Silver Age editors believed that a monkey on a cover, regardless of context or actual story content, sold comics. Love of monkeys has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At Marvel, the cow is viewed as benevolent, a nurturer, a level to be obtained. To view a cow as "evil" as in Hellcow's case, is the ultimate in obsurdity, hence its apperances primarily happening within a comic featuring a cigar chompin' duck.

At DC, a monkey just is what it is. Love of monkeys.

At Marvel, love of cows is much like a Marvel superhero's powers, best stumbled upon by accident.