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. 

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

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.

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...

The Flash, Vixen and Rex the Wonder Dog team-up to take down Gorilla Grodd (1990-1991's Flash #45-47)

Wally West was a few years into his new career as The Flash when he ran up against one of his late mentor Barry Allen's greatest foes, the super-intelligent super-gorilla Grodd. When he did so, the villain had a new and frankly rather terrifying plan to conquer first Keystone City, and then the world, a plan that called to mind a whole sub-genre of horror films.

In order to beat Grodd, Flash would need help from some rather unexpected quarters. His allies? The animal power-channeling former Justice Leaguer, then Suicide Squad member Vixen, and too-little-seen canine hero from the 1950s, Rex the Wonder Dog (A minor DC character who continues to fascinate me, which is why he makes such frequent appearances on my blog...with another to come shortly!)

This particular story arc ran through Flash #45-47, published in late 1990 and early 1991, and was the work of writer William Messner-Loebs and the art team of Greg LaRocque and Jose Marzan Jr. 

By that point, Messner-Loebs had been writing Wally-as-The-Flash since the character had taken over for the dead-ish Barry Allen after Crisis on Infinite Earths (I mean, Barry was meant to be dead back then, but via retcons we now know that he didn't really die after all, right?), and he would continue to do so though 1992, at which point he would hand the baton over to Mark Waid, who was writing the title when I started paying attention to comics (Although I did buy Messner-Loebs and company's 1989's Flash #33 from a back-issue bin at some point in the early '90s, mostly because the cover promised you-know-who...I don't remember anything at all about the issue now, though). 

Given Messner-Loeb's long tenure on the title, there was obviously some ongoing storylines being tended to in this arc. These seem to involve some Keystone City public safety politics and Wally becoming something of a semi-official partner to the city's police department; in these issues, he's partnered with police Detective Cleveland. 

They encounter something weird almost immediately in a rundown part of town: A building with maybe a hundred dogs with it, as well as some partially eaten human bodies. The dogs attack them, and it is immediately evident that the dogs aren't attacking as dogs might but are instead exhibiting strategy and tactics. Soon, the dogs are joined in their attack against the humans by similarly organized cats.

Messner-Loebs and company clue readers into what's going on when they introduce us to a nameless stray dog, the writer giving us his thoughts in narrations boxes. They are simple thoughts that run together. For example, the first such box reads:

Hungry. Tiredhungry. Tiredthirsty. Hungry.

This as the dog sniffs around an alley. It is soon greeted by someone off-panel who casts a large shadow and speaks to him in red-rimmed square boxes. The unseen speaker calls the dog "Little Brother" and leads it to another alley, one full of different kinds of animals.

The voice tells the dog to "Feel the space behind your eyes" and "Know the truth," instilling it with the power of thought.

The big shadow and the mysterious voice belong, of course, to Grodd, and he has been building an army of animals and giving them the ability to think like a human being might. It was he who was behind the building full of organized dogs and cats that The Flash and Detective Cleveland found and fought. Grodd's new animal army gets even bigger and far scarier once all of the animals in the city zoo escape. 

The Flash tracks one of the escapees, a chimpanzee, and he ends up face-to-face with Grodd (See the panels at the top of the post). The still new-ish Flash might have super-speed, but it's not enough to overcome Grodd's army of dogs, his super-gorilla strength and his "force of mind" psychic abilities, and soon our hero is on the ropes, while a dog leaps to maul the fallen Cleveland.

Which is when Vixen appears, on the final page of the first issue #45:

She's not dressed as she was the last time I personally saw her in a comic book (that would have been last fall's DC Finest: Justice League of America: The Return, collecting much of the "Detroit Era" of JLoA), but rather in head-to-toe black leather with a plunging neckline...and a far better, less Wolverine-y hairstyle. 

I wonder, would Flash readers have recognized her here? She had switched to that costume about a year previously in the pages of Suicide Squad, but it's awfully non-descript, and, in this particular image, Laroque doesn't even draw the Tantu totem necklace (Throughout the story, its visibility depends on the panel, but in most, you can see it or the yellow chain it hangs on; in this one, it seems to be absent entirely though). 

Well, if they didn't, I'm sure the next issue box on the letters page would have named her, and the cover of the next issue, #46, certainly does. 

When that issue picks up the story, Grodd clobbers her from behind. She was using tiger powers against the pack of dogs when he did so, which might explain why he didn't take her head clean off. Then, sprawled out on the floor, she takes Grodd's measure:

A mountain gorilla...but different...aggressive...carnivorous...violent...great mental power, but unstable...

...must try to duplicate his kind!

And thus she does so, channeling the powers of a Gorilla City super-gorilla, if not Grodd himself. (Laroque and the art team do a particularly fine job of rendering Vixen's abilities in this arc, the animal whose "powers" she adopts in any given panel appears within the drawing, often in the background, but in subtle enough a way that the reader can see and recognize it, without its presence overpowering the image. I feel this is a better depiction of Vixen's powers than many later ones I've seen).

Vixen then proceeds to kick Grodd's ass, talking in bigger, bolder, wavier dialogue balloons which I guess are meant to be some kind of gorilla voice, which Cleveland remarks upon.

After she tackles Grodd through the wall and demands that he "Get up so I can kill you again...", Grodd gets the fuck out of there. With Flash apparently too banged up to run and Vixen out of sorts from having gone ape shit, they retreat for a breather.

Meanwhile, Grodd completes some kind of amplification machine and it's Day of the Animals in Keystone. 

When our heroes finally track him down again, Grodd takes over Vixen's mind, and has her use her powers to take down Wally, channeling a boa constrictor to squeeze him into unconsciousness. The two heroes and Flash's ally Piper all awake in cages.

Has Grodd won? This round, sure, but another hero appears on this second issue's last page:

Note the narration boxes in the top three panels belong to the stray dog who we saw being taught how to think by Grodd in the story's first chapter, while those in the final panel are, obviously, those of Rex.

It's not explained here, but Rex seems to be able to "talk" directly to other dogs somehow here...as well as to other animals...and even to humans. 

In Rex's fist scene of the final issue of the arc, Flash #47, the army guy at Rex's side answers a question the brown dog asks Rex, and the dog is surprised: "The human understands us?"

"Yes," Rex replies. "He's been well-trained."

Messner-Loebs otherwise doesn't get into how on Earth Rex is able to psychically communicate with other animals and, apparently, humans. I suppose Bill Willingham's retconned version of  1981's "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" that Bobo told in 2005's Day of Vengeance could retroactively explain this as the result of Rex having drank from the Fountain of Youth, but there are a handful of other Rex and/or Detective Chimp's between this story and that one yet.

After the army guy, Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Smith share's Rex's origins with the dog, they get some intel about Grodd's operation. (And who is this Jeff Smith fellow? I have no idea. As far as I can discern, this is his only appearance...unless he appeared in an issue of The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog from the 1950s, none of which have been collected. The human being that Rex spent the most time with in those stories Danny Dennis, who also achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel, as was revealed in the penultimate panel of "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?".)

There are more scenes of chaos as the animal army attempts to overthrow Keystone—that city zoo sure had a lot of animals in it, including a whole pride of lions and what we are told is a herd of zebras—and Grodd is toying with Flash, Vixen and Piper. Victory seems within his grasp.

But Messner-Loebs has a neat twist here, in that once the animals are all as intelligent as Grodd, they are also smart enough to question his plans...and his right to rule over them all as a king.

His animal army on the verge of rebellion, Grodd uses his force of mind to make a violent, gory example of the rats, but by that point, Piper has fashioned an instrument out of a blade of grass to break Flash's shock collar, and then Rex joins the fray: 

Grodd is still too strong for Flash, even with Rex mauling him, but then the remaining rats join the battle to avenge their "grandfather rats", swarming all over Grodd, and Vixen channels the powers of an electric eel to short out his apparatus. 

Grodd is down, his machine in ruins and the war between animals and humans at an end...although there are still a whole bunch of newly intelligent animals in Keystone. 

So, Rex makes a speech:

And thus ends a particularly epic adventure in the life of one of DC's greatest heroes, The Flash Rex the Wonder Dog. 

He would be back before too long though, and in the pages of The Flash again, but that is a story for another time/blog post

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. 

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

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. 

That time Rex the Wonder Dog almost helped found the Justice League (On 1977's Justice League of America #144)

Justice League of America #144 is particularly interesting for two reasons.

First, it addresses the passage of time in a way that, at least here in the 21st century, seems unusual for a superhero comic book.

Second, it is premised on the never before revealed story of the true creation of the Justice League, long concealed from the world and, indeed, even some of its own members. A literal secret origin, then.

The 33-page story, "The Origin of the Justice League--Minus One!", is written by Steve Englehart, pencilled by Dick Dillin and inked by Frank McLaughlin. In its framing sequence, Green Arrow is on the League's satellite headquarters, reading through a thick book labeled "Journal of the Justice League," as one does. 

Apparently upset by what he has just read, he storms off to angrily confront Superman and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who are playing cards, as Justice Leaguers do. How upset is GA? Well, Dillin draws an explosion of energy emanating from his head, which colorist Anthony Tollin has colored red. 

What's got him so worked up? Well, he says that Hal has always maintained that he became a Green Lantern in September of 1959 (a date, an editorial box points out, that was chosen because that was the cover date of Hal's first appearance, in Showcase #22). And Green Arrow was told that the League was founded, "with you a large part of it", in February of 1959, which is seven months before Hal was even a superhero.

So what gives? Well, Superman and Hal solemntly lead Ollie to "the communications quadrant" of the satellite, seat him before a giant monitor (Green Arrow sits down while wearing his quivers on his back? Seems uncomfortable), and play him a tape of Martian Manhunter, who will tell the story that will dominate the rest of the book's 30 pages, when the heroes who would become the Justice League all met one another for the first time and decided to form a team...but to postpone doing so for six months or so.

"It wasn't you we feared-- It was the times!" J'onn says, addressing the camera. 

But let's linger on those dates that Green Arrow rattled off, shall we? 

This issue was released in 1977, and, presumably, the framing sequence is meant to be set in 1977 as well. If Hal became a GL in 1959, that means he has, at the point this story takes place, been superhero-ing for 18 years now (and the League has been around for that long as well...meaning the rest of its members are all at least 18 years into their careers already).

If we imagine that Hal was as young as, say, 20 when he became a Green Lantern, then that would mean he is 38 in this story...and, as we know, this was relatively early in Hal's career. It would be another decade or so before Crisis On Infinite Earths altered the timestream/DC continuity for the first time. 

While those numbers work out for the purposes of this story as regards Hal and his Justice League peers, it's worth noting that Robin Dick Grayson appears in the flashback story, which, again, is set 18 years ago, in 1959. He was a teenager then. And, in 1977, he was still Robin and, apparently, still a teenager (He went away to college in 1969, though, at which point he must have been 18 or thereabouts.)

So, um, obviously that doesn't work.

That same editorial note that mentions how they came up with the month of Hal's Green Lantern origin, credited to "Julie" (who would, of course, be editor Julius Schwartz), also contains something of a disclaimer about the passage of time: "Remember-- We're dealing here with comic mag time! And comic heroes have their own ways to stop the clock and avoid aging!"

Dick Grayson especially, I guess.

As for the story, it is, for its first half or so, primarily a Martian Manhunter one. It begins with his origin, being brought to Earth by a device created by scientist Dr. Erdel, who almost immediately has a heart attack and dies, stranding J'onn.

He takes on the identity of John Jones, and becomes a police detective in Middletown, doing superhero work on the sly while trying to figure out Erdel's device in order to get back home. His life is upended with the arrival of a General Blanx and a gang of other White Martians (Who Green Arrow, and I suppose readers at the time, knew from the pages of JLoA #71).

J'onn, resuming his more familiar form of a half-naked green muscle man, is in the middle of battling the White Martians when The Flash arrives. J'onn tries to explain to Barry Allen that there's a difference between good Martians and bad Martians, but upon seeing the aliens, the locals all start to freak out. 

The Flash tries to calm down the spreading mass hysteria, telling the gathering crowd that he will get someone everyone knows and trusts to head up the investigation: Superman. 

He's never, at this point, actually met Superman though. Nevertheless, he runs to Metropolis and finds the Man of Steel, who is at present in the company of Batman and Robin. The four heroes return to Middletown, where they promptly meet Roy Raymond, TV detective.

"If we alert the nation, this story should generate a lot of help for you!" Raymond tells the heroes.

And it does. A turn of the page reveals a pretty spectacular splash, filled with the 30 heroes promised on the cover: Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Blackhawks, The Challengers of the Unknown, The Vigilante Greg Saunders, the original Robotman Robert Crane, Congo Bill "with the amazing Congorilla", Plastic Man and Rex the Wonder Dog. (Do dogs watch TV...? How did Rex know what was going on, and how did he get himself to Middletown...? Well, I he is a wonder dog, I guess). 

Oh, and also Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, introduced as if they too were superheroes.

Now, even after all these years, I still haven't integrated a deep enough knowledge of DC Comics/DCU history to know this for certain, but I suspect this particular gathering is meant to represent all of—or at least most of—the DC Comics heroes who had their own books or regular features in early 1959, or perhaps those that could have conceivably been around then...excluding the various heroes who were already established as occupying other Earths in the DC multiverse, like the Justice Society and other Golden Age characters of Earth-Two, or the Fawcett characters like Captain Marvel and company, assigned to Earth-S. (A pair of other heroes from that time will turn up in the course of the story; just wait.)

That said, the inclusion of Plastic Man and the Blackhawks is curious. 

They all came from Quality Comics, the Golden Age adventures of which were apparently set on a theoretical "Earth-Quality" and, in 1973's Len Wein-written JLoA #107, a Nazi-ruled Earth-X occupied by the various Quality heroes (Plas and the Blackhawks appear in that issue, but only in flashback). 

I haven't similarly tracked the Blackhawks, but DC launched an ongoing Plastic Man comic in 1966, which was presumably set on Earth-One with the majority of the DC Comics line (although I have read that the series, like several other comedic DC comics, was set on an Earth-Twelve...?). And then there are Plas' various Brave and The Bold appearances, of which there were three prior to this issue of JLoA, to deal with. 

I guess there are, therefore, at least three, possibly four Plastic Mean in the DC Multiverse, then...? (The original of Earth-Quality, an alternate one from Earth-X, that of Earth-One and possibly an Earth-Twelve Plas.)

One can see why DC felt a multiverse streamlining crisis was needed about a decade later. 

Anyway, this massive assemblage of heroes broke up into three smaller teams. Plastic Man, The Blackhawks and Jimmy Olsen followed one lead, which lead them to almost encounter Rip Hunter. Robotman, Vigilante, The Challs, Lois Lane and Congo Bill and Congorilla followed another, which lead them to almost encounter Adam Strange. And, finally, the heroes who would eventually form the Justice League, along with Raymond, Robin and Rex, followed another, which lead them to Ferris Air test pilot Hal Jordan, and the Martians.

After a brief battle, the heroes defeat the White Martians, rescue the green one and plan future public relations. J'onn decides to stay on Earth, which he has come to love, and which he believes, in his words, needs a Manhunter from Mars. 

Given the anti-Martian hysteria of the previous pages, though, Aquaman suggests J'onn allow for a six-month cool-off period before coming out, and Wonder Woman adds that, when he does, "it could be with the backing of all of us".

"You know, we ought to form a club, or society...!" Superman suggests. While Batman says he's not much of a joiner, Flash argues the point: "But Batman-- A league against evil! Our purpose would be to uphold justice against whatever threatens it!"

And so it's decided that these heroes would form a league to uphold justice in six months' time...Hal Jordan and Roy Raymond, who were present for the discussion, both swearing secrecy. 

The eventual line-up of the Justice League, this story suggests, seems to have been determined by who just so happened to be on the team that followed one of the three leads in this adventure. Had the team's divided up slightly differently, Plastic Man or Robotman or Congorilla or Vigilante could have ended up on the team. (Of course, Plastic Man would eventually join the team, in 1997's JLA #5, and Congorilla would join around 2010's Justice League of America #41 or so, after appearing in the troubled 2009 miniseries Justice League: Cry for Justice. As for Vig, he never made it into a comics League, but he was an unlikely inclusion on 2004-2006's cartoon Justice League Unlimited's massive line-up).

Of course, the book doesn't explain why Robin wouldn't be offered membership, or, for that matter, Rex, who found the Martians in the first place...

I guess the Justice League must have put a "No Dogs Allowed" sign in front of their Happy Harbor headquarters...?

(If you would like to read the issue for yourself, it looks like it's been collected twice before, in 2018's Justice League of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2 and in 2020's Justice League of America: A Celebration of 60 Years, the latter of which is where I read it. I'm hopeful DC will collect the issue, and most of the Satellite Era, in future volumes of their DC Finest series, though...)