Detective Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog re-team in 1992's Green Lantern/Flash crossover "Gorilla Warfare"

While The Flash is technically Gorilla Grodd's archenemy, a couple of DC writers must have so enjoyed the match-up between the psychic super-gorilla and Rex the Wonder Dog during William Messner-Loeb's Flash run that they decided to stage a rematch a few years later. Of course, the story would unfold in a pair of issues of 1992's The Flash and Green Lantern, and so the title heroes of those books are the real stars of the story "Gorilla Warfare."

I, of course, am more interested in a pair of guest-stars, however: Rex the Wonder Dog and Bobo, the Detective Chimp. Here the pair of old animal heroes both have new jobs, working for a new top-secret government agency, one that would never actually appear again.

The story arc was collected in 2017's The Flash by Mark Waid: Book Two. Waid wrote the two Flash issues participating in the crossover, which were both pencilled by Greg Laroque and inked by Roy Richardson. As for the Green Lantern issue, these were written by Gerard Jones, pencilled by M.D. Bright and inked by Romeo Tanghal. 

Yeah, this is a Gerard Jones story. As you likely already know, Jones was a prolific and talented writer who produced plenty of Green Lantern and Justice League stories for DC Comics and co-created Prime for Malibu Comics...and then, in 2018, plead guilty to possession of child pornography and served a prison sentence. 

That fact thus complicates the reading of his past work, and it makes it hard to enjoy a fun superhero comic about gorillas and animal heroes, knowing what one knows about the darkness of the writer and his appalling crimes. He's one of the comics creators I have struggled with whether or not it was even worth engaging with his work at all at this point. I've decided to do so here in order to be complete in my following of the history of particular comic book characters, but I also wanted to make sure I noted this aspect of Jones' biography while doing so.

I certainly wouldn't buy any work from him, and I don't think DC will give anyone the opportunity to do so. This collection, which I borrowed from the library, was published between the time Jones was first arrested and when he plead guilty. I'm not sure if DC will republish it in the future or not; I just noticed the other day that 1990's Secret Origins #48, which contains an eight-page Rex the Wonder Dog origin by Jones and pencil artist Paris Cullins, is one of the few issues of that series not available on Amazon's Comixology. 

Oddly though, Rex's entry in the timeline in New History of the DC Universe is illustrated by the title panel from that comic, including Jones' writing credit:

One imagines that was a mistake that was overlooked in the editing process. 

With Jones' crimes thus acknowledged, let's try to focus on the story he and Waid told for a bit.

The first two chapters, Green Lantern #30 and Flash #69 are interesting in that they run parallel to one another, rather than occurring in strict consecutive order. 

Both open with the same scene, Justice League Europe moving into their new headquarters in an English castle, the team's new leader Green Lantern Hal Jordan spotting Flash Wally West from the air and calling out "Hey! Twinkletoes!" The pair then chat a bit, their teammates Power Girl, Crimson Fox, Elongated Man and Sue Dibny all putting in brief appearances (In the GL issue, Jones has Sue scolding Ralph, "If you paid as much attention to your step as you do to Power Girl's chest-- we might survive this experience!")

And both issues end with Flash and Green Lantern unexpectedly running into one another in an African jungle near the cloaked Gorilla City, shouting simultaneously, "What are you doing here?!"

In between those scenes, each of these issues show what their respective heroes are up to...as well as what's going on in Gorilla City.

In Green Lantern #30, the first part of the crossover, we see the young super-gorillas of Gorilla City talking politics at a cafe. Some of these are loyal to the worldview of the imprisoned criminal Grodd. And in n his cell, Gorilla Grodd receives a message from big-headed Green Lantern villain Hector Hammond and he then psychically informs his young gorilla followers, "The time is now!"

They break him out of jail, and all flee the city for the jungle. Grodd's plan, he tells his followers, is to find a nearby third chunk of a special meteorite that fell to earth; the rays of one such chunk had gifted their tribe with the brain power they now enjoyed, turning them into super-gorillas, while Hammond had long ago found the second chunk, the rays of which evolved his mind and gave him his powers...and unfortunate appearance. (Jones here seems to be ignoring the new, post-Crisis origin of Gorilla City from Secret Origins #40, in which it was a crystal aboard a crashland-ing alien spaceship that gave the gorillas their smarts; ironically, that comic was edited by Jones' co-writer here, Mark Waid.)

King Solovar immediately calls his old ally Barry Allen for help, his distress call coming through a special radio that is now housed in The Flash Museum. When the museum calls the JLE HQ looking for current Flash, he's MIA, but Hal goes to the museum in his stead.

There he's met by a mysterious blonde man with a receding hairline I did not recognize (and I imagine you won't either, if we've been reading the same old comics lately), probably because his hair is blonde instead of red. The man offers to explain everything if GL accompanies to a place in Washington D.C. where "few...people...have ever been."

Jones draws the scene out and layers on suspense. 

They go to the zoo, where this happens:

Then they take an elevator down, pass by some guard dogs and enter a room filled with desks at which sit chimpanzees working on computers. 

The man, who is psychically referred to by one of those dogs as "Sheriff", tells Green Lantern:

I don't blame you for being a little boggled, GL. I've been an aide here for years, and it still throws me. 

Welcome to the Bureau of Amplified Animals.

Where animals who've been given unnaturally high intellects--either through sports of nature or scientific experiments--have been gathered to help mankind!

This is, of course, Sheriff Chase, formerly of Oscaloosa County, Florida. And who is he an aide to,exactly? 

Who else? 

Bobo doesn't seem to have started using his middle initial or last name just yet. He's also going without his signature hat, but instead wears a vest and, perhaps most surprisingly, seems to be capable of psychic speech now. 

Like the guard dogs, he "speaks" out loud, but his dialogue bubbles lack tails, and have those little lines about them, indicating that he is communicating telepathically. How? Well, this story never offers an explanation, but as this follows "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" and Secret Origins #40, we can assume it is either due to his having drank from the magical fountain of youth or because microscopic aliens had meddled with his brain back in Africa all those years ago.

Bobo and the sheriff explain that while some "amplified" animals want to work with humans, others work against them, animals like Grodd. Bobo refers to the events of Keystone City we recently read about as the first time the Bureau took on Grodd—a bit of a retcon, as it wasn't clear how or why Rex appeared then; at the time, it seemed as if Rex was working with the United States army—and so Bobo assigns GL a partner, "the one agent who's gone head to head with Grodd." 

Rex the Wonder Dog, of course. 

On their flight to Africa, Rex communicates with Hal in the same psychic fashion that Bobo had earlier, although he notes "without Major Dennis as my 'familiar' you'd never be able to pick up my thoughts." So, having Dennis—presumably Daniel Dennis, although here he is a major instead of the lieutenant colonel he was in DC Comics Presents, which I think is a demotion, isn't it?—seems to allow Rex to communicate with humans. I wonder if it is the same with Bobo, and the sheriff is his human familiar? 

And what has Flash been up to while King Solovar and Green Lantern were looking for him? (Don't they have communicators for these purposes? Or, this being 1992, beepers?) For that we check out Flash #69.

There we see that, after ogling Laroque's Power Girl, who then had a triangular cut-out in the chest of her costume rather than a circular one, and chatting with Hal, The Flash heads back to his home in the states and spends a few pages getting ready for a TV interview with Linda Park at super-speed.

On his jog over to the meet her, however, he sees Hector Hammond sitting in his flying chair and using his telekinesis to attack a bus. They fight a bit, but Hammond eventually overcomes Flash mentally, and then uses him as transportation. Using psychic reins of pink energy, Hammond forces Wally to pull him to Africa, where he's to meet Grodd and join him in harnessing the power of the third chunk of meteorite. 

That brings us to Green Lantern #31, where the heroes Flash and GL finally literally get on the same page again. The two heroes make short work of Grodd's gorillas, but Hammond takes out Hal in an amusingly brutal and embarrassing way...

...and then uses his powers to extract Grodd from his grudge match against Rex, escaping their fight with the heroes so they can instead seek out the meteorite. 

They soon find it, having essentially followined the trail of wildly mutated animals affected by the special rays. 

When the heroes catch up with them, Hammond tries to betray Grodd, as Grodd knew he would, and Grodd takes the power for himself, producing an interesting new look for himself in the process: 

Grodd then uses his new amplified powers to mutate the title heroes. Flash gets a preposterously big head, one so big he can't balance well enough to get up and run (this is likely an homage to the cover of 1968's Flash #177), while we're told that Hal has been transformed into a caveman...but he basically just looks like he now has big, weird hair and needs a shave. 

Oh, and Grodd has also turned Hammond into a bestial caveman, albeit one with a normal-sized head. 

While the now wild Hal seeks to destroy the big-headed Flash, Wally is able to defeat him through a well-aimed toss of his yellow boot—this was back when GL was powerless against the color yellow, remember—and then, using his big old brain, he is able to harness the power of the meteorite to restores himself and Hal to normal.

Not everything is normal, though. Rex can now talk out loud,  just like a human being:

To make a long story short, the trio then manages to find Gorilla City, break through its forcefield and battle the big-headed Grodd and his army of armed super-gorillas. Bobo literally parachutes in, first saving Major Dennis from the caveman-ized Hammond and then leaping on Grodd's back at a pivotal moment to save Rex who, given the respite, is then able to use the"force of mind" abilities of Grodd's that the new meteorite gave him to defeat the evil gorilla, reducing him to the intelligence of a normal gorilla.

Solovar and his people imprison the villains—Hammond still having the mind and body of a caveman with an appropriately-sized head, and Grodd with an oversized but not gigantic head, Laroque drawing him with smaller head than Bright did—and our heroes head home, Rex retaining the power of speech, but not sure how long it will last.

Well, not all of the heroes head home. Bobo, last seen being fed peeled fruit by a pair of gorilla women, says he intends to take his eight weeks of comp time in Gorilla City, among similarly intelligent apes.

And that seems to be where DC would leave Rex and Detective Chimp for a while. 

Rex wouldn't reappear until 1996's Superboy and The Ravers #1, after which point he would join the team and appear in most issues of the short-lived series (Unless, of course, you want to count Rex's one-panel cameo among the crowd of heroes in 1995's Guy Gardner: Warrior #29). 

Bobo would next appear in a one-page scene in 1998's Martian Manhunter Annual #2, part of that summer's JLApe annual event story (Which I plan on revisiting in the near-ish future). (That is, unless you want to count Bobo's cameos among crowds of heroes in the just-mentioned Warrior #29 or the new "Afterschock" story in 1998's Crisis on Infinite Earths collection).

And the Bureau of Amplified Animals? Well, apparently "Gorilla Warfare" was the sole arc in which it appeared. 

Perhaps after Bobo and Rex left the government decided to shut it down...

Bookshelf #18

The contents of this week's featured shelf are organized by when I got the books on it (again, between 2012 and 2024 or so) and the size of those books. That's why its contents are so completely random.

How random? Well, among the books on the left are Ed Piskor's Hip Hop Family Tree Vol. 3, Marvel's X-Men: Grand Design—Second Genesis, Fantastic Four: Grand Design and History of the Marvel Universe, Chris Claremont and John Bolton's Marada the She-Wolf, some Jules Feiffer graphic novels and more.

To the right? Things are even more random. In fact, only one of these books is actually a comic book: Tom Scioli's Jack Kirby. As for the rest, most of them are at least about comics, like Jon Morris' League of Regrettable Heroes, Mark Fertig's Take That, Adolf! and TwoMorrows' Swamp Men, The Quality Companion and Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour. There are also a pair of collections of pin-up art from comics artists, Jim Silke's Jungle Girls and Bruce Timm's The Big Tease.

And then there are a couple of books in there that are not really comics-related at all, but book-books I apparently stuck there because I didn't have anywhere else to put them. These include Stephen Bissette's Cryptid Cinema (which, though fun, wasn't exactly what I expected given the title), a Suicide Girls coffee table book, Giant Monsters of Filmland and Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders, a book I bought from the gift shop at the Cleveland Museum of Art when the Morgan Library & Museum's exhibit of the same name was there in 2018.

Above this hodgepodge of a shelf, you'll see a few recent DC books lying sideways with their spines out. I didn't count that little shelf, which is too short for even a digest-sized comics collection to stand up in, as a shelf of its own, so it doesn't get a post dedicated just to it. I'm not sure what that little shelf is meant to hold, but I've just been sticking books I don't have room for elsewhere there. 

The Flash, Vixen and Rex the Wonder Dog team-up to take down Gorilla Grodd (1990-1991's Flash #45-47)

Wally West was a few years into his new career as The Flash when he ran up against one of his late mentor Barry Allen's greatest foes, the super-intelligent super-gorilla Grodd. When he did so, the villain had a new and frankly rather terrifying plan to conquer first Keystone City, and then the world, a plan that called to mind a whole sub-genre of horror films.

In order to beat Grodd, Flash would need help from some rather unexpected quarters. His allies? The animal power-channeling former Justice Leaguer, then Suicide Squad member Vixen, and too-little-seen canine hero from the 1950s, Rex the Wonder Dog (A minor DC character who continues to fascinate me, which is why he makes such frequent appearances on my blog...with another to come shortly!)

This particular story arc ran through Flash #45-47, published in late 1990 and early 1991, and was the work of writer William Messner-Loebs and the art team of Greg LaRocque and Jose Marzan Jr. 

By that point, Messner-Loebs had been writing Wally-as-The-Flash since the character had taken over for the dead-ish Barry Allen after Crisis on Infinite Earths (I mean, Barry was meant to be dead back then, but via retcons we now know that he didn't really die after all, right?), and he would continue to do so though 1992, at which point he would hand the baton over to Mark Waid, who was writing the title when I started paying attention to comics (Although I did buy Messner-Loebs and company's 1989's Flash #33 from a back-issue bin at some point in the early '90s, mostly because the cover promised you-know-who...I don't remember anything at all about the issue now, though). 

Given Messner-Loeb's long tenure on the title, there was obviously some ongoing storylines being tended to in this arc. These seem to involve some Keystone City public safety politics and Wally becoming something of a semi-official partner to the city's police department; in these issues, he's partnered with police Detective Cleveland. 

They encounter something weird almost immediately in a rundown part of town: A building with maybe a hundred dogs with it, as well as some partially eaten human bodies. The dogs attack them, and it is immediately evident that the dogs aren't attacking as dogs might but are instead exhibiting strategy and tactics. Soon, the dogs are joined in their attack against the humans by similarly organized cats.

Messner-Loebs and company clue readers into what's going on when they introduce us to a nameless stray dog, the writer giving us his thoughts in narrations boxes. They are simple thoughts that run together. For example, the first such box reads:

Hungry. Tiredhungry. Tiredthirsty. Hungry.

This as the dog sniffs around an alley. It is soon greeted by someone off-panel who casts a large shadow and speaks to him in red-rimmed square boxes. The unseen speaker calls the dog "Little Brother" and leads it to another alley, one full of different kinds of animals.

The voice tells the dog to "Feel the space behind your eyes" and "Know the truth," instilling it with the power of thought.

The big shadow and the mysterious voice belong, of course, to Grodd, and he has been building an army of animals and giving them the ability to think like a human being might. It was he who was behind the building full of organized dogs and cats that The Flash and Detective Cleveland found and fought. Grodd's new animal army gets even bigger and far scarier once all of the animals in the city zoo escape. 

The Flash tracks one of the escapees, a chimpanzee, and he ends up face-to-face with Grodd (See the panels at the top of the post). The still new-ish Flash might have super-speed, but it's not enough to overcome Grodd's army of dogs, his super-gorilla strength and his "force of mind" psychic abilities, and soon our hero is on the ropes, while a dog leaps to maul the fallen Cleveland.

Which is when Vixen appears, on the final page of the first issue #45:

She's not dressed as she was the last time I personally saw her in a comic book (that would have been last fall's DC Finest: Justice League of America: The Return, collecting much of the "Detroit Era" of JLoA), but rather in head-to-toe black leather with a plunging neckline...and a far better, less Wolverine-y hairstyle. 

I wonder, would Flash readers have recognized her here? She had switched to that costume about a year previously in the pages of Suicide Squad, but it's awfully non-descript, and, in this particular image, Laroque doesn't even draw the Tantu totem necklace (Throughout the story, its visibility depends on the panel, but in most, you can see it or the yellow chain it hangs on; in this one, it seems to be absent entirely though). 

Well, if they didn't, I'm sure the next issue box on the letters page would have named her, and the cover of the next issue, #46, certainly does. 

When that issue picks up the story, Grodd clobbers her from behind. She was using tiger powers against the pack of dogs when he did so, which might explain why he didn't take her head clean off. Then, sprawled out on the floor, she takes Grodd's measure:

A mountain gorilla...but different...aggressive...carnivorous...violent...great mental power, but unstable...

...must try to duplicate his kind!

And thus she does so, channeling the powers of a Gorilla City super-gorilla, if not Grodd himself. (Laroque and the art team do a particularly fine job of rendering Vixen's abilities in this arc, the animal whose "powers" she adopts in any given panel appears within the drawing, often in the background, but in subtle enough a way that the reader can see and recognize it, without its presence overpowering the image. I feel this is a better depiction of Vixen's powers than many later ones I've seen).

Vixen then proceeds to kick Grodd's ass, talking in bigger, bolder, wavier dialogue balloons which I guess are meant to be some kind of gorilla voice, which Cleveland remarks upon.

After she tackles Grodd through the wall and demands that he "Get up so I can kill you again...", Grodd gets the fuck out of there. With Flash apparently too banged up to run and Vixen out of sorts from having gone ape shit, they retreat for a breather.

Meanwhile, Grodd completes some kind of amplification machine and it's Day of the Animals in Keystone. 

When our heroes finally track him down again, Grodd takes over Vixen's mind, and has her use her powers to take down Wally, channeling a boa constrictor to squeeze him into unconsciousness. The two heroes and Flash's ally Piper all awake in cages.

Has Grodd won? This round, sure, but another hero appears on this second issue's last page:

Note the narration boxes in the top three panels belong to the stray dog who we saw being taught how to think by Grodd in the story's first chapter, while those in the final panel are, obviously, those of Rex.

It's not explained here, but Rex seems to be able to "talk" directly to other dogs somehow here...as well as to other animals...and even to humans. 

In Rex's fist scene of the final issue of the arc, Flash #47, the army guy at Rex's side answers a question the brown dog asks Rex, and the dog is surprised: "The human understands us?"

"Yes," Rex replies. "He's been well-trained."

Messner-Loebs otherwise doesn't get into how on Earth Rex is able to psychically communicate with other animals and, apparently, humans. I suppose Bill Willingham's retconned version of  1981's "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" that Bobo told in 2005's Day of Vengeance could retroactively explain this as the result of Rex having drank from the Fountain of Youth, but there are a handful of other Rex and/or Detective Chimp's between this story and that one yet.

After the army guy, Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Smith share's Rex's origins with the dog, they get some intel about Grodd's operation. (And who is this Jeff Smith fellow? I have no idea. As far as I can discern, this is his only appearance...unless he appeared in an issue of The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog from the 1950s, none of which have been collected. The human being that Rex spent the most time with in those stories Danny Dennis, who also achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel, as was revealed in the penultimate panel of "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?".)

There are more scenes of chaos as the animal army attempts to overthrow Keystone—that city zoo sure had a lot of animals in it, including a whole pride of lions and what we are told is a herd of zebras—and Grodd is toying with Flash, Vixen and Piper. Victory seems within his grasp.

But Messner-Loebs has a neat twist here, in that once the animals are all as intelligent as Grodd, they are also smart enough to question his plans...and his right to rule over them all as a king.

His animal army on the verge of rebellion, Grodd uses his force of mind to make a violent, gory example of the rats, but by that point, Piper has fashioned an instrument out of a blade of grass to break Flash's shock collar, and then Rex joins the fray: 

Grodd is still too strong for Flash, even with Rex mauling him, but then the remaining rats join the battle to avenge their "grandfather rats", swarming all over Grodd, and Vixen channels the powers of an electric eel to short out his apparatus. 

Grodd is down, his machine in ruins and the war between animals and humans at an end...although there are still a whole bunch of newly intelligent animals in Keystone. 

So, Rex makes a speech:

And thus ends a particularly epic adventure in the life of one of DC's greatest heroes, The Flash Rex the Wonder Dog. 

He would be back before too long though, and in the pages of The Flash again, but that is a story for another time/blog post

Look, it's a gorilla with a machine gun! (The origins of Gorilla City and Congorilla, from 1989's Secret Origins #40)

If one is interested in the origins of one of DC Comics' ape characters, it stands to reason that one might be interested in others, so I suppose it is well worthwhile to examine the two stories that preceded the Detective Chimp origin in 1989's Secret Origins #40. 

These are of Gorilla City (though the cover says Gorilla Grodd, who is of course featured in the tale) and Congorilla. While both stories are quite fantastical, perhaps even more so than that of Detective Chimp, they are presented in a much more straightforward and realistic art style and with a far more serious tone.

The first story under Bill Wray's iconic cover (the text of which the Grand Comics Database attributes to editor Mark Waid, who must be the "I" in "Because I Demanded It!") is the 19-page Gorilla City/Gorilla Grodd one, entitled "Gorillas in Our Midst: The Secret Origin of Gorilla City". It is written by Cary Bates and Gary Weisman, penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Mike DeCarlo. 

It opens with a six-page sequence in which a mysterious white ship crashes in a lush jungle and is immediately surrounded by variously colored gorillas. They make various gorilla noises "OOGA", "CHEE" and "AH", each of which appears as a sound effect, sans dialogue balloons, and these are among the many letterer Augustin Mas fills the sequence with, other sound effects including those related to the ship itself and a crystal it contains.

The gorillas also find a tiny humanoid in the fetal position within. This flesh-covered creature looks like a human baby crossed with a Hopkinsville goblin, and it attempts to speak when pulled from the vessel, although the alien language is as unintelligible to me as it would have been to the gorillas. It's a nice visual depiction of an alien language, though; not sure who gets credit for it, DeCarlo or Mas: 

Ass for that crystal, a group of apes surround it and lay their hands on it, and then it emits rays in every direction as the apes flee, one of them apparently learning to think in English as it does so, as a thought cloud appears above the ape, containing the words, "...Ruh...Ruh...Run away...!!"

The scene then shifts to 1873 London, where a man in what is apparently an insane asylum of some kind is restrained to a chair while a reporter interviews him (As for that date, I suppose it is worth mentioning that the gorilla was only discovered and described by white scientists a few decades previous to that year, and the mountain gorilla wouldn't be officially recognized until 1902). 

The restrained man, Albert, then shares his "remarkable story" with the journalist, one so strange that it seems to have gotten him branded a mad man and confined within a madhouse. 

That story is, of course, how he and his fellow explorer and adventurer Hughes were in Africa and stumbled upon "a glorious metropolis beside which our own London pales," which Infantino draws like the sort of high-tech, fantastical city he might have drawn for Marvel's Star Wars comics, here colored all golden yellow. It was, Albert says, "a city of beasts: A city of gorillas!!"

The gorillas take them to the little humanoid from the earlier scene, which resembles a wizened baby, and it talks to them telepathically, its dialogue punctuated by nouns with dual meanings, as when it refers to itself as a "prisoner/god" of the gorillas.

It explains the story we already saw unfold and could intuit ourselves, given that the DC Universe has included a secret civilization of super-gorillas called Gorilla City since 1959. The crystal "exploded/enhanced", making the gorillas smarter, and the little alien, referred to as Mentor, further instructed the apes. Because they destroyed Mentor's ship with rocks, it is now stuck here on Earth, worshipped by but also captive to the gorillas.

Mentor further explains that, before it exploded, the crystal emitted two beams, one "straight/pure" that struck Solovar, the other "warped/dangerous". It doesn't know which gorilla the second beam struck, but readers should be able to guess pretty easily.

Solovar tells the men he wants to soon reveal the gorillas' city to the rest of the world, and perhaps the two could serve as ambassadors between the two civilizations. Mentor, meanwhile, wants them to help it escape, and bathes all of them in invisibility to do so. 

A familiar-looking gorilla with a fringe of sideburns dangling from the sides of its head has other plans, too; said gorilla, putting his fingers to his temples, seems to psychically possesses Hughes, who draws his pistol, shoots Mentor dead, and then shouts, "Death to the Mentor!! Death to Solovar!!" 

The gorillas witness this last bit, and administer their own gorilla justice upon the killer:

Albert manages to escape, but no one believes his tale. Given this betrayal by the first human beings to see Gorilla City, Solovar decides to cloak the city and hide it away from humanity. 

I suppose Albert would be long, long dead before The Flash Barry Allen discovers Gorilla City anew, and before the long-lived Solovar decides to finally reveal Gorilla City to the rest of the world. 

That story is followed by the 10-page "The Legend of Congorilla", a retelling of the story from 1958's Action Comics # 247, which was republished in 2004's Weird Secret Origins one-shot and which I detailed in the first and, before now, only EDILW post all about Congorilla.

This newer, 1989 origin is the work of writer Tom Joyner and artists Fred Butler and Kez Wilson. It retains the basics of the original origin. Adventurer Congo Bill receives a magical ring from his African friend Kawolo which, when rubbed, allows him and a large golden gorilla to exchange minds, which proves quite convenient when Bill finds himself trapped in a cave by rubble. 

Despite that, the story is here more complex, and involves treachery and a big gun battle, which, of course, allows Butler and Wilson to draw that panel of Congorilla with a machinegun I posted above.

Here Kawolo is murdered, and the doctor tending him gives the magic ring to Congo Bill, who has heard the story about exchanging minds with the golden gorilla, the creature being the totem of Kawolo's tribe. He's heard it, but he doesn't believe it. 

Investigating the murder with an off-panel group that is apparently the CIA, although Bill refers to them more cryptically throughout, he tells Kawolo's nephew N'Solo that the bullet that killed him had apparently come from an old Russian army rifle, of the sort being regularly smuggled to local guerilla groups. 

While the pair set out to avenge Kawolo's death, Bill asks N'Solo why he didn't inherit the ring from his uncle. He responds:

I suppose I scoffed at him once too often. My years at Oxford anglicized me. Uncle didn't approve.

He used to say, "You are more white than Congo Bill!" Ha! Ha! Uncle saw you as...an elemental force, Bill. White but with Africa's blood in your veins. He was quite poetic about it.

As it turns out, it is N'Solo who killed his uncle and he then tries to kill Bill. In this version of the story, Bill is exploring a cave, tracking the killers, and N'Solo, waiting outside the cave mouth, tosses a grenade in. The explosion doesn't kill Bill outright, but it does cause a cave in, seemingly dooming him...unless that magic ring really does work.

And we already know that it does, right?

Bill-in-the-gorilla's-body heads towards the cave entrance to free the-gorilla-in-Bill's-body, but along the way he comes across an ambush set up by the gun smugglers and gives way to his gorilla instincts...although with Bill's ability to aim a machine gun and pull a trigger, I suppose. 

After the battle, Bill is able to use the gorilla's body to free himself.

The issue, which I found on Comixology, then contains the short Detective Chimp origin we discussed the other day. It also contains what the Grand Comics Database refers to as "4 explanatory articles", devoted to the "secrets behind" the cover and each of the three origin stories.

I kind of wish Comixology included not just the comics content, but also the letters column and other material then, as the cover asks a direct question, "Why Is This Chimp Crying?" in reference to Bobo, and beneath it says, "See Letters Page For Details."

Alas, I could not do so, and thus even after reading the issue, I still don't know why that chimp is crying...

How Detective Chimp got so smart and solved his first case (at least according to 1989's Secret Origins #40)

In a previous post about Detective Chimp, we learned how it was that he and his fellow 1950s animal hero Rex the Wonder Dog gained their remarkable longevity (Spoiler: It was the Fountain of Youth). 

But how did Bobo get so smart in the first place, and when did he solve his first crime? Those questions are answered in a nine-page strip in 1989's Secret Origins #40. Interestingly, it doesn't contradict the "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" back-up from 1981's DC Comics Presents #35 nor "Meet Detective Chimp!" from The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog #4, so all three stories would seem to be canonical. It's not until 2005's Day of Vengeance that any real revision happens in Bobo's history.

Of course, this Secret Origins story is a rather silly one, perhaps befitting a character like Detective Chimp, and its focus is thus more on being entertaining than on providing important information about the history of its star, a character who wasn't exactly appearing regularly in comics at the time.

If you want to read the story for yourself, I should note that DC has—quite unfortunately—not yet collected the 50-issue, 1986 to 1990 Secret Origins series. This particular short was collected in the 2020 DC's Greatest Detective Stories Ever Told, however, and that's where I found it. You could also resort to Amazon's Comixology too, of course.

The story is drawn by Mark Badger, who actually gets the first credit here, it is scripted by the suspicious sounding "Rusty Wells" and it is plotted by Andy Helfer (Actually, his credit reads "plot & tardiness.") 

If you've been reading comics very long, you probably know the names Mark Badger and Andy Helfer. But who is this Rusty Wells character? Well, according to comics.org, it's a pseudonym shared by the book's editors Mark Waid and Dan Raspler. 

The story opens with a spaceship approaching Earth, which the aliens in heavy spacesuits piloting it call "Sol-3." The ship is a very weird design, looking as much like abstract sculpture as it does a vehicle, and it presages the jagged, chunky, loose art that will fill these pages. Badger's art here is far from realistic, but it's also not what we generally think of when we think of "cartoony" art, either. It has a sketchy, dashed-off look to it.

These aliens are named "Y-Nad" and "K-Ram", easily unscrambled into "Andy" and "Mark", and the former alien, who continually refers to himself as "surfer on the waves of thought," is on a mission to "take a native's puny mind and alter it, enlarge it... ...so that it may contemplate its existence in this cold, empty universe."

On the second page, we see just how unusual these aliens are, when their ship flies into the open mouth of a chimpanzee: The ship is tiny, about the size of a bug.

That chimpanzee is, of course, is the one that will eventually come to be known as Detective Chimp. A page and a half later, the aliens have made their way from the chimp's stomach to its brain, and Y-Nad has done whatever he does to brains to ensmarten them (He uses a tool that looks a little like a jackhammer that emits lightning bolts).

Meanwhile, outside of the chimp's skull, somewhere in Africa, a round man with a huge gray mustache and a pith helmet named Gus is lamenting the failure of his expedition, the apparent result of a constant stream of disappearances among those he is working with. His assistant, Randolph, smiles while eating an apple and listening.

And then things suddenly start to look up for Gus, as the pair see a chimpanzee—the chimpanzee from earlier, of course—using a sharp stick to draw what looks to be a portrait of Blue Beetle on the side of a crate.

When Radolph dismisses the chimp as "a dumb animal," the chimp responds by grabbing the apple from Randolph's hand and then throwing it at his face ("THOK"), thinking his first lines of dialogue in his thought bubbles: "sigh" and "Speak for yourself, butthead."

From this point on, we're privy to the chimpanzee's thoughts. Or, I suppose I should say, Bobo's thoughts. He flees the enraged Randolph, finds a Kaye Daye mystery novel entitled Murder in the Museum and retreats to the edge of the camp to read it (Here's a bit of evidence that Waid co-scripted this story, by the way; Kaye Daye is a deep cut of a DC character, having been introduced in a 1964 issue of Batman in which she was part of the Mystery Analysts of Gotham City).  

Seeing someone dragging a body into the sparse, Doctor Seuss-looking forest and then proceeding to bury it, Bobo strides into Gus and Randolph's tent the next morning and points at Randolph, thinking "J'accuse!"

As it happens, Randolph's murder spree and motivation pretty perfectly match the plot of the mystery novel, and Bobo points this out to Gus and, when Randolph pulls a gun on him, chucks the novel into his chin, knocking him out (Luckily it was a hardcover, I suppose).

"You're coming to America with me," Gus tells Bobo. "Just wait till the world sees you!"

So, Bobo's smarts? The result of tinkering by tiny little aliens operating secretly on his brain. And the solving of his first murder mystery? Well, that seems to come down to more than a bit of luck, but, once he gets to America and partners with Sheriff Chase of Oscaloosa County, Florida, well, he'll get better and better and crime-solving, as seen in the Detective Chimp strips collected in 2023's The Detective Chimp Casebook. 

Bookshelf #17

We finally come to the very last set of bookshelves that I have in the downstairs of my house. Again, these contain my most recent comics collections and graphic novels, those acquired between 2012 and 2014. I have plenty more bookshelves upstairs though, and those are all filled with books I acquired far earlier, probably between 1991 and 2011 or so.

Because this is my newest set of shelves, it is also that with the most room left for new books on it.

The organizing principle for this particular shelf? Well, here size was a big factor. 

To the left, you will find a bunch of Drawn and Quarterly books of a bigger size, from the fancy shmancy 2014 Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition still in its shrink wrap (I'll get to it one day, I swear!) to a couple of Little Lulu hardcovers. There's a wide variety of books between them, the one thing they all have in common being their size and the fact that they are from D+Q...with the exception of an AdHouse collection of Jay Stephens' Welcome to Oddville, which I guess I stuck there because, like those D+Q books, it was far too big to stick with the other books from that particular publisher that I have. 

On the right? Well, these are mostly collection of comics strips. Nancy is well represented, by the quite recent Nancy Wears Hats from Fantagraphics, a very old 1988 copy of The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy (published by Henry Holt, edited by Brian Walker and purchased at 2024's Nancy Fest at OSU's Billie Ireland), The Nancy Show published in conjunction with Nancy Fest (and a book any fan who couldn't make it in person should have on their shelf), a couple of collections of Olivia Jaimes' Nancy and Bill Griffith's superior Bushmiller biography, Three Rocks. (Sadly, The Nancy Show is a little too horizontal for the shelf, so it juts out further than the spines of all the other books, which naturally bugs me a bit every time I look at this shelf.)

There's also a collection of Tony Millionaire's Maakies, Charles Addams' cartoons and Jeff Smith's crowd-funded Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986, collecting OSU student Smith's comic strip for the school paper The Lantern, which he later transformed into the influential self-published comic Bone. (This too is wider than the shelf is deep and thus it also juts out past the spines of the other books.)

Finally, and more randomly, are a couple of books placed there for size more than content: And old and battered The Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes Vol. 2: Wonder Woman that I saved from the weeding at a library (in the time before Wonder Woman Chronicles and the DC Finest collections, the next best thing to reading the old William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter Golden Age Wonder Woman comics was reading about them), Yoe Books/IDW's Alice In Comicland (a part history, part anthology devoted to four color adaptations of and riffs on Lewis Carroll's Alice books) and Yoe Books/IDW's Super Patriotic Heroes (a part history, part anthology devoted to lesser star-spangled heroes like The American Crusader, Captain Fight, The Fighting Yank, Man of War and the like...even MLJ's The Shield and Quality's Uncle Sam put in appearance, the latter in a strip by Will Eisner). 

Art Adams' Creature Features, a great book you probably won't be able to find.

I had read most of the contents of this 1996 trade paperback collection before, having found the 1993 Arthur Adams-drawn Creature from the Black Lagoon adaptation in a back issue bin, and having read his 1992 Godzilla Color Special a couple of times in a library-borrowed 1998 Godzilla: Age of Monsters collection (where it appeared, ironically, in black and white). 

Researching Godzilla comics of late, I learned that Adams, maybe the best Godzilla artist ever, had once collaborated with Alan Moore, maybe the best comic book writer ever, on a Godzilla story (of sorts) in the pages of 1990s anthology series Negative Burn, and that the story was collected in Art Adams' Creature Features. 

And so I was curious to find a copy of the long out of print book. The consortium the library I work at shares materials with did not have a copy in any of its 40 libraries. Neither did the consortium that my local library belongs to. I only saw one used copy for sale on Amazon, and it was selling for the rather expensive (and oddly specific) price of $43.67. 

That left me with two options. I could visit Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus and read it there (a three-hour drive, so more a thing I could do when visiting the city rather than a reason to go visit the city), or I could hope that my library could find a copy on WorldCat that would be willing to share it with us. (The "Cat" stands for "catalog", and it's a resource that connects libraries to one another; it's my last resort for finding books often, but the library that might own the rare book I want might not be willing to share it, so it's never a sure thing). 

Luckily, a library in Roanoke, Virginia both had a copy of this now 30-year-old trade paperback collection and was willing to mail it to Mentor, Ohio, so I was able to read that short—like, three splash panels over four pages short—Adams/Moore collaboration, as well as see the Godzilla Color Special in color (So now I know that G-Force's matching jumpsuits were orange, for example, and that Godzilla's ray weapon was electric blue in color).

Given how hard it is to find this collection, I thought I would take a few moments to break it down here for readers (Although, if you live near Columbus or Roanoke, you should be able to get your hands on a copy). I should note that regardless of how great the book is, it's unlikely to ever be reprinted. Not only is it from Dark Horse Books, but the two stories that make up the bulk of the book star licensed characters, and not only are they no longer licensed to Dark Horse, they are now licensed to two entirely different publishers. 

IDW of course has the Godzilla license, while that for the Universal Monsters (including the Creature) is held by Skybound/Image. The book also includes eight pages of Monkeyman and O'Brien comics, originally published by Dark Horse but I assume owned by Adams (that's what the fine prints says here, anyway), and the Negative Burn short by Adams and Moore. 

I suppose it's possible for IDW and Image and Adams to all get on the same page to republish this book, but it seems unlikely. I feel it would be more likely that these stories might appear in new, different collections from various publishers.

THE COVER

Adams' original cover is dominated by three figures: Godzilla, the Creature and Adams himself, all of whom ae roughly the same size, and all seem to be teaming up against the reader.

Along the bottom we see Adam's Monkeyman and O'Brien in an inset, and Adam's version of Julie Adam's Kay swimming by in her iconic white bathing suit. All three seem to be reacting to Adams and his monster friends above.

Note the strings of saliva stretching between the top and bottom of Adam's mouth. While I don't think most of us think of Adams when we think of the various excesses of 1990s mainstream comics art, such depictions of saliva are a very '90s thing, so it's interesting to see Adams drawing it, and drawing it in a self-portrait. 

THE INTRODUCTION 

This is from Geof Darrow, who is now probably best known for his Shaolin Cowboy but, to 1990s readers, would probably be better known for Hard Boiled, The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot and his many covers and illustrations. 

He pens a one-page prose introduction, and I'm afraid I can't tell how serious it is. 

He starts out by saying he asked Adams why he liked Godzilla, and Adams replied "Nick Adams." Nick Adams (1931-1968) died about a decade before I was even born, so I'm not expert, but I think he might be best known for starring in the TV show The Rebel...? I've only seen him in his two Toho movies: Frankenstein Conquers the World and Invasion of Astro-Monster, the latter of which Art Adams discusses with Darrow in a conversation relayed in the introduction. 

That seems reasonable. It's easy to imagine someone of Arthur Adams' generation seeing that movie at a young age and being impressed by it enough to fall in love with the genre and, perhaps, to be taken with Nick Adams' portrayal of a dashing, heroic, Western astronaut. 

Darrow then says he asks Art Adams what he liked so much about Creature of the Black Lagoon, and he replied "Julie Adams". Again, that's reasonable, especially if Arthur Adams saw it at a certain age; certainly, Fay Wray is why a pre-teen Caleb first fell in love with the movie King Kong. 

Of course, you'll have noticed that Arthur Adams shares a surname with Nick Adams and Julie Adams. 

Is this all a gag of Darrow's, and he's making up these conversations with Arthur Adams...?

Darrow continues:

Art went on for some time, ricocheting between the film credits of Nick and Julia Adams (no relation, I think). As he continued, it occurred to me that Bryan Adams was playing on the stereo and that Art's shelves held numerous books by the likes of Charles Addams and Richard Adams, and videos of films like Adam's Rib, Deep Inside Tracey Adams, The Best of Buck Adams and countless more where the name Adams figured in  either the title or credits.

Now if this were anyone else, I'd have said this was a bit egotistical. But I know Art to be as modest as he is talented; I ruled out ego and put his interests down to mere coincidence. But if it had been an enormous ego at play, I knew few others who'd have as much right as Art Adams.

So yeah, it seems like a long—too long—riff on the fact that Arthur Adams shares a surname with a Godzilla actor and the heroine of Creature to get to the point where he could note that Adams is enormously talented. 

In the final three paragraphs remaining, Darrow notes how influential Adams is on the "hot" artists of the day, and makes a joke about how Adams was often criticized for his speed ...including by those same artists. ("I think the main reason they are concerned with Art's rate of production is because they've run out of Art Adams material to pay 'homage' to and are on their third or fourth Adams retread work, and their editors are at last staring to complain about being billed for the third or fourth time for the same material.")

He also notes that this trade paperback is well worthwhile because the comics within it were "hopelessly under-ordered." 

I assume he's not joking about that, although it does make it unfortunate to readers in 2026, who might want to read these comics now...

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON 

Scripted by Steve Moncuse and drawn by Adams and Terry Austin (the latter presumably handling the inks, although in this collection both Adams and Austin simply share an "art by" credit), this is exactly what it looks like: A comic book adaptation of the 1954 black-and-white horror film.

Comic book adaptations used to be far more popular, perhaps even common, in years past, although they seem to have long been out of style. In fact, I'm not even sure what the most recent such comics might have been. Those that pop up immediately in my memory are the 1989 DC Comics adaptation of the original Batman film by Denny O'Neil and Jerry Ordway (which got a "Deluxe Edition" hardcover release in 2019), the 1990 Archie Comics adaptation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film (by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird themselves, oddly enough, and just re-released in a 35th anniversary hardcover by IDW last month) and 1992 Topps Comics adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (penciled by Mike Mignola, which is almost certainly why it saw a hardcover collection released by IDW in 2018). 

Surely others have been published since though, right?

Anyway, the odd thing about this one was, of course, that it was released almost 40 years after the original film. 

While over-sized at 49 story pages, it's still relatively short for an adaptation of a feature film, I think, but it's quite complete, the creators managing to get it all in there thanks in large part to the man tiny panels on each page, maybe 12 per page or so. 

In that respect, the comic feels a little old, a little small and a little crowded. It certainly doesn't read like a comic book of the 1990s. 

The creators do a damn good job thought, and this is basically the seminal film translated pretty directly into the comics medium, nothing really new or unique added...aside, I suppose, from seeing Adams' renderings of the various characters, and seeing just how awesome the Gill-Man design could be when it's not limited by having to be made out of rubber to latex or whatever and fitted over a human actor.

That is, the monster looks much more monstrous, and more realistic, too.

The only downside? According to Wikipedia, this wasn't the Creature story Adams most wanted to tell. Here, listen to this:

When Adams learned that Dark Horse would acquire the rights to the Universal Monsters, Adams lobbied to them to illustrate the comics sequel to the 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon, but Dark Horse wanted to produce and adaptation of the film first, and told Adams that if he illustrated that, that he would be able to illustrate a future sequel. 

Unfortunately, the article goes on to say, the book suffered from low sales and the Universal Monster comics ended up costing Dark Horse money, so we never got that Creature sequel Adams had planned. 

Of course, that means there's a Creature from the Black Lagoon sequel by Arthur Adams out there somewhere, even if only in his head, yet to be published. Hopefully Skybound has read Adams Wikipedia entry, and is in the process of contacting him to produce that comic for them now...

If you can't find this issue in a back issue bin or get your hands on Creature Features, it was also collected along with Dark Horse's Dracula, Frankenstein and Mummy adaptations in the 2006 trade paperback Universal Monsters: Cavalcade of Horrors.


GODZILLA COLOR SPECIAL 

This 1992 comic was co-written by Randy Stradley and Adams and drawn by Adams. The 40-page one-shot was one of the earliest of Dark Horse's Godzilla comics, following 1987's Godzilla King of the Monsters Special and a 1988 mini-series republishing a manga adaptation of 1984 film Return of Godzilla.

Aside from being totally awesome, it's notable for introducing G-Force, a team of jump-suited Japanese adventurer scientists based on the Fantastic Four (The team consists of a brilliant scientist, his wife, his wife's kid brother and his best friend, a big guy who is also their pilot). A military force by that name was introduced in the 1993 film Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II; Adams and Stradley's G-Force came first, although given the lead time it takes to make a movie, it's possible the two G-Forces were created simultaneously. 

In this story, Godzilla is approaching a fictional island off the coast of Japan, one whose inhabitants have cut themselves off from modern culture (and thus communication technology) in order to lead a medieval style of life. G-Force and the U.S. military arrive during a storm to evacuate them before Godzilla can get there, but it turns out the islanders have their own plan for dealing with Godzilla: A large statue they believe to be a petrified oni, which, under the right circumstances can be brought back to life.

And that's what happens. Though the statue is far smaller than Godzilla, every time it is destroyed, it magically rebuilds itself, bigger and stronger than it was previously. So here we have two seemingly unstoppable foes.

I think this is probably among the better Godzilla comics I've ever read, and, reading it, you'll see why I think Adams is perhaps the best Godzilla artist. Its relatively short page count finds time and space for Godzilla battling warships and Godzilla battling a giant foe, the exact likes of which we've never seen him fight before, and the human action occurring underfoot is fun and exciting. 

This story also includes this funny sequence, in which Godzilla is as petty as I've ever seen him. In a dramatic moment, he stomps on a character, in a big panel that fills two-thirds of a page. The bottom third of the page features a series of three panels. In the first two, other characters react to the death of the character, one shouting "No!" and the other his name. In the third and final panel, we get a medium-shot of Godzilla, who goes on to keep stomping on the clearly already dead character, "THOOM THOOM THOOM" sound effects letting us know he did so three more times in rapid succession, as if to rub the other characters' faces in what he just did. 

There's one line of dialogue here that will seem like an odd throwaway if you read this special anywhere other than Creature Features. "Remember how he helped us defeat The Shrew-Manoid's monsters?" one member of G-Force asks another. Here though, one of the short stories to follow will introduce us to said Shrew-Manoid.

As I said above, this story was also collected in 1998's Godzilla: Age of Monsters, which is another place you can try to look for it. 

MONKEYMAN AND O'BRIEN

In referring to the contents of the trade, the back cover refers to "two rare Monkeyman & O'Brien stories," which, in 2026, seems ironic. That's because, as far as I can tell, all Monkeyman & O'Brien stories are rare now. 

All of the comics are from the '90s, and, as far as I can tell, the only collection was published way back in 1997. Which is unfortunate, as the two super-short stories collected in here made me want to read more about these characters, a super-intelligent gorilla and a super-strong woman, respectively.

The feature was part of Dark Horse's creator-owned "Legend" imprint, where Mike Mignola's Hellboy originated (Indeed, Adams' feature occasionally ran as a back-up in Hellboy comics), and the characters appeared in a two-issue crossover with Image's Gen13 in 1998, a series I'd really like to see.

The two stories here, "The Shocking Case of the Brief Journey" and "Trapped in the Lair of the Shrewmanoid", are both four-pagers. One is from 1993's San Diego Comic Con Comics #2 and the other from 1994's Dark Horse Insider #27. 

The first opens with a full-page splash, making its short page-count feel even shorter, and the story plays more like a scene than a story. The leads are running a theropod dinosaur hot on their heels while O'Brien narrates a little bit about them and what's going on. Before the dinosaur, a brown-ish one with plates on its back the same shape as those on Godzilla's, can gets its jaws on them, they reach "the D-gate," a little glowing device that opens a portal and sends them...somewhere, presumably the present. The dinosaur satisfies itself by carefully sniffing and then eating the D-gate projector. 

And, um, that's it; it's just 11 panels total. Not much to it, obviously, but it allows Adams to draw a gorilla, a dinosaur and a beautiful woman, all things that he apparently likes to draw and he's exceptionally good at drawing. 

The second is 18 panels but manages to feel more like a complete—albeit quite short—story. It opens with our heroes bound in very substantial looking manacles and chains to a large pillar underground, menaced by The Shrewmanoid, who was mentioned in the Godzilla Color Special (Although here there's no hyphen in his name). 

It's clear that he's meant to be an analogue of Marvel's Mole Man, whom he rather exactly resembles, only sans glasses and with a different color scheme. He also has a horde of humanoid followers, although these are little rat people that kinda sorta resemble Rizzo and friends from The Muppets, and commands at least one giant monster. 

In the opening panel, a large one that fills three-fourths of the first page, is filled with these rat people, and, like so many of Adams' drawings, this one seems to be one that he must have labored over for a while, as he draws the hell out of the crowd. It rewards scanning closely too, as the rat people all wear clothes, and some of them seem to be cosplaying familiar comic book characters. One, for example, seems to be dressed as Doctor Doom, only with a red cape rather than a green one, and another wears a trenchcoat and seems to have sanded-down horns like Hellboy.

As for that giant monster, that is K'Nog, a giant naked mole rat. Using their great strength, our heroes escape and prevail, O'Brien tearing down the pillar and using it like a baseball bat to clear the crowd of rat people, and Axwell Tiberius (aka "Monkeyman") grabs K'Nog by the teeth and flips him onto his back with a "WHAM!"

Living as we do in a time when it seems almost every comic ever is readily available, it's kind of frustrating to know there are all these Arthur Adams comics about a gorilla and a beautiful woman fighting monsters out there but not readily available. (At the very least, I would hope DC might publish that Gen13 crossover, maybe in some kind of future Gen13 collection or another...)

Ah well, hopefully someone gets around to collecting it eventually. In the meantime, I am glad that Creature Features provides a bit of an introduction to the concept and characters.

"TRAMPLING TOKYO"

The final entry isn't from a Dark Horse book, but rather from Caliber Press's Negative Burn anthology. As the images are copyright Adams, and the words copyright Alan Moore though, I guess all Dark Horse needed to reprint it int this collection was the permission of the creators. What's perhaps most interesting about it is that while it features Godzilla, or at least a version of Godzilla, this one, unlike the Godzilla Color Special or any of Adams' other Godzilla work, this is not an official Godzilla story, so the version of the character Adams draws here is a unique, original one—Godzilla-y enough to suggest the character, but not so Godzilla-y as to actually be Godzilla (In this respect, the characters' appearance here is similar to the way he might appear in newspaper comic strips, New Yorker cartoons or parodies in Mad magazine and elsewhere.)

The short strip is one of Negative Burn's ongoing features, "Alan Moore's Songbook," in which various noteworthy comic artists would illustrate lyrics written by Moore. “Trampling Tokyo” is told from the perspective of a weary Godzilla who has tired of his life destroying cities and now longs to retire to the peace and calm of Monster Island.

The strip consists of just three panels spread over four pages. An opening splash page featuring the title “Alan Moore’s Songbook: Trampling Tokyo”, a two-page splash featuring two verses in boxes before another illustration and a final splash page featuring a third and final verse. 

Adams’ monster here looks an awful lot like what Godzilla might look like if he were a real creature, one that might exist in nature, rather than the one of Toho's films.

Adams gives us three images of his new, off-brand Godzilla. The first, a splash pages, shows it from the chest up, apparently mid-roar, while smoke fills the background.

The second, a double-page splash, shows the creature’s entire body as it stands in an urban setting, its dorsal plates crackling with energy (electric blue, in the colorized version) while a beam of explosive yellow-orange energy pours from its jaws, destroying some sort of high-tech vehicle, while another such vehicle swoops above the blast, avoiding it.

In the third, another singe-page splash, the monster stalks off, away from the smoking city; in the sky, we see images of its fellow monsters’ faces. One looks exactly like that of the larval Mothra, another looks like it could be a similarly off-brand Rodan, given its beak and suggestion of wings (although it has a mane of spines, unlike Toho’s Pteranodon-like monster), and the other two are distinctly dinosaurian; one could be Gorosaurus, I suppose, given how much like a standard theropod dinosaur that monster looks, while the other is a unique design of Adams’).

Adams' “Trampling Tokyo” version of Godzilla's body looks much like that of Toho’s, especially in the deep grooves of the scaly skin and the plates along its back, but the face is more bestial and dinosaurian, with an elongated snout and deeply-set eyes, on the sides of the head rather than the front.

Its posture is similarly that of a real dinosaur, as it is hunched forward and balanced by a long, whip-like tail. Its arms are short and held close to its body, folding up like those of a Jurassic Park raptor in the last panel, and its legs look as if they are bent backyards, as it stands atop its clawed toes.

This is not a monster that a man in a suit could play...at least not most men, and not easily.

In fact, it would have made a perfect design for the monster that starred in the 1998 American Godzilla; for that film, the creators clearly wanted a more dinosaur-like, more “realistic” version of Godzilla, and here Adams provides one, while still giving the monster just enough Godzilla signifiers that he suggests the original without looking all that much like him.

Moore’s song is short enough that I could probably quote it in its entirety here, but I will instead just note that, among the nuclear age imagery (X-Rays, Hiroshima and Robert Oppenheimer are mentioned), there are a few references to Toho’s filmography.

When Godzilla first mentions Monster Island, he says “The tiny twins hold hands and sing/while Mothra plays guitar”, the “tiny twins” referring to the Shobijin introduced in 1961’s Mothra.

The song ends with another mention of the idyllic nature of Monster Island, “where the luminous lagoon night never ends/and all my monster friends/ are singin’ Gojira! Gojira! Go!”, before repeating the title.

And if Moore’s Godzilla was tired of trampling Tokyo way back in 1995, I can only imagine how exhausted he is of doing so now, over 30 years, some 15 feature films and dozens of comics later...

“Trampling Tokyo” has been collected several times since it was originally published, not just in Creature Features but also in 1998’s Alan Moore’s Songbook and 2005’s Negative Burn: The Best from 1993-1998.