2. BIZARRO TITANO By the time 1962 rolled around, Superman’s dopey doppelganger, Bizarro No. 1, had populated his backwards Bizarro World with imperfect duplicates of just about every character in the Superman family. Titano got his shot in Adventure Comics #295 (Apr. 1962), becoming a raging Bizarrobeast in “The Kookie Super© 2007 DC Comics. Ape!” Since the Bizarro Code is “Us do opposite of all earthly things,” BizarroTitano should have been docile instead of the easy-to-anger big ape written by Jerry Siegel and penciled by John Forte. But logic never applied to a Bizarro story, and besides, Bizarro-Titano’s wrestling match with Bizarro-Lois No. 1 ranks as one of the goofiest moments in DC’s Silver Age. 3. KINGORILLA Titano wasn’t DC Comics’ first attempt to squeeze “King Kong” into its Superman mythos. In Adventure Comics #196 (Jan. 1954), Superboy (“The Adventures of Superman When He Was a Boy”) had a smackdown with the rampaging giant Kingorilla. This story, drawn by John Sikela and possibly written by William Woolfolk (remember, story credits were rare in those days), took teenage Clark (Superboy) Kent and Lana Lang into the African jungle to find Lana’s missing parents. It soon blatantly © 2007 DC Comics. sponged off King Kong by having the Langs and Clark held captive by natives as sacrifices to Kingorilla, but seeing Superboy in action against a mammoth ape was a heck of a lot of fun.
4. GORGILLA Before he co-created the Fantastic Four in 1961, writer/editor Stan Lee had had his fill of scripting the innocuous monster stories that were Marvel Comics’ bread and butter during the early ’60s. So the assignment to pen “I Discovered Gorgilla! The Monster of Midnight Mountain!” for Tales to Astonish #12 (Oct. 1960) went to Stan’s brother, Larry Lieber. Like King Kong, Gorgilla was a giant ape (or missing link, actually, between ape and man) that lived on an island (Borneo) on the highest hilltop (Midnight Mountain), where he was worshipped as a deity by the locals. (He also fought a T-Rex.) Unlike King Kong, Gorgilla was designed by Jack Kirby, who gave him the four fingers and toes so common among Kirby monsters, as well as a tail and a flowing mane of © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. rock-star hair. Marvel brought Gorgilla back in Tales to Astonish #18 (Apr. 1961), this time having him visit New York, where he was cornered atop—no, not the Empire State Building—the Statue of Liberty. (Careful where you sit, Gorgilla. Lots of sharp points up there.) Gorgilla could have slinked away into limbo like so many of the other Marvel monsters, but after a couple of 1970s reprints (in Monsters on the Prowl #9 and Where Creatures Roam #5), he got an overhaul. Gorgilla’s origin was reprinted, albeit with art and lettering changes, in Weird Wonder Tales #21 (Mar. 1977), with the Marvel mystic Dr. Druid substituting as the lead character, replacing Scotty, an anthropologist from the original tale. Gorgilla later appeared as a menace in a few Marvel titles, and reappeared as a monster-fighter in 2005’s Marvel Monsters: Fin Fang Four #1. No longer your father’s “Monster of Midnight Mountain,” the retooled—and rehabilitated—Gorgilla has learned to speak, and has been shrunk to human size by super-whiz Mr. Fantastic.