Now DC has collected that particular issue of the Superman team-up series before—first in 2013's Showcase Presents: DC Comics Presents: Superman Team-Ups Vol. 2, and then in 2021's Superman's Greatest Team-Ups—but, to my dismay, they had only collected the feature stories from the book, the ones featuring Superman and a guest-star, and not the "Extra!" back-ups, some of which seemed to be "Whatever Happened To..." stories featuring Golden Age or extremely obscure characters.
It turns out DC did collect the DC Comics Presents back-up in the pages of 2023's Detective Chimp Casebook, which collects Bobo's original adventures from his back-up strip in The Adventures of Rex The Wonder Dog in the 1950s, but, a few days before I found that, I had managed to track down a copy of DC Comics Presents #35 proper, in full color and with the "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" back-up feature.
Its story is rather different than the story Willingham had Bobo tell in Day of Vengeance (and not just because it doesn't include the ape eventually developing alcoholism and becoming a regular in an interdimensional bar for magic-users). But it clearly served as inspiration, its key event proving pivotal in Willingham's version...which has long since become the relevant one, as Bobo started appearing regularly in DC comics over the course of the next 20 years.
The thrust of the eight-page "Whatever Happened to Rex The Wonder Dog?"seems to be to explaining just how it is that Rex, the canine hero who had fought with distinction in World War II, could conceivably still be around in 1981, some 36 years after the end of the war. Dogs just don't live that long, after all.
The strip is the work of writer Mike Tiffenbacher and artist Gil Kane, but the guy telling the story, directly to the readers as it turns out, is one Sheriff Case, Bobo's human partner from his 1950s adventures.
"Hi!" he says, looking out at the reader, straight through the fourth wall, holding aloft a newspaper with a front-page story about Rex. "Remember us-- Sheriff Case of Oscaloosa County, Florida, and my 'special deputy' Bobo--known far and wide as the famed Detective Chimp?"
"If you do," he continues, "you may also remember the fella in this picture--Rex, The Wonder Dog!"
He's not just saying that because he assumes that, if you know one obscure animal hero from 30-year-old DC Comics than you're likely to know another, but because Bobo's strip ran as a backup in the Rex series for years. Interestingly enough, though Rex's was the original book's cover feature, and it's his name in the title of this short strip, Bobo actually plays a bigger role in this particular story.
The Sheriff goes on to say you/we might be wondering how it is that Rex is still around all these years later, a question he will be answering here. It all began, he says, with Bobo's "latest obsession--to become Rex's biggest fan."
This Bobo, it should be noted, is far different than the one we've seen in the DCU throughout the last two decades, in books like Shadowpact and Justice League Dark. For one, he's nude. For another, he has a bushy white fringe around his face, a detail meant to show his extreme old age at the point of the story's beginning. And, most dramatically, he can't speak English but instead communicates through a series of ape-like noises, like "chk-chk-wagh!" and "whk-whky-Fiit!"
While his chimpanzee vocalizations are presented "out loud" in dialogue balloons, their translations appear in thought balloons below them, letting readers know what Bobo means when he chatters something. When Bobo eventually meets Rex, the two seem like they might be able to communicate with one another telepathically, or through some sort of shared animal language, as they "think" in English at one another.
I've gone back to scrutinize their conversations with one another in this strip a few times now, and I'm not 100% sure they are meant to be talking to one another, or if Tiffenbacher is just showing us what each thinks, and they are essentially "talking" past one another. There's no real instance, for example, of one asking the other a question and that question being answered, and some of the times one of them addresses the other in their thoughts, it's not necessarily clear the other "hears" them.
At any rate, they do seem to be able to communicate with another to a degree, as they have an exchange at one point and, near the climax, formulate a plan together.
As for Bobo's newfound Rex fandom, the first page of this highly economic story shows us Bobo working on a Rex scrapbook in one panel, and then watching a Western starring Rex while wearing a cowboy hat hanging from a string around his neck. The fact that Bobo watches a Rex Western seems to be why he wears a cowboy hat throughout most of the story (well, one reason, anyway; the other will become clear shortly) and to think/talk in Western slang throughout, calling Rex "Marshal" and "pardner" and their opponents "owl hoots" and "sidewinders".
(The image of Rex in the Western shows him riding on a horse, not unlike he did on the cover of Rex #35, although riding a horse is really one of the least impressive feats he performs on the covers of his series. I've long wanted DC to collect those Rex comics so I can see what's under all those magnificent, often bonkers covers, but a small part of me does wonder if it's better not to see the actual stories, as, unread, those adventures will always be so wild and crazy, and I can never be disappointed if the interiors fail to live up to to what imagine they might be like.)
Rex and his human, Danny Dennis, are performing at a local circus benefit, and Bobo "begged" to go, so he and Sheriff Chase do. so. Bobo was so excited to see his idol, who he identifies on the poster outside the tent by pointing and saying "Whee-Plp! Rxxx! Rxxx!", that he apparently accidentally paid his admission with "his lucky liberty dollar."
During Rex and Danny's four-panel highwire act, in which Rex does a handstand, the sheriff says it was clear that Rex was "showing the sad passage of time", and, indeed, Rex loses his footing and falls, although Danny throws him a rope, which he grabs in his mouth and swings down to safety, the audience thinking it was all part of the act .(When my dog started to get old, she had trouble with stairs, and I can't imagine her walking a tightrope or swinging from a rope; of course, she was just a regular dog, not a wonder dog).
Backstage, the two animal stars and their humans meet, and Rex gifts Bobo with a yellow collar reading "Rex" as a souvenir. But then the wonder dog smells "the scent of evil" and goes off in pursuit, his nose to the ground. The curious Bobo follows him, while the sheriff is pulled away to deal with a crime: Two men had just made off with $10,000 in charity receipts!
Rex is, of course, on the scent of the men and Bobo, finally realizing that he lost his lucky coin and that it must be in one of the men's bags, follows. They jump aboard the thieves' getaway boat and lie low until the boar arrives at "the Atlantic island of Bimini".
Once there, Rex continues to track them, until the animal heroes are set upon by an alligator. Rex leaps to wrestle it, thinking, "One of my old tricks--but it usually works!" (Consulting the cover gallery of The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog on comics.org, again, I see Rex tangled with crocodiles on the covers of #6 and #34.)
Rex wondrously chases the reptile away, but is hurt in the process, and lays on his side looking, Bobo thinks, "like I do after too much popcorn!" He decides to get water for Rex, and finds a pool that tastes "funny--but good!" Bobo fills his cowboy hat with the water—see, that's why he's wearing that hat in this story!—and takes it to Rex, who drinks and then continues to rest and recover.
When some time has passed, not only has the pain from Rex's injury gone, he thinks, but so too has the stiffness in his legs (and, readers may notice, so has the white fur on Bobo's face). Rex then tracks the thieves to their shack hideout, and then he and Bobo start wrestling one another, barking and chattering as they do.
When the bad guys come out with their guns drawn to investigate the racket, our heroes grab their guns from them, and then Rex headbutts them both into their speedboat. With Bobo at the wheel and Rex guarding the thieves, they head back toward the mainland. On the way, they are met by the sheriff and Danny in a boat of their own.
Later, when Bobo starts acting hyperactive in a way he hasn't since he was a baby, the sheriff has Bobo checked out by a doctor, who informs him that Bobo is a perfectly healthy, 18-month-old chimpanzee.
"Bobo and Rex had done what the explorer Juan Ponce De Leon couldn't--" the sheriff tells us on the last page of the story, "They'd discovered The Fountain of Youth from Indian legend! Rex and Bobo actually are younger!"
And what did they do with their newfound youth? Well, Bobo seems to have kept acting as the sheriff's unofficial deputy, and following Rex's spectacular career from afar, as Danny grew up to be Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Dennis and eventually landed on the moon, with Rex accompanying him and becoming "America's first wonder dog on the moon!"
As for the magical water of the fountain granting Bobo immortality and the ability to speak to all living creatures, including human beings, in their own language, that doesn't come up in these couple of panels, but the differences between this story and that told in Day of Vengeance could be accounted for by the changes to the timeline wrought by Crisis on Infinite Earths or Zero Hour.
Between this issue and Day of Vengeance, new, original stories featuring Bobo seem to be few and far between, limited to the aforementioned issue of Secret Origins, a couple issues of DC's uncollected (and maybe not canonical) DC Challenge and, post-Crisis, cameos or guest-appearances in The Outsiders, Animal Man, Green Lantern, The Flash, Guy Gardner: Warrior and Martian Manhunter Annual #2 (the "JLApe" event tie-in). I read a couple of these (Animal Man, the Martian Manhunter Annual and maybe that particular issue of Warrior), but don't recall seeing Bobo in them now...but then, I didn't know the character back when I would have read those.
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I was at least somewhat interested in this issue's Superman team-up, as it was with Man-Bat, still in his monster hero era, and I had just recently read one of his Batman Family adventures (the Etrigan, The Demon team-up, covered here). The 17-pager was the work of writer Martin Pasko, penciller Curt Swan and inker Vince Colletta.
(I do kinda love "The Chriopteran Crusader" as a nickname, although it clearly wasn't as catchy as "The Caped Crusader".)
Interestingly, it revolves around Rebecca, the young daughter of Kirk and Francine Langstrom, who we saw being born in that Man-Bat/Etrigan story. While she didn't end up being a demon, she did have a problem: She can't seem to fall asleep, as her hearing is so sensitive she's always picking up noises, which the Langstroms theorize may be a result of the bat-serum they had both taken in the past so altering their chromosomes that they passed a mutation on to Rebecca.
If Rebecca can't fall asleep, of course, she will die, so Kirk does the most rational thing he can think to do in order to find a cure: He takes his family from Gotham City to Metropolis, takes the formula that turns him into a humanoid bat and then breaks into S.T.A.R. Labs to rummage around and see if they've discovered anything that might be able to help his daughter.
He's in the midst of being attacked by security robots—which Swan has drawn endearingly old-school, so that they look like handle-less lawnmowers or vacuum cleaners with long, bendy tentacles terminating in claws.
Seeing the ruckus with his super-vision powers, Superman decides to join the fray because of the monstrous nature of the intruder, but once he arrives, smashing through a window some poor bastard at S.T.A.R. is just going to have to replace, he proceeds to help the breaking-and-entering Man-Bat destroy all of the robots.
Maybe Superman just hates robots...?
Having reverted to human form, the shirtless Kirk stands just-so in order that a dramatic shadow falls across his head, presumably obscuring his identity—although given Superman's vision powers, surely he can see him just fine, shadow or no.
Kirk finally introduces himself, and then takes Superman to the hotel where he is staying with Francine and Rebecca and explains their problem to him. Superman thinks he might have a solution, a machine he found on an alien world that can "rearrange the molecular structure of organic material!"
Convenient! Superman takes the Langstroms with him to his Fortress of Solitude, but soon two unexpected visitors join them, the original Atomic Skull and his new assistant, a shapely woman in a costume that matches his.
I didn't recognize this Skull, who has a skull symbol on his chest and flies around in a charming skull-shaped ship, in addition to having a skull for a head, which he partially covers with a yellow cowl. He can shoot some kind of brain blasts at Superman and is associated with a skull-themed criminal organization. I guess I am more familiar with the second Atomic Skull, the one with a more Ghost Rider-y design.
During the battle that ensues, the Skull shoots Superman with the molecular-rearranger, which results in the Man of Steel only being able to use one superpower at a time. That's still more than enough for he and Man-Bat to be able to attack the Skull's skull-ship. Once aboard, the pair of heroes find out just why the Skull wants the alien device so bad.
Apparently his partner and girlfriend Felicia is actually a panther he had evolved though his experimentation into a beautiful woman. I would say this is super-weird, but then, a big cat who becomes a beautiful woman is a plot point in 1932's Island of Lost Souls, the first Hollywood adaptation The Island of Doctor Moreau too, so...
Anyway, things go badly for the bad guys. Struggling with Man-Bat while in the process of devolving, Felicia accidentally fires the ray at herself, turning her back into a normal panther, and the Skull himself falls out of a hole in the hull of the crashing skull-ship. Superman is able to right the ship, but not to catch his plummeting foe; he's able to fly after him but, thanks to the Skull shooting him with the ray, he can't do so at the super-speed he would need to be able to catch him before he hit the ground.
So Atomic Skull dies (or at least seems to), Felicia turns back into a cat and Superman and the Langstroms are finally able to turn the ray device on little Rebecca, curing her of her super-hearing induced insomnia.
The end.
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