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:
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:
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.
Meanwhile, Grodd completes some kind of amplification machine and it's Day of the Animals in Keystone.
Has Grodd won? This round, sure, but another hero appears on this second issue's last page:
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.
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.
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.
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