Adventure. Into those series Schiff introduced super-gorillas that the first super-villain gorilla (although he is, without a doubt, the fired ray blasts from their fingertips, pink-furred gorillamost famous of the troop). As early as 1940, a superior-minded creatures, and gorillas that got their jollies watching stupid simian debuted in the form of Orang, the talking orangutan that human tricks in a “human zoo.” met Will Eisner’s masked man, the Spirit. And a generation DC’s gorillas weren’t all bad, before Grodd’s first clash with the Flash mind you… some were whizzes on TV in ’59, gorillas had tangled with Golden game shows, or even unlucky enough Age super-heroes, with characters as to be tried for a crime they didn’t diverse as the Green Hornet and Captain commit. But overall, when a gorilla America occasionally taking a day off showed up on a DC Comics cover, he from pummeling Nazis and hoodlums to was up to something, and it wasn’t punch out an irritated ape. good (for humans). Yet Julie Schwartz can be credited This Silver Age gorilla mania for making the intelligent gorilla a wasn’t confined to DC Comics. comic-book genre. Gorilla covers have Across the racks, gorillas were seen as since joined robot, “headlights” (buxom super-villains (or as comic foils) in women), and bondage covers as desired titles as wide-ranging as Fantastic collectibles. And talking gorillas (both Four, Mighty Mouse, Popeye, Abbott good and evil) have become quite and Costello, Magnus Robot Fighter, commonplace in comic-book continuand, believe it or not, The Rawhide ities, coexisting with human characters in Kid. Yet no one embraced gorilla otherwise reality-based mythologies. covers (or stories) with DC’s gusto. Writer Alan Moore, for example, has Schwartz wrote, “Eventually the law used apes in a variety of his titles, from had to be laid down: No more than King Solomon and the Weeping Gorilla one DC cover that had a gorilla on it a (you’ll read about them momentarily) to month.” It’s even been said that DC Terrifo the Super-Ape (the companion of had a “gorilla cover chart” to track ape Tom Terrific, an alternate-universe appearances. version of Tom Strong) and the Titano Although Julie “Be Original” tribute Stupendo (from Supreme). Kurt Schwartz took immense pride in his Busiek’s character-rich Astro City inventiveness, sometimes his “origiincludes the armored legionary Korrga, a nal” ideas were simply novel spins on movie monster given life by a “belief Ralph goes ape for Ruth on the trailblazing earlier concepts. Gorilla City, the ray.” DC itself continues to expand its Win Mortimer cover to Strange Adventures #8 hidden African civilization of superUniverse with simian characters like the (May 1951). © 2007 DC Comics. intelligent apes first seen in 1959 in Joker’s underling Apeface (from the 2001 Schwartz’s The Flash, expanded upon Otto Binder’s “The Gorilla miniseries Joker: Last Laugh). World” of five years earlier. Both Gorilla World and Gorilla City Certainly, gorillas are not an endangered species in comic were throwbacks to the sci-fi pulps of the ’30s—the stuff books. If we didn’t love ’em so much, you might call in Planned Schwartz read as a kid—where cunning, adversarial gorillas Primatehood to keep their population under control. With the could sometimes be spied. dizzying array of comic-book gorillas that have made it into print Nor did the enmity between the Flash and Gorilla City’s over the decades, a reader needs a simian scorecard to keep up most notorious native, megalomaniac Gorilla Grodd, make Grodd with them. So be it…!
A CHECKLIST OF CLASSIC STRANGE APE-VENTURES [Editor’s note: Not finding the issue you’re looking for? See Chapter 5 for more.]
Strange Adventures #39 (Dec. 1953) “The Guilty Gorilla” Strange Adventures #45 (June 1954) “The Gorilla World” Strange Adventures #55 (Apr. 1955) “The Gorilla Who Challenged the World” Tales of the Unexpected #2 (Apr.–May 1956) “The Gorilla Who Saved the World” Strange Adventures #69 (June 1956) “The Gorilla Conquest of Space” Strange Adventures #75 (Dec. 1956) “Secret of the Man-Ape” My Greatest Adventure #14 (Mar.–Apr. 1957) “I Was a Prisoner in a Human Zoo” Strange Adventures #88 (Jan. 1958) “The Gorilla War Against Earth”
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Comics Gone Ape!
Strange Adventures #100 (Jan. 1959) “The Amazing Trial of John (Gorilla) Doe” House of Secrets #16 (Jan. 1959) “The Gorilla Genius” Strange Adventures #108 (Sept. 1959) “The Human Pet of Gorilla Land” Strange Adventures #117 (June 1960) “Challenge of the Gorilla Genius” House of Mystery #105 (Dec. 1960) “The Creature of X-14” Strange Adventures #125 (Feb. 1961) “The Flying Gorilla Menace” House of Mystery #118 (Jan. 1962) “The Secret of the Super-Gorillas” From Beyond the Unknown #5 (June–July 1970) reprints SA #55, “The Gorilla Who Challenged the World” (See right for covers)