A Chain Of Chimps!

Today is an excursion down one of the Dojo's patented countdowns as I take a look at my favorite comic book apes. Apes of all kinds are abundant in the comic books as they are in lots of other venues of popular culture. DC Comics famously had a love affair with apes in the 60's when the editors noted upticks in sales when apes showed up on covers. There have been giant apes, smart apes, civilized apes, ferocious apes, and even a golden ape.

So let me jiggle this barrel of monkeys and see what tumbles out. You can tell me if I have strung them together successfully or not. Let's begin.

21. The movie Planet of the Apes was a huge success in the 70's spawning sequels, toys, a TV show and a comic book. There was also a magazine, both were published by Marvel and featured some dandy talent. Whether your goal is to get beneath, escape, battle or got to conquer these blokes no list of favorite comic book apes would be complete without at least a mention of Caesar and his ape associates.

20. On Saturday mornings the spy craze of the time met up with ape craze to give us Lancelot Link Secret Chimp. I'll confess watching an episode these days might be a little tedious but back in the day I loved it as the agents of the Agency to Prevent Evil battled the never ending schemes of  the Criminal Headquarters  for the Underworld's Master Plan. Chimps aren't my favorite apes, but for Lancelot and best girl Mata Hairi I'll make an exception.

19. Spider-Man has an impressive rogues gallery, arguably the finest in all the Marvel Universe. But likely not on the A-list is The Gibbon. Martin Blank has powers and wants to be best buds with his his friendly neighborhood Spider-Man but things go wrong, he gets juiced and ends up battling Spidey as the "The Gibbon". It's a short battle, but I loved it.

18. Saturday mornings also gave us Bingo, a member in good standing with the Banana Splits. I was much too old to admit liking the Banana Splits when they were on TV, but by gosh I did enjoy their zany antics which happened between episodes of other not-that-bad cartoons and such entertainments. I hear there is a rumor they've gone rogue and have been killing folks, but surely not Bingo. Say it ain't so Bingo.

17. The Red Ghost, a spy for Mother Russia needed help when he planned to take on the Fab 4, but the Fantastic Four still got the best of him despite his trio of Super-Apes (gorilla, orangutan, and baboon) getting super powers like super-strength, super-magnestism and shape-changing respectively. I know I liked them when they popped by the Baxter Building.

16. Never read too many Golden Gorilla stories but the idea that he and Congo Bill shared a brain later in their careers was too much of a hoot. That's the kind of wack creativity that has made comics such a wonderful terrain for so many decades.

15. Rounding out the first gaggle of apes is...well...er...Ape. That's what he's called in the hilarious George of the Jungle cartoons and the comic books as well. While George is clumsy, dim, and an all-around goof, it is Ape who is the sophisticated voice of reason in the depths of the jungle. His cool head and refined manner make George a better boy. 

14. Monkeyman was an Indy hit back when the artist reigned supreme in the comics world and comic books were never "hotter". As is often the case Monkeyman was partnered with a beautiful girl, this time to form a duo against evil. Axwell Tiberius is Monkeyman's real name and he's a genius from another dimension brought to Earth when Ann O'Brien opened a portal. She got super strength and stature and he got stuck, but together they were a formidable team in all too few adventures by their creator Art Adams.

13. Cowboy Gorilla is the creation of Don Simpson and while not as successful as Megaton Man or even Yarn Man, he's a hoot. Often teamed with Phantom Jungle Girl he's a force for good alongside the other heroes of the Fiascoverse. Sadly Don Simpson, his creator has taken a step back from regular comic book production and that's hurt Cowboy's chances for the big time.

12. Who doesn't like Magilla Gorilla? While that might seem a rhetorical question it's actually one which could be asked of any of his potential owners, the folks who have tried to take Magilla home from Mr. Peebles' pet shop. Dressed like some misfit hobo Magilla is memorable if not exactly striking, but he means well. Hanna and Barbera came up with a winner with Magilla.

11. When is an ape not an ape? When that ape is the Ultra-Humanite. A super-villain from the earliest days of Superman's adventures, the Ultra-Humanite is the intellect to confront Superman's brawn. His schemes were many and varied but when he decided to become an albino ape, he found the body he'd dreamed of...in our worst nightmares.

10. And then there's Superman's other ape foe -- Titano the Super-Ape. Not unlike the Fantastic Four or the Red Ghost's own Super-Apes, Titano was once upon a time merely a chimp named Toto who was launched into space and irradiated. Returning to Earth he became an enormous gorilla armed with eye beams of sizzling Kryptonite. Take that Superman. '

9. Malevolent is the Mandrill, the sinister creation of Steve Gerber who battled against first Sheena the aptly named She-Devil and later Daredevil with the assistance of Nekra, an albino female vampire of sorts. Jerome Beacham is the Mandrill's real name and he's the mutated son of a pair of scientists once bombarded with radiation. Nekra it turns out is the daughter of a black cleaning lady also irradiated in the same accident. Together they hate the world and themselves and are extremely dangerous. 

8. Monsieur Mallah is part of DC's Brotherhood of Evil, the vile counterparts to the Doom Patrol. He's a loyal follower of The Brain who created him by experimenting on those of his kind. Along with the ductile Madame Rouge they are villains tough enough for anyone. And who doesn't love a gorilla with a gun? Oh that's right -- everyone!

7. Sam Simeon was delightful in his way as a partner with Angel O'Day. They were a dandy and entertaining pair in the relatively few issues of DC comics which featured them. Sam himself was a comic book artist as well as a detective of sorts and the fact he was a gorilla seemed of less concern to him and others as one might've thought.

6. M'Baku the Man-Ape is really an ape I know, but he made a tremendous impact on this Marvel Zombie from the very fist time he showed up to challenge the rule of T'Challa The Black Panther. The Panther had just become an Avenger and needed a villain and Man-Ape filled the bill with gusto. I guess based on the movies he's something of an ally for T'Challa these days, but it's the Man-Ape of yesteryear that makes me happy.

5. Kerchak is maybe the most important ape on this list. Without the ferocious Kerchak and his impact on the life of the one and only Tarzan of the Apes, pop culture as we know it might look quite different. In the earliest tales of Tarzan we see him grow and become a thorn in the side of Kerchak, but when he finally challenges the leader of his tribe to the right to rule he became a king of sorts in the dark territories of the mythical Africa.

4. Another bad ape is Grodd, the infamous member of the Flash's rogues gallery who seeks nothing less than the subjugation of mankind itself. While considered technically a rogue, you always knew that Grodd was something else, something  more dangerous and deadly. The Trickster wanted to make you look foolish and get booty, Mirror Master wanted to prove his mettle in battle against the most potent enemy he could locate, but Grodd just wanted to kill you.

3. Gorilla Man is a delightful character erupting from the depths of Marvel's horror past when the company was dubbed "Atlas". He was a man who was transformed into a gorilla by dint of a curse and that was his tale of morality until he was rediscovered by Roy Thomas and Don Glut and made a part of the 50's Avengers in an issue of What If?. He proved to be a fascinating character and even rated his mini-series at one time.

2. Perhaps the most successful comic book ape was Konga. Based on a British monster flick which wanted to capture a wee bit of the old King Kong magic, Konga landed at Charlton Comics where the ape fell into the hands of the late great Steve Ditko. Ditko imbued Konga with a charming personality, perhaps a bit too broad at times, but the stories have been reprinted time and again since proving that they have a lasting appeal. (More on Konga tomorrow and beyond.)

1. And finally at last we have the number one ape in comics, in fact  he's the number one ape in any list of any kind. King Kong is the well-spring of modern pop culture, a tale in which for the first time a thing which never lived demanded the empathy of the world and proved that all that hokum could be used to tell stories of lasting lingering power. While it's been many decades since Kong fell from the Empire State Building, he's never ever lost his lofty perch on top of the modern imagination.

Rip Off

Amazing X-Ray Vision!

I now have super-powers thanks to the generosity of my two daughters and the wonderful present they gave a few years ago. I love my new set of X-Ray Spex [sic] which makes a man to be dealt with. 

This new ability to see through things, especially the garments of shapely, beautiful women (gasp) makes me darn near delirious with anticipation of wandering the streets and discovering a whole new world.

What do you mean it's an illusion? What do you mean that I really cannot penetrate the privacy of beautiful dames with my lusty glare? What do you mean I'm a perverted old fart for even wanting to do so? I am so disappointed!

But at least I'll look exceptionally cool.

Rip Off

Favorite Heroes Countdown #15 - Megaton Man!

Don Simpson's Megaton Man was not a breath of fresh of air, it was a hurricane of fresh air. The comic was at once a terrific spoof of several classic comic book tropes and styles while at the same time being a compelling story all on its own. Some characters, perhaps developed for a joke, became in time people we cared about as they drifted closer to a sense of reality.

Trent Phloog, the Megaton Man is an absolute fool, but somehow he attracts folks who have qualities of worth. Even Megaton Man's own desire to do good, as misguided as it often is, is noble.

Simpson is a dynamic artist and while he has largely withdrawn from the field was able to tell stories that at once made fun of a form while using that form to tell more stories of the type being spoofed. The fact is that Simpson's love of comics and of the heroes who populate them kept Megaton Man from becoming disdainful while showcasing the evident absurdity of the  concepts. And he did it with magnificent craft.

Rip Off

War And Remembrance - Almost!

I stumbled across this a few weeks ago at my local comic book store. I almost never take a flyer on random comics anymore, but I made a concession for this for a very simple reason -- Don Simpson. I am a huge Don Simpson fan, so much so that in the 90's and going forward I was nearly a completist on his work which has been kindled mostly in the Indie world but also has roots at DC and Eclipse and Image and elsewhere. Once upon a time Simpson was a major talent in the field, but in more recent years has chosen to withdraw to some degree. He put his characters, Megaton Man is the most most famous, online relatively early and once in a while will get something in print.

Now he's drawn this, or most of it. This is the fourth issue of a series which I thought had long ago withered away. War of the Independents (from Red Anvil Comics) sought to bring a higher profile of sorts to a mob of Indie characters and creators by slamming them all together into a Crisis-like event which sprawls across countless comic book universes and plays havoc with any attempt at what once was lovely dubbed "continuity". I don't care about that if the comic is fun, but alas this latest entry (I only ever got the first and third issues of this run because of E-Man and Captain Canuck) is an absolute mess.

Simpson's art is, as always, grand but the story is just a hapless series of micro-events which don't really appear to have any narrative momentum. It's just a huge bunch of characters doing some stuff for a period of time, and then the book stops. Simpson does get to play out his long-running notion that Megaton Man and The Tick are visually identical, but even that gets somewhat humdrum by the end. There's an idea that more of this series will come, but unless the artwork is worthy, I won't be sampling it. Given how long it is between installments, I likely won't remember I said that though.

Rip Off

Man Of Molecules!

Don Simpson's Megaton Man erupted from Kitchen Sink in 1984, a wacky send up of superhero comics and a rowdy and sharply crafted melange of elements which seemed not only to poke fun at superheroes but also the audience who craved them. The first issue looks like a lost issue of Marvel's old parody book Not Brand Echh which itself was a "Marvelized" version of the vintage spoof comics in the MAD comics vein. Simpson's artwork evokes a Jack Kirby feel with a strong dose of Jim Steranko worship. There is frankly little of Simpson's own distinctive look in these earliest efforts.

The first issue begins in media res as Megaton Man (the Man of Molecules), a drippingly rich satire of an overly developed superhero returns from a mission in the past in the middle of the downtown skyscraper headquarters of the Megatropolis Quartet. So in in a single page we have both Marvel and DC getting barbed and the weird blend continues as we discover motifs from both companies being flung about. There is even a full page send up the classic Doonsbury comic strip which was still all the rage in the mid 80's. There's no doubt this comic book is a product of its time.

The second issue of the series continues in much the same mode as the first. We get a closer look at the Megatropolis Quartet made up Liquid Man, the Human Meltdown, Yarn Man and See-Thru Girl. The main point still seems to be to send up the vintage comics of the Bronze and Silver Ages with outlandish but oddly recognizable villains and situations. Megaton Man (Trent Phloog a bogus secret identity of a "reporter" who works at a paper called "The Manhattan Project") everyone seems to see through immediately and then totally forget) joins the Megatropolis Quartet and but that doesn't really work out as it ought, but still feels like many of the old stories we were reading at the time in mainstream comics. The artwork took on a more purely Steranko feel with some pages and panels evoking him really strongly.

With the third issue we begin to see how the this going to develop beyond the one-joke nature of the premise. The crazy compression of imagery begins to loosen up and we encounter characters who behave slightly more like real people with actual recognizable motivations. In particular the saga of cliched love interests Pamela Jointly and Stella Starlight (See-Thru Girl) go off to discover themselves away from the pawing misogyny of both Megaton Man and Rex Flaccid, the Liquid Man. College is seen as the place to do that, but it too comes under a withering indictment as the absurdity of the endeavor is explored.

We begin to get a sense where this series is headed with a story which folds back into the history of both Megaton Man and the Megatropolis Quartet to show hour Stella Starlight is disenchanted with her marriage to the cold and sometimes cruel Liquid Man. We also are introduced to I.C.H.H.L. a parody of S.H.I.E.L.D. which stands for "Ivy Covered Halls of Higher Learning" and the series begins to shift its focus more to a satire about college life and the alternatives. We also meet Wall Man a spoof of Spider-Man who comes to the offices of The Manhattan Project to pick a bone. Lots of stuff is folded into the series at this point, all of it with a decided sense of Steranko grandeur.

The next issue is a more detailed look at the romance between Stella and Megaton Man and the consequences of that which strike so close to reality that the veneer of a comic merely dedicated to spoofing superheroes is starting to shred in significant ways. Simpson's own personal art style in this issue is starting to break through a bit as the homages to Kirby and especially Steranko diminish.

These first five issues of Megaton Man are worthy comics, coming from a talented newcomer who uses these pages to pour out his interests in torrents which if anything so enrich the pages that getting it all in a single pass is unlikely. Like the great "chicken fat" style of Will Elder, this comic though drawing influences from other sources has that same intoxicating density.

And I haven't even mentioned the "Partyers from Mars". 

Rip Off

Trent Phloog On Patrol!

You really have to be a Megaton Man fan to get that heading.

I love Megaton Man. Don Simpson's wacked-out parody hero is on my all-time fave list. His run at Kitchen Sink in the early 80's is among the finest spoofs of the superhero genre ever, and possibly the last moment to do one since in these post-Crisis days a parody of superheroes seems redundant and unnecessary.

I have pretty much the whole Megaton Man canon, and some of them were very hard to find. I've even had the pleasure of meeting Don Simpson many years ago and getting his autograph on an issue or two. He's a friendly fellow who was inspired by Marvel Comics and his artistic hero John Romita to try his hand at comics and he's been very successful. Along with Megaton Man, he's done a wonderful (at least I think so) King Kong adaptation, a rich science fiction series called Border Worlds, some erotic comics under the name of "Anton Drek" (most of this stuff I don't have and it's pretty expensive) some work for DC'sWasteland series, and more recently various illustration jobs and advertising gigs. Sadly he seems to have given up comics for the most part after his self-publishing gig dwindled away in the middle 90's.

I didn't know it, but he illustrated Al Franken's books (now I've got to get those too) and that burst of notoriety apparently got I Books to issue a reprint of the original Megaton Man stories from Kitchen Sink a few years back. It's a lovely cover, features a few new pages by Simpson starring Al Franken and a few extras, but the core of the book is the first five issues of Megaton Man. Those early issues evoke the late 60's Marvel experience as vividly as any pastiche I've ever come across. The page design, the lettering, the whole thing just screams old Marvel. Simpson's style was really different then, much more about linework and detail and less the more-Romita style he uses now. It's a wonderful send-up, tart but still with charm.

If you're a Marvel fan and you've never sampled Megaton Man, the early stuff in particular, you might like it.

Rip Off