The suspiciously familiar secret origin of Rex the Wonder Dog (From 1990's Secret Origins #48)

Rex the Wonder Dog first appeared in 1952's The Adventures of Rex The Wonder Dog #1. The cover featured the title character dragging an unconscious woman by the collar of her shirt, while an injured man grips a tree, urging him to get her to safety. Flames and smoke fill the background. In the lower right corner, there's a yellow box full of the following words: "Introducing a new hero--Rex the Wonder Dog in exciting stories of danger and courage!"

Was one of those exciting stories of danger and courage an origin for the wondrous dog? I don't know, as I have never read that comic. Nor have I read any of the Rex stories from the 45 issues of the title that followed before it was finally cancelled in 1959. That's not because I'm not interested in them, of course. I mean, look at those covers! Who wouldn't be interested? Rather, it's because DC has yet to see fit to collect and republish them, although I continue to hold out hope that they will do so before I die. 

If Rex never received an origin story in his own book—and he might not have, given that he seems to be a relatively normal dog, rather than masked and costumed person with superpowers—he did get one in 1990's Secret Origins #48, which the publisher might have greenlit because Rex was making a rather unexpected guest appearance in the pages of The Flash around then. 

The eight-page story was the work of writer Gerard Jones*, pencil artist Paris Cullins and inker Gary Martin, and it is entitled "The Birth of Rex the Wonder Dog." When it was originally published, it would have sounded awfully familiar to any comics readers familiar with Captain America. Read today, some 15 years after the release of Captain America: The First Avenger, it will likely sound awfully familiar with far more people (Although, having been written by Jones, chances are it won't be read today or at any point in the future, not unless you can find a copy of this comic in a back issue bin).

Jones isn't a bit shy about writing a Captain America parody for Rex's origin story, referring to the fact fairly directly at a few points, as in the panel above. (And, notably, Jones uses the word "wonder-soldier" repeatedly and interchangeably with what likely would have sounded more natural in either the 1940s of the setting or today—"Super-soldier".)

The mode is thus quite comedic, Jones and, one imagines, many of his readers finding the idea of a heroic dog with as many amazing feats to his name as Rex inherently funny...even if amazing dogs like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie or Green Lantern's pal Streak (who eventually earned top-billing over Alan Scott off the cover of All-American Comics# 99 in 1948) were a relatively prevalent in pop culture in the early- to mid-20th century. 

Cullins follows suit with highly cartoony art. As you can see in the first page of the story, at the top of the post, Cullins seems to both homage and lightly parody Golden Age comics, and his human characters after that first page are cartoonier still. 

Rex, for example, often thinks in terms of pictograms here (not unlike Mark Waid would have his Impulse regularly do later that decade), and when the scientist who developed the super-soldier serum, er, wonder-soldier serum is murdered, Cullins lets us know he's definitely dead by drawing crosses for his eyes (this, despite all the blood from his chest wound pretty clearly communicating that he wouldn't live to see the end of the strip).

Cullins' Rex also appears with a degree of heroic exaggeration in one panel, with his expressive black eyebrows and a toothy smile of white, human-looking cartoon teeth.

Lieutenant Dennis of Libertyville leaves his son Danny playing with his little white puppy Rex to attend a meeting at what he announces is "the secret lab" about "some new super-soldier project." 

There, a Dr. Anabolus explains with drawings how he has developed a wonder-serum that can turn 97-pound weaklings into Charles Atlas-like wonder-soldiers, which, once they made enough of them, would allow the Allies to wrap up the war quickly. The only catch is that the serum is untested, and he can't find an animal subject to test it on, as the U.S.O. is drafting and training "all the animals it can find" to entertain soldiers overseas. 

And obviously they can't go straight to human testing, as "Only a lunatic would test this on a human being fist."

Dennis volunteers his son's puppy, and soon he returns to the lab with Danny and Rex, passing an obvious Nazi spy posing as a guard on the way in ("Oh...oh, Ja ja! I am der new guard.") 

The puppy gets the shot, and he suddenly becomes a full-grown dog, one who Cullins gives bulging dog muscles. 

Also, Rex's thought balloons have now progressed from containing just pictures and symbols to sentences of dialogue. 

(While the story is obviously a comedy, I wonder if it's telling of where superhero comics were at that point that Jones seems to feel the need to explain Rex's wondrousness at all, here with a Captain America-like super-serum giving him enhanced physical and mental abilities, rather than just allowing for the fact that maybe Rex is just a particularly great dog capable of doing things like swinging on vines, riding horses, operating parachutes, fighting dinosaurs and the other feats seen on the covers of his book from the 1950s).

The Nazi who was posing as a guard then appears, replacing his American-style helmet with a German-style one, and he then shoots the doctor dead, next aiming his Luger at Danny. Rex leaps to the boy's defense, savagely but bloodlessly taking down the enemy agent. As with Timely/Marvel's Captain America then, here the special serum results in only one unique hero, rather than an entire army of them.

As Dennis, Dany and Rex walk off, the lieutenant makes an oddly specific prediction for what the future will hold for them:

Danny says that's a bunch of "hooey", but Rex, like the readers, knows better, and the last panel shows him winking at the reader like Clark Kent, the words "The Beginning" beneath it. 

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As long as I've got my hands on a copy of Secret Origins #48, I might as well discuss the rest of the comic, too. 

As you can see from the cover, Rex's secret origin was just one of four that were included in this issue, the others being those of Ambush Bug, Stanley and His Monster and The Trigger Twins (And, as a note about as big as the logos and credits for any of the characters within says, Batman and Robin do not appear anywhere within the comic; they're only on artist Kevin Maguire's cover as props in an Ambush Bug gag). 

Like the Rex story, three of the other features are comedies, while one is a pretty straightforward melodrama. You can probably guess what's what from the characters included.

The feature story is a 15-pager by Ambush Bug's creator Keith Giffen (handling the plot and pencils), Giffen's frequent collaborator Robert Loren Fleming (handling the script) and inker Bob Lewis, with Cynicalman creator Matt Feazell contributing one page (and getting a "special thanks" credit). 

I wonder if Giffen were reluctant to tell this story or not. At any rate, Ambush Bug is presented as reluctant to star in it, or at least to reveal any kind of origin, as the plot, as loose as it is, essentially revolves around the character trying to avoid being in an origin story of any kind, while under pressure from the National Bureau of Origins to do just that.

To that end, the story is full of several suggested origins and feints toward origins, although the true origin of Ambush Bug is probably that revealed in the title for the story, and it is basically the same origin of every comic book superhero: "We Thought Him Up."

An NBO agent visits Ambush Bug in his room/cell at the Roscoe P. Sweeny Memorial Home for Forgotten Cartoon Characters, and he tells our hero that he is "required by law to declare a credible origin story... ...or one will be provided for you!" 

To pressure him, the agent holds up a picture of Mr. Bug's missing child/sidekick, his doll Cheeks. This sets Ambush Bug off on a journey to find Cheeks, a more-or-less random, meandering story that includes an encounter with a Lord of Order, a trip to Heaven, the Feazell-drawn interlude that seems to suggest Ambush Bug's origin as a doodle in young student Irwin's algebra notebook, an appearance by Vril Dox from Giffen and company's L.E.G.I.O.N. series and parodies of  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman's "I shall become a bat!" origin.

Note the words "Big Fat Freakin' Frogs" in the style of the TMNT cartoon logo; does that make this the very first iteration of that one meme based on this installment of xkcd, decades early, or nah?

This is then followed by the Stanley and His Monster story by writer/artist Phil Foglio and inker Keith Wilson, telling the story of how little boy Stanley Dover met the big, pink, furry creature with tusks that Arnold Drake and Win Mortimer created as a back-up strip in The Fox and Crow in the 1960s. This being 1990, this short eight-page story is Foglio's first Stanley and His Monster story; he would go on to write and pencil a four-issue mini-series in 1993.

In this short story, Stanley's monster, who, as was the case in the late 1960s, still looks like something that Jim Henson and his friends might have created, is "one of the nameless lords of the sixth circle" in Hell. As a demon, though, he has seemingly lost his way, no longer being cruel and pitiless, but rather showing mercy to the condemned and generally trying to make Hell a nicer place to spend eternity (He is "responsible for those loathsome 'Have A Nice Day' stickers appearing everywhere," a demon tells Lucifer Morningstar).

Yes, Lucifer. Interestingly, Foglio's two pages set in Hell feature the realm's rulers "the Triumverate", introduced in Neil Gaiman's** Sandman #4 from the previous year. If you recall, the Triumverate consisted of Lucifer, Beelzebub and Azazel the Abomination; artist Sam Kieth drawing them as a handsome blonde man, a giant green fly monster and a discorporate field of eyes and teeth, respectively.

Foglio draws them about the same here, although his Lucifer wears a shirt and pants (He has to wear a shirt, as it will be revealed there's a "Have A Nice Day" sticker on his back) and Azazel looks a bit more solid and a bit more red. Oh, and while Beelzebub is portrayed as a big green fly, upon first mention Lucifer calls him "Belial"...although later he calls him "Lord of the Flies," and Foglio has him speaking with a buzzing lisp and, in one panel, drinking from a cup labeled "Guano Whip."

It certainly seems like the fly guy is meant to be Beelzebub and not Belial, then. What accounts for the mistake? Well, that same year, in the just-launched new volume of The Demon written by Alan Grant, Etrigan's father Belial replaced Azazel on the Triumverate, so it's possible in trying to keep consistent with other DC comics, either Foglio or an editor messed up the exact makeup of the Triumverate. 

Still, how strange to imagine DC once caring so much about book-to-book continuity that a silly, cartoony comedy short in an anthology like this would honor the goings-on of a horror/fantasy series for mature readers! 

Anyway, to punish the Monster, he is exiled from Hell to Earth, where Lucifer assures his co-rulers that the hateful, fearful humans would soon drive the goodness out of him. Indeed, the monster is immediately made miserable on Earth, as everyone runs and screams as soon as they see him...everyone, that is, except Stanley Dover, a lonely little kid looking for a playmate.

The two become friends, with the Monster moving into Stanley's house, when the boy asks his parents if he could keep the "giant red talking dog with tusks" that he had found. They of course say yes, assuming he was talking about an imaginary friend.

The final story in the issue seems like it might have given readers a bit of whiplash, after three comedic stories, two of which had highly cartoony art. This is writer William Messner-Loebs and artist Trevor Von Eeden's story of the Trigger Twins. 

Like Rex, the Twins were once-successful characters that had by 1990 become something of a DC Comics trivia question. Looking them up, I see that they appeared in All-Star Western between 1951 and 1961, which is obviously a damn healthy run (Interestingly, that book was previously All-Star Comics, home of the Justice Society, but became a Western as the popularity of superheroes waned in the years after World War II). They made the cover on a fairly regular basis, too.

The Twins were created by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino and their schtick was that one of them was a sheriff and the other civilian, and it was the civilian who was the better gunfighter of the two. Being identical twins, though, the superior marksman would often impersonate his brother. 

They were apparently so little-seen after the end of their All-Star feature that I think this is the very first time I've actually read a story featuring them, although I suppose it's possible they cameoed in one of those comics where all of DC's Western heroes might have appeared, like, I don't know, 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior #24 or 2006's Justice League Unlimited #19 or 2017's  Scooby-Doo Team-Up #28. By contrast, I've read a handful of comics featuring Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan's modern-day Trigger Twins, criminals who first showed up in a 1993 chapter of "KnightQuest" (They are prominently featured in 1997's Robin Annual #6, part of that year's winning "Pulp Hero" suite of annuals). 

In wordy but efficient fist-person narration, Messner-Loebs takes us from Wayne and Walt Triggers' birth until the point at which Wayne impersonates Walt for the first time. 

During the Civil War, the more shy and retiring Wayne discovers his phenomenal facility with firearms, killing nine members of a Confederate patrol that came upon the brothers before the rest of the patrol, seeing how quickly he took down their compatriots, "plumb gave up." 

The more outgoing Walt, took credit and, after the war, continued to coast on his unearned reputation as a quick-draw "gun hawk." When circumstances lead to him being made sheriff and having to face off against a whole gang of bandits, however, Wayne disguises himself as Walt and blasts through the bad guys, a pretty amusing sequence of panels in which Wayne's narration rattles off the colorful names of all the guys he kills, like Pegs the Swede, Mexican Luke Dagle and Stinky Porker and, eventually, "several whose names I do not know."

*A once prolific writer of comics (DC's Justice League and Green Lantern comics, Mailbu's Prime) and writer about comics (Men of Tomorrow), Gerard Jones pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography in 2018 and has since served a prison sentence for his crimes. I know I mentioned this the last time I had occasion to write about Jones, but it would seem wrong to not do so when discussing his work.

**While never confessing to nor being convicted of a crime like Gerard Jones was, Neil Gaiman was accused of sexually assaulting several women over a period of many years in a 2024 podcast. In 2025, New York magazine published a gut-wrenching article about the accusations against Gaiman that was posted online at Vulture.com. It's hard to read, and it is, in 2026, now impossible to write about Gaiman's comics work without an asterisk.