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. 

When Man-Bat met The Demon (On 1978's Batman Family #16)

One of the DC characters I've been thinking about lately is Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon, having recently encountered him in November's The Spectre omnibus, and during a partial re-read of the Moench/Jones/Beatty Batman run and again in Lobo/Demon: Helloween. So, I was of course quite interested to see him show up in a Man-Bat story from the pages of 1978's Batman Family #16, collected in that 2019 Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden in which I found that "Enter the Ragman" story I blogged about the other day 

Unfortunately, Etrigan didn't make the cover, so I'm just using the character intros from the first page of Bob Rozakis and Michael Golden's "There's a Demon Born Every Minute" at the top of this post. 

Now Man-Bat was created in 1970 by writer Frank Robbins, artist Neal Adams and editor Julius Schwartz (the last of whom Wikipedia credits with "concept"). He was originally an antagonist to Batman. After several appearances in Detective Comics, however, he became something of a hero himself and seems to fit into the broader category of monster heroes, a superhero sub-genre that seems to have been rather prevalent in DC and Marvel comics in the 1970s. 

This portrayal now seems strange, given that Man-Bat has primarily been portrayed as a usually bestial, monstrous foe of Batman's over at least the last 35 years or so. (I wonder how much of that might be attributable to the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode "On Leather Wings", which was itself based on those early Robbins/Adams Detective Comics appearances?) 

But in late 1975, the character starred his own series—even if it only lasted two issues—and was then given a regular feature in the Batman Family anthology series. In these stories, he seems to have retained enough of his humanity to function as a good citizen, combatting bad guys rather than just going on rampages.

In this particular 19-page story, Man-Bat's human alter-ego, scientist Kirk Langstrom, is pacing the floors of a Gotham City hospital, nervously waiting as his wife Francine is about to give birth to their first child (Is all of that nervousness just the usual jitters of a first-time father, or is he worried his chemically induced transformations into a human/bat hybrid might have some effect on his child, I wonder...?).

When he hears screaming and sees medical personnel fleeing from a delivery room, he thinks to himself "This is a case for-- --Man-Bat!", pulls off his shirt, and transforms into Man-Bat, flying in the direction the doctors and nurses have just fled from. (Unlike, say, The Hulk, Langstrom's transformations don't seem to have any ill effect on his pants, so he's always sensibly dressed in a pair of hunter green slacks while naked from the waist up.)

Inside the delivery room, he finds a new mother and a monstrous three-eyed green baby. The baby is able to magically throw tanks of gas through the air at Man-Bat. He punches the baby (yes, our hero punches out a baby), and it soon returns to its normal form, that of a human baby (and it doesn't seem to have taken any real damage from Man-Bat's punch).

What's going on here...? 

Nattily dressed professional demonologist Jason Blood, with some seriously unkempt eyebrows, is on the case. 

He arrives and presents his very seventies-looking business card to an incredulous police officer. 

Soon, there's more screaming from a second delivery room, and Blood chants "Yarva Demonicus Etrigan!" or "I summon the demon Etrigan!", and soon he's transformed to the yellow-skinned, big-eared, horned demon who, as Golden draws him here, also has some prominent eyebrows, apparently the one feature he shares with Blood (see below).

This Etrigan, by the way, doesn't yet speak strictly in rhyme (While Kirby had his Demon speak in rhyme a bit, Len Wein had him rhyming in a 1984 DC Comics Presents appearance, and that same year Alan Moore featured the character in a Swamp Thing arc in which he spoke in rhyming iambic pentameter; afterwards, whether he rhymed or not seemed to depend on the writer and the circumstances of the character, but it sure seems to be he rhymed more than he didn't ever after that Swamp Thing appearance).

Etrigan also, in this particular story anyway, is unequivocally a good guy, and doesn't seem to harbor any hidden agendas or propensity for evil. 

He too battles a demon baby, this one another great monster design by Golden, using "demon-fire" (not sure why, but Rozakis keeps using that term rather than "hellfire") to restore the baby to its human form.

The two monster heroes quickly get on the same page, with Etrigan explaining that his old enemy Morgaine Le Fey seems to be waiting for a particular baby destined for great power to be born, and she is therefore infusing each one with a spell that temporarily turns it into a demon, but so far she hasn't found the right newborn yet (We already knew Le Fey would be the story's villain though; we saw her escaping the dimensional walls of her prison and stealing the Philosopher's Stone from Blood's office in the opening pages of the story. As to how she made her escape, it apparently had something to do with the JLoA's interdimensional transporter to Earth-2 weakening the walls between dimensions or something. We therefore get two panels of Batman and Batgirl bidding farewell to the pre-Crisis Huntress as she leaves Earth-1 for home). 

Given that he's got a child about to be born any minute, Man-Bat obviously wants to put a stop to this turning-newborns-into-demons thing as soon as possible, and so he and Etrigan leave the hospital to search for Le Fey, Etrigan riding on Man-Bat's back as if he were a horsey:

The creators are fast running out of pages, but there's room for a brief, five-page confrontation with the villain, during which Golden lays out a quite cool page in which we see Le Fey framed in the middle of the page, two tiers of panels on either side of her. One features Etrigan, the other Man-Bat, and in these, she menaces them with giant versions of her own hands that appear through the ceiling and floor.

Luckily for Man-Bat, on of these giant hands grabs him by the wings, and so all he has to do to free himself is to revert back into wing-less Kirk Langstrom, snatch the Philosopher's Stone from Le Fey and point it in her direction, which turns her to stone.

Rushing back to the hospital, he arrives in time to greet his new baby, which he reacts to in shock, before the last-page splash reveals why exactly he is so surprised: The baby he's been referring to as "Kirk Jr." throughout the story is actually a girl, Rebecca Elizabeth Langstrom.

In the lower righthand corner of the page there's a little box reading, "Is Rebecca Langstrom actually the latent demon foreseen by Etrigan and Morgaine Le Fey? Only time and future issues...will tell!"

As far as I can tell, no future issues of Batman Family—or any other comics—would address the possibility of Rebecca Langstrom being a demon of some kind. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that she might have turned into a human/bat hybrid at some point, though.  

I liked Yanick Paquette's Batgirl design from "Rotworld: The Green Kingdom"

I recently read Swamp Thing Vol. 3: Rotworld: The Green Kingdom, and I didn't really enjoy it much, in large part because I had previously read Animal Man Vol. 3: Rotworld: The Red Kingdom, which included much of the same contents, including the climax of the conflict (DC's repeating content in mutliple trades is something I discussed in a little more detail, using these books as an example, here).

One thing I did like though was that when Swamp Thing and Animal Man get separated for a while in Rotworld, Swamp Thing finds his way to what's left of Gotham City, and there he meets Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon. She has survived the rotpocalypse thingee by injecting herself with Kirk Langstrom's Man-Bat serum, making her at least part animal and giving her a connection to "The Red," the mystical life web that binds all animal life (Yeah, I know, humans are animals too; writers Jeff Lemire and Scott Snyder didn't really address why humans didn't count as animals in the context of this story).

On the last page of the collection, DC shares a couple of Paquette's designs for the story, including a character design for Poison Ivy, and these two pages, devoted to Gordon or, as he refers to her here, Man-Bat-Girl:

I appreciate how much thought went into designing what is essentially a cameo appearance in a larger story, particularly because the hands of Man-Bat (and the many other characters who have taken Man-Bat serum over the years) always really bug me—you really shouldn't be able to have bat-wings and arms simultaneously, unless you're some kind of magical creature with six limbs, like a demon or dragon or whatever. Paquette just adds fingers, so Man-Bat-Girl has six or seven digits per hand. That works; I probably woulda given her one "human" finger and thumb, and three elongated wing-fingers, but, still, nice to see so much thought put into something like that for once.

Additionally, Paquette gave some thought into what sort of clothing would fit on a body like that, on that, in this case, can change back and forth, so that sometimes it has huge bat-wings and sometimes it doesn't. So he designed her costume around that. Again, another nice solution to the problem and one that, incidentally, gives Pacquette an excuse to draw a particularly sexy Gordon with a great deal of her flesh exposed.

Here's how his Barbara Gordon looked in the final story, when in human form (Note that these pages are non-consecutive, and I'm just posting them here to look at, not read, as they don't really make much sense if you do read them like this):

Unfortunately, we don't get to see what Pacquette's Man-Bat-Girl would have looked like when she was in bat-mode, as she only appears in parts of the book drawn by other artists (there are a lot of artists involved in this story arc), including two panels by Marco Rudy and in sequences by Steve Pugh, Timothy Green II and Joseph Silver and Andrew Belanger. During those scenes, her carefully conceived costume seems to have been forgotten, and she's shown wearing something that looks more like a diving suit, with a back to it.

Crazy Kelley Jones Contraption of the Month:

Batman has developed his own personal Man-Bat Catcher, which shoots out a missile that, when within range of Man-Bat, enters its second stage and fires a net around him.

But wait, wouldn't tossing a net over Man-Bat while he's in mid-air cause him to fall all the way to the ground, badly injuring and possibly killing him, and thus violating Batman's strict modal stance against taking another life?

Yes, it would. If Batman hadn't already thought of that, and included a little parachute, which will gently float the captured Man-Bat safely down to the ground:



Note Batman's usual strong branding efforts on the net, too; it includes a big, bright, yellow Bat-symbol, so anyone who comes across a giant were-bat entangled in a net on the street will know who's responsible for putting it there.