Rex and Bobo cameo in 1995's Guy Gardner: Warrior #29...as does seemingly the rest of the DC Universe.

Detective Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog next appeared in 1995's Guy Gardner: Warrior #29, and they were hardly alone. This is the issue that featured the grand opening of Guy's Planet Hollywood-style superhero bar in New York City, Warriors. The event drew quite a crowd.

In fact, there's a whole crossover event's worth of guest-stars and cameos in the issue, all lovingly rendered by pencil artist Phil Jimenez, one of only a handful of artists who could handle so many characters and do so with such aplomb.

Bobo and Rex only appear in a single panel, and each get a single line of dialogue. It's a very small panel, though, so I scanned the whole tier to post above. Their inclusion should give you a sense of just how wide a swathe of the DC Universe ended up in the book, as does the panels around them. 

In addition to the two animal heroes we've been following in recent posts, above we see also See Orion, Plastic Man, Tiger-Man, Supergirl, Steel, Angel and the Ape, the monster from Stanley and His Monster, Jade, Sentinel Alan Scott, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Captain Marvel and Lobo.

At this point in the book, we've seen a conflicts of varying degrees of seriousness simmering in the background, but Guy has just morphed his right hand into a big spiky mace and sent Captain Atom flying out the bar. Two pages later, Lobo arrives, unconscious Captain Atom under one arm, and the Czarnian bounty hunter immediately gets in Guy's face. A bar brawl quickly erupts.

As for Rex and Bobo, the former's line is simply, "Humans!", apparently said—er, thought—in a dismissive, perhaps exasperated tone. ("Humanoids" might have been more exact though, given how many of the patrons are aliens, robots, animals and not-quite-humans.)

And Bobo seems to be running from Sam Simeon, the ape in Angel in the Ape, protesting that he was not hitting on Angel. 

You'll note that Rex is thinking his line, rather than saying it, so the power of speech he gained as a result of Hector Hammond and Gorilla Grodd messing with the meteorite in Green Lantern/Flash crossover "Gorilla Warfare" seems to have worn off by his very next appearance. 

And Bobo is speaking his line out loud, not projecting his thoughts, but speaking in a regular dialogue balloon like all of the other talking characters in the book do. I believe this is the very first time we've seen Bobo speak out loud like a regular human being—unless he did so during his appearances in 1985-1986's DC Challenge series, most of which I haven't read—and he would continue to do so in all future appearances (I suppose it's possible here that he's meant to speaking in some kind of ape language though, given that here he's directly addressing a gorilla rather than a human being).

As for the rest of the comic, which was written by Beau Smith and inked John Stokes and Dan Davis, I found it to be surprisingly good. (Of course, I've pretty much always been surprised by the relative quality of Guy Gardner: Warrior whenever I read a back issue; given that the title character's famous for being an insufferable asshole and, at this point, he had a garish design that might have been the worst of any DC character of the '90s and that his powers at this point were dumb and gross, I never expect much from an issue of Warrior. Usually, the art is a weak point, but then, that's obviously not the case in an issue drawn by Jimenez.)

Does this issue's surprising quality have anything to do with how little Guy appears, given that this is his book? And how much of the book is devoted to DC characters mostly just mingling, rather than engaged in fighting supervillains or doing various super-feats? I mean, maybe.

It opens with Darkseid and Desaad looking in on the event from a giant monitor on Apokolips, curious about "a gathering of heroes without the purpose of battle." Guy, dressed in a white tuxedo, welcomes various guests. All goes fairly well, until first Captain Atom and then Lobo arrive and a brawl breaks out, but it ends happily enough, Lobo having drank himself unconscious. Then there's a cliffhanger leading to crossover with Superman in Action Comics.  

As I said, hose panels above probably give you a good sense of how wide a net Smith and Jimenez cast for cameos and guest-stars—and I do find myself now wondering if Smith called for each and every character to appear in the background, or if Jimenez just filled the crowd scenes with whoever he felt like drawing. At any rate, the crowd at Warriors includes the likes of Cave Carson and Sea Devils, a bunch of New Bloods (those in the short-lived team Blood Pack even recommending their reality show to Cat Grant) and a few characters that were appearing in DC Comics at the time, but now seem even more obscure than Cave Carson (Anyone remember Technocrat from the 1993-1995 Outsiders, for example?)

Two were obscure enough that I didn't recognize them, and had to do a bit of research to figure out who they were. These were Fastbak (whose design at least pointed me in the direction of Jack Kirby's New Gods) and Black Thorn, whose identity took me far longer to suss out (A character from the 1983-1988 Vigilante series, I don't think I've ever actually read a story with her in it before).

There are some interesting interactions among all the pleasantries, like Aquaman worrying how people will react to his new harpoon hand only to find Guy ignore it completely and bust his chops about his long hair instead("First Superman and now you...What's the deal with all this long hair stuff?") or Guy's old Justice League teammate Rocket Red Dmitri Pushkin giving him a bear hug.

There were also some genuinely surprising interactions, ones of such note that I was surprised they were happening in a couple of panels of Warrior, rather than elsewhere.

For example, Kyle meets Arisa, former Green Lantern and Hal Jordan's problematic ex-girlfriend:

And as tensions rise and the brawl becomes imminent, Donna Troy, at that point a Darkstar, introduces herself to then-Wonder Woman Artemis, apparently in order to start some shit:

Anyway, Warrior #29 a pretty good comic, one that is well-drawn, takes full advantage of DC's huge character catalog and engages in something I particularly enjoy seeing, the publisher's superheroes just hanging out together, rather than fighting or saving the world as they usually do when they get together in any real number. 

Oh, and of course, 30 years later, it serves a great time capsule of the DC Universe circa 1995.

Now, why Guy and his staff decided to invite a chimpanzee and a dog to the grand opening of a bar, well, your guess is as good as mine...

*********************

Two more quick things before I move on from this issue.

First, remember when we recently revisited 2005's Day of Vengeance, and Captain Marvel said this...?

At the time, I pointed out that he was in a bar in L.E.G.I.O.N. '91 #31, the War of the Gods tie-in where he found himself in a space bar, ordered a milkshake and fought Lobo (A comic which was collected in 2015's Shazam!: A Celebration of 75 Years). 

Well, here he is in another bar. Jimenez draws him quite prominently arriving in a two-page splash along fellow fliers like Donna, Kyle, Steel and Sparx, and he appears in a few panels within Warriors as well, helping Nuklon and Obsidian hang a hammer on the wall, talking to one-time Dmitri about how Guy's jaw is as big as Jay Leno's (?) and then getting dismissively tossed aside by Lobo in the panel at the top of this post (A callback to their L.E.G.I.O.N. fight, I wonder?).

So that's two bars you've been in by my count, Captain Marvel.

Second, remember how I said that Warriors seemed to be based on Planet Hollywood, what with the superhero memorabilia on the walls and in display cases? Well, Smith pays debt to that inspiration with some unnamed cameos from Planet Hollywood's founders, a scene that wouldn't have worked if Smith wasn't here teamed with an artist capable of drawing such likenesses so well:

Oh, and if you're wondering, Planet Krypton, the Planet Hollywood-like superhero themed restaurant introduced in Kingdom Come, debuted in 1996, after Warriors opened. 

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...

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. 

The first appearance and original origin of Detective Chimp

Detective Chimp first appeared in a seven-and-a-half-page back-up strip in 1952's The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog #4, the work of writer John Broome, pencil artist Carmine Infantino and inker Sy Barry. That short story was entitled, simply enough, "Meet Detective Chimp!" and was thus devoted to introducing the character to readers.

That's the first page of it above. As you can see, the story is being told by a lawman, one Sheriff Chase of Oscaloosa County, Florida. He would serve as the narrator for this and all future Detective Chimp stories in the pages of Rex the Wonder Dog, and he would then return to do so in the "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" strip from 1981's DC Comics Presents #35. 

On page two Bobo wanders on-panel, wearing a bright orange ball cap and crying "Ooo--Eee!", which we are told is "Bobo speak" for "You" and "Me." While Bobo proceeds to peel a banana, the sheriff relates the story of how he came to meet Bobo.

Animal trainer Fred Thorpe, of "the famed Thorpe animal farm", has called the sheriff out to visit him one afternoon. While there, the sheriff sees Bobo riding a bicycle with food in its basket. Bobo then begins measuring out the milk that he will feed to Tombo, the gorilla. Are there other animals on this famed animal farm besides the two primates? Perhaps, but these are the only two we see in this strip.

When the sheriff leaves, he says aloud to himself how strange it was that Thorpe had called him out there to tell him something important, but then just ended up talking about Bobo the whole time. Later at his office, the sheriff gets a call from Thorpe's niece, Alice: Thorpe has been shot and killed!

The only witness to the crime? Bobo! 

The chimpanzee seems all excited, and when he takes the sheriff by the hand and leads him back to his car, the sheriff thinks that Bobo must be trying to take him to the killer. Once in the car, Bobo points directions, and he ends up leading the sheriff back to the office he had just left from.

There's no one there but the sheriff's secretary, Pete Drummond, who laughs about it. 

"Those monks are dumb," Pete says while loading a revolver, "Always up to silly tricks!"  

It's outside the sheriff's office that Bobo gets his first line of dialogue in English. While he vocalizes "Ch-Chk!", a thought balloon tells us what he's really thinking: "If only they would listen to me-- But they won't!"

This is how Bobo will continue to communicate for the next 40 years or so, making chimpanzee noises out loud, and thinking in the English language, often in quite simple sentences. 

What Sheriff Chase and Alice failed to understand is that the reason Bobo had led the sheriff back to his own office is because that's where the killer was. Pete Drummond is the one who shot Thorpe. (This isn't that mysterious of a mystery, really, as Drummond is the only other character in the whole story. But then, it is only seven and a half pages long, so it's not like Broome had room to introduce any other suspects.)

Realizing Bobo can actually finger him, Drummond returns to the farm to silence the ape once and for all...with a bullet. Bobo is on to him though, and he escapes his cage and leads the killer on a chase through the nearby forest, where he continually frustrates him—pelting him with coconuts, leading him into quicksand, slapping him with a bent back branch—before the chase ends back at the farm. 

Seeing the sheriff had also arrived there, Drummond tells his boss that it was Bobo who had killed Thorpe...and that the ape had then tried to kill him, too. 

Bobo, meanwhile, opens Tombo's cage, and the much bigger, scarier ape grabs Drummond and forces a full confession from the killer.

In the very last panel, we see Alice handing Bobo a bunch of bananas from a crate marked "For Bobo, Sheriff Chase", as she tells him the sheriff plans to send him such a crate every month for the rest of his life.

"Ch-- Ch--" Bobo says, while thinking, "Boy oh boy!" 

It sure reads like it's meant to be a one-off story, and that Bobo had returned to the Thorpe farm to live out his days with Alice, enjoying crate after crate of bananas. 

But someone must have wanted more Detective Chimp stories, be it DC Comics, or Broome and Infantino, or Rex the Wonder Dog readers. 

Because while the sheriff and Bobo took Rex #5 off (according to the Grand Comics Database, that issue's non-Rex story was "The Saga of Leapin' Lena," starring a kangaroo), they returned in issue #6, and a Detective Chimp story ran in all 40 of the remaining issues of the series.

That second Detective Chimp story in Rex #6 was entitled, appropriately enough, "The Return of Detective Chimp!" 

In it, Bobo dons his Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker cap for the first time, the sheriff saying he had bought it for him. He also starts referring to Bobo as his assistant...perhaps Bobo took Drummond's job...?

Once again, there's a murder with relatively few suspects, and while the sheriff investigates, it's Bobo who ultimately solves the crime. 

This would be the basic pattern of all the Detective Chimp shorts from the pages of Rex. If you would like to read them for yourself, DC collected them all in 2023's The Detective Chimp Casebook (which also includes the DC Comics Presents back-up in which Bobo and Rex team-up, and takes its cover from 2007's Helmet of Fate: Detective Chimp #1, the only other comic in which Bobo's name is in the title). 

That time Detective Chimp accidentally discovered the Fountain of Youth, in DC Comics Presents #35

When I first read the Bill Willingham-written miniseries Day of Vengeance back in 2005, it was one of the first time I had ever encountered the then rather obscure DC character Detective Chimp. As we saw when revisiting  the series a few weeks ago, during the proceedings Detective Chimp, also known as Bobo T. Chimpanzee, reveals his origin story to another character. The story he told covered the time between Bobo was kidnapped from the wild to how he became an alcoholic following the failure of his detective business, explaining how he gained the ability to speak and why he has lived so extraordinarily long in the process. 

I didn't know it back in 2005, but Bobo actually had a couple different comics published in the 1980s that we might consider his secret origin, a back-up strip in 1981's DC Comics Presents #35 and a story in 1989's Secret Origins #40 (the notorious all-ape issue, the one featuring one of the publisher's best-ever covers). The story Willingham has Bobo tell in Day of Vengeance is something of an extrapolation of that in DC Comics Presents. 

Now, I hadn't read either of those in 2005, nor had I before I reread Day of Vengeance just recently, so I just took Bobo's word for it that he was telling the unaltered, unvarnished truth, but, having determined those other origins were out there, I figured I might as well check them out. Today we'll look at DC Comics Presents #35. 

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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So that's some 30 paragraphs about the eight-page back-up in DC Comics Presents #35. Are you more interested in the feature story than the doings of some animal stars from the 1950s? Well, let's discuss that here now too, albeit it as briefly as possible, given the length of this post. 

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. 

I'm beginning to think I'll just plain never get used to the fact that Batman: The Brave and The Bold even exists.

You guys, there is a television show that actually exists in this, the real world, in which Batman, Detective Chimp, B'wana Beast and Vixen all team-up to defeat Gorilla Grodd, Monsieur Mallah and The Gorilla Boss of Gotham City and their invasion force of mind-controlled, machine gun-wielding gorillas.

And that is not even the craziest part of the episode, seeing as how the very same episode begins with a scene of The Spectre using his God-given ghost powers to turn an evil scientist into living cheese in order to entice a bunch of rats to eat him alive. And at the climax, B'wana Beast uses his weird-ass powers to...well, I don't want to spoil it, but...my God, this fucking show.