Look, it's a gorilla with a machine gun! (The origins of Gorilla City and Congorilla, from 1989's Secret Origins #40)

If one is interested in the origins of one of DC Comics' ape characters, it stands to reason that one might be interested in others, so I suppose it is well worthwhile to examine the two stories that preceded the Detective Chimp origin in 1989's Secret Origins #40. 

These are of Gorilla City (though the cover says Gorilla Grodd, who is of course featured in the tale) and Congorilla. While both stories are quite fantastical, perhaps even more so than that of Detective Chimp, they are presented in a much more straightforward and realistic art style and with a far more serious tone.

The first story under Bill Wray's iconic cover (the text of which the Grand Comics Database attributes to editor Mark Waid, who must be the "I" in "Because I Demanded It!") is the 19-page Gorilla City/Gorilla Grodd one, entitled "Gorillas in Our Midst: The Secret Origin of Gorilla City". It is written by Cary Bates and Gary Weisman, penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Mike DeCarlo. 

It opens with a six-page sequence in which a mysterious white ship crashes in a lush jungle and is immediately surrounded by variously colored gorillas. They make various gorilla noises "OOGA", "CHEE" and "AH", each of which appears as a sound effect, sans dialogue balloons, and these are among the many letterer Augustin Mas fills the sequence with, other sound effects including those related to the ship itself and a crystal it contains.

The gorillas also find a tiny humanoid in the fetal position within. This flesh-covered creature looks like a human baby crossed with a Hopkinsville goblin, and it attempts to speak when pulled from the vessel, although the alien language is as unintelligible to me as it would have been to the gorillas. It's a nice visual depiction of an alien language, though; not sure who gets credit for it, DeCarlo or Mas: 

Ass for that crystal, a group of apes surround it and lay their hands on it, and then it emits rays in every direction as the apes flee, one of them apparently learning to think in English as it does so, as a thought cloud appears above the ape, containing the words, "...Ruh...Ruh...Run away...!!"

The scene then shifts to 1873 London, where a man in what is apparently an insane asylum of some kind is restrained to a chair while a reporter interviews him (As for that date, I suppose it is worth mentioning that the gorilla was only discovered and described by white scientists a few decades previous to that year, and the mountain gorilla wouldn't be officially recognized until 1902). 

The restrained man, Albert, then shares his "remarkable story" with the journalist, one so strange that it seems to have gotten him branded a mad man and confined within a madhouse. 

That story is, of course, how he and his fellow explorer and adventurer Hughes were in Africa and stumbled upon "a glorious metropolis beside which our own London pales," which Infantino draws like the sort of high-tech, fantastical city he might have drawn for Marvel's Star Wars comics, here colored all golden yellow. It was, Albert says, "a city of beasts: A city of gorillas!!"

The gorillas take them to the little humanoid from the earlier scene, which resembles a wizened baby, and it talks to them telepathically, its dialogue punctuated by nouns with dual meanings, as when it refers to itself as a "prisoner/god" of the gorillas.

It explains the story we already saw unfold and could intuit ourselves, given that the DC Universe has included a secret civilization of super-gorillas called Gorilla City since 1959. The crystal "exploded/enhanced", making the gorillas smarter, and the little alien, referred to as Mentor, further instructed the apes. Because they destroyed Mentor's ship with rocks, it is now stuck here on Earth, worshipped by but also captive to the gorillas.

Mentor further explains that, before it exploded, the crystal emitted two beams, one "straight/pure" that struck Solovar, the other "warped/dangerous". It doesn't know which gorilla the second beam struck, but readers should be able to guess pretty easily.

Solovar tells the men he wants to soon reveal the gorillas' city to the rest of the world, and perhaps the two could serve as ambassadors between the two civilizations. Mentor, meanwhile, wants them to help it escape, and bathes all of them in invisibility to do so. 

A familiar-looking gorilla with a fringe of sideburns dangling from the sides of its head has other plans, too; said gorilla, putting his fingers to his temples, seems to psychically possesses Hughes, who draws his pistol, shoots Mentor dead, and then shouts, "Death to the Mentor!! Death to Solovar!!" 

The gorillas witness this last bit, and administer their own gorilla justice upon the killer:

Albert manages to escape, but no one believes his tale. Given this betrayal by the first human beings to see Gorilla City, Solovar decides to cloak the city and hide it away from humanity. 

I suppose Albert would be long, long dead before The Flash Barry Allen discovers Gorilla City anew, and before the long-lived Solovar decides to finally reveal Gorilla City to the rest of the world. 

That story is followed by the 10-page "The Legend of Congorilla", a retelling of the story from 1958's Action Comics # 247, which was republished in 2004's Weird Secret Origins one-shot and which I detailed in the first and, before now, only EDILW post all about Congorilla.

This newer, 1989 origin is the work of writer Tom Joyner and artists Fred Butler and Kez Wilson. It retains the basics of the original origin. Adventurer Congo Bill receives a magical ring from his African friend Kawolo which, when rubbed, allows him and a large golden gorilla to exchange minds, which proves quite convenient when Bill finds himself trapped in a cave by rubble. 

Despite that, the story is here more complex, and involves treachery and a big gun battle, which, of course, allows Butler and Wilson to draw that panel of Congorilla with a machinegun I posted above.

Here Kawolo is murdered, and the doctor tending him gives the magic ring to Congo Bill, who has heard the story about exchanging minds with the golden gorilla, the creature being the totem of Kawolo's tribe. He's heard it, but he doesn't believe it. 

Investigating the murder with an off-panel group that is apparently the CIA, although Bill refers to them more cryptically throughout, he tells Kawolo's nephew N'Solo that the bullet that killed him had apparently come from an old Russian army rifle, of the sort being regularly smuggled to local guerilla groups. 

While the pair set out to avenge Kawolo's death, Bill asks N'Solo why he didn't inherit the ring from his uncle. He responds:

I suppose I scoffed at him once too often. My years at Oxford anglicized me. Uncle didn't approve.

He used to say, "You are more white than Congo Bill!" Ha! Ha! Uncle saw you as...an elemental force, Bill. White but with Africa's blood in your veins. He was quite poetic about it.

As it turns out, it is N'Solo who killed his uncle and he then tries to kill Bill. In this version of the story, Bill is exploring a cave, tracking the killers, and N'Solo, waiting outside the cave mouth, tosses a grenade in. The explosion doesn't kill Bill outright, but it does cause a cave in, seemingly dooming him...unless that magic ring really does work.

And we already know that it does, right?

Bill-in-the-gorilla's-body heads towards the cave entrance to free the-gorilla-in-Bill's-body, but along the way he comes across an ambush set up by the gun smugglers and gives way to his gorilla instincts...although with Bill's ability to aim a machine gun and pull a trigger, I suppose. 

After the battle, Bill is able to use the gorilla's body to free himself.

The issue, which I found on Comixology, then contains the short Detective Chimp origin we discussed the other day. It also contains what the Grand Comics Database refers to as "4 explanatory articles", devoted to the "secrets behind" the cover and each of the three origin stories.

I kind of wish Comixology included not just the comics content, but also the letters column and other material then, as the cover asks a direct question, "Why Is This Chimp Crying?" in reference to Bobo, and beneath it says, "See Letters Page For Details."

Alas, I could not do so, and thus even after reading the issue, I still don't know why that chimp is crying...

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). 

Black Canary apparently spent the majority of the Golden Age concussed.

Black Canary gets knocked out at a rate of about once per story in the pages of Black Canary: Bird of Prey. All above panels are written by Robert Kanigher and penciled by Carmine Infantino, with the exception of the last panel, which is by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson.