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.