The Lonely One!

Konga is a name to conjure with. The movie, a bit of schlock from the 50's featuring a mad scientist (played to hilt by Michael Gough -- more on that tomorrow) who uses jungle potions to make things grow to vast proportions experiments on a monkey and gets Konga, a giant ape who prowls the streets of London before meeting his apparent doom. And that's the end. No sequels, no need. Konga the movie is a strange but oddly compelling flick

Konga the comic book series from Charlton is the same and different too. Konga survives the end of the first story and becomes something akin more to Godzilla than King Kong, his obvious inspiration. Konga of the comics can survive nuclear blasts and seems to wander the globe with great speed, impervious to the elements for the most part. He is at once part of the world and apart from it. Hence The Lonely One as the title of this Robin Snyder produced collection of some of Joe Gill's and Steve Ditko's most curious Konga stories. This was the very first Konga collection I ever purchased way back when. 

The first story in the collection is "The Monster Hunter" from Konga #11. It tells the tale of world-famous hunter E. Kellington Trent and his romantic partner Miss Lovejoy who want to trap the greatest game of all, and that happens to be Konga who is at once a real creature and almost a thing of myth. The pair stalk the great beast but become charmed by him, and the story ends much differently than expected.

"The Land of the Frozen Giants" from Konga #8 has Konga travel to the great white vastness of Antarctica where he gets frozen, becoming a living statue. He is discovered but before he can be captured and he falls into a sub-world filled with dinosaurs where he must fight ceaselessly for his life.

"The Peacemaker" from Konga #13 has Konga get a bad cold and then invade a southern clime where he finds healing mud in the steamy swamps. While taking the cure, he finds himself at odds with a tinpot dictator who is kept in power by nefarious foreign powers. Konga saves people from broken train tracks and battles the full force of the dictator's military.

Finally, there is "The Lonely One" from Konga #12 a story which reprises Konga's origin story from the movie adaptation, then has the great beast become stranded in the snow in the alps after a mighty avalanche. There mankind must decide whether to save or slay the beast and bring two of the humans who first cared for Konga back again to deal with his current situation.

Also on hand in this collection are two one-page gag comics from Henry Boltinoff and a Ditko short about the origins of mankind.

To say this is an idiosyncratic package is to understate it. But oddly the Konga stories themselves have a neat cohesion. The stories published in the order that they are, have something of an arc to them as Konga prowls the world looking for peace and companionship, and all too often finding only strife and combat. The stories stand on their own well enough, but when taken together to seem to work even better. The ending is a happy enough one.

Konga stories have a humor and a charm not found in just every comic, at least these by Gill and Ditko do. Konga is an absurd character who seems to absorb atomic blasts, yet at the same time remaining an identifiable personality. He's big but not beyond the scope of human character. These are wonderful little morality fables with more to say about the human condition than might at first be surmised.

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