NEAR-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME TWO (1991)

 

This four-issue series, credited to "writer-penciller Phil Foglio and inker K.S. Wilson," never became part of DC's ongoing continuity for any length of time, despite its tying together three different DC franchises. I can't claim that APE II is any sort of neglected gem. Often it comes off like an unholy marriage of Roy Thomas (for continuity-linkages) and Alan Moore (inserting transgressive materials into kids' comics). Given that Foglio sports a comical bigfoot-style-- which is being applied to the silly, short-lived detective spoof from 1968--the humor is unusually shrill and, well, not especially funny. But APE II does make an attempt, however flawed, to follow through on the transgressive vibe I detected, at least in a house ad for the 1968 series.

APE II starts out with girl-on-ape violence.

  

For a moment, this seems like a sequence from the '68 series: a dizzy blonde girl detective messing around with her partner, talking ape Sam Simeon. One big change, though, is that, possibly in deference to feminist imperatives of the period, Angel O'Day becomes more of a tough, no-nonsense action-girl a la the heroines of Chris Claremont. However, while the original series never explained how Angel and Sam became partners in the first place, Foglio devises an origin. As a small child, Angel meets the talking gorilla on a safari in Africa, and somehow or other, Sam gets adopted into Angel's family.

However, Foglio decides that this family also includes Angel's half-sister Athena, a.k.a. "Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five." My guess is that, because Silver Age writer E. Nelson Bridwell created INFERIOR FIVE and wrote stories for the '68 APE series, Foglio melded the two comic series with this maneuver. Thus Sam is raised alongside both half-sisters, who he regards as his real-but-only-figurative sisters. Athena, unlike Angel, is allowed to be somewhat like the dizzy blonde from the 1967 series, but with a more practical difference. Because she possesses immense super-strength, she's unable to have a physical relationship with an ordinary man. She tells her sister that she thinks she might be able to make Sam her boyfriend-- albeit a platonic one. (DC editorial probably said, "NO BESTIALITY.") 

In the midst of this subplot, it's established that the reason Gorilla Sam has been able to walk around the city without (usually) being noticed is that he has some mental powers he uses to fool people. But something starts messing with the people of the city, turning them (temporarily) into a bunch of damn dirty apes. Plus which, Sam and Angel are attacked by a squad of super-strong humans, who turn out to be apes from Sam's old African haunts-- the Gorilla City of many FLASH adventures.             

  Sam, when told that Athena has a thing for him, is aghast, though Angel seems to have become somewhat more reconciled to the idea. Then, the mysterious boss of the ape-men stops by the detective office, puts Athena through a nightmare in which she kills both Sam and her father, and then introduces himself to all as Sam's grandfather, Gorilla Grodd.  

Athena summons (rather unwisely) the rest of the Inferior Five, who are easily defeated. Grodd drags Sam to his laboratory hideout, revealing that he's gained control of an entity called "The Green Glob" (the narrator of a handful of DC SF-stories). He's tested the power before, and now he plans to transform all humans into apes to solve the problem of human incursions on Gorilla City.  

Then, to his credit, Foglio does come up with a sort of "No Exit" take on things, for Grodd forces Sam to reveal that he does have a covert passion for one of his "sisters"-- but it's Angel, not Athena. I won't go into the way Foglio works all this melodrama out, except to say that Sam doesn't end up with either sibling, and everyone's more or less okay with the way things turn out-- except for Grodd, who gets cursed with a love for human junk food.     

Though I didn't find APE TWO very funny, the original feature on which it's based wasn't that great in that respect either. So APE TWO is at least more diverting than APE ONE, and the way Foglio monkeys around (yes, I went there) with the "beauty and beast" trope at least elevates this short series to the level of a near-myth.  

NULL-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME ONE (1968-69)

 

The best thing about the original run of DC's ANGEL AND THE APE -- lasting just one SHOWCASE issue and six issues of a regular magazine-- was the above house ad.

Now, whenever I first saw this 1968 ad, I had been collecting superhero comics for at least two years. Thanks to an easy-to-reach used bookstore where a lot of kids dumped their comics, I had amassed a substantial collection. (Just as a marker, by the time the first SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted on TV in September 1967, I had read reprints of all the Spider-stories that the show was kinda-sorta adapting.) I didn't have much interest in DC Comics' comedy features, so I never bought any issues of AATA. 

I would have been at least twelve whenever I saw this ad, so I'm not sure my memory is entirely accurate. But what I seem to remember is wondering if the opposition of the "Angel"-- a lithe-looking young woman-- with the brutish (albeit clothed) "Ape" was supposed to have some weird romantic vibe. I may or may not have seen the 1933 KING KONG by 1968, but I'm sure I had heard that there was at least a one-sided amour fou going on there. And everyone knew, without being able to put into words, that the classic fairy tale BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was all about an angelic human female getting mixed up with a hideous male brute. As it turned out, there were no real romantic vibes between the titular "funny detectives" Angel O'Day and her partner, intelligent gorilla Sam Simeon. However, I still think that the artist who drew the ad had a little salacious intent-- for I now notice something I didn't in 1968. I might have mistaken the shape with the logo, the form separating Angel and Sam for an angel's wing-- but now I realize that angel-wings don't have stems. The object separating angelic female and brutish male is the venerable fig-leaf of Judeo-Christian art.     

Two years before AATA, one of the feature's creators, E. Nelson Bridwell, had been responsible for another DC humor-title, THE INFERIOR FIVE. But though both IF and AATA boasted roughly the same sort of cornball comedy, IF at least had a rationale for its parody of superheroes. AATA was a detective parody in which a martially-trained human girl and an intelligent gorilla went around solving mysteries. The creators-- which seems like a committee of three or four guys throwing crap at the wall-- don't supply even a minor rationale as to why the two of them run a detective agency, which kind of conflicts with Sam Simeon's regular job, that of drawing comic books. (He sometimes used Angel as his model.) 

Given the short duration of the original title, I gather most readers weren't even slightly curious about the feature. It didn't help that most of the time the stories wandered about from one comic schtick to another with no rhyme or reason, as if the creators thought the fans would simply go ape over a funny gorilla-- or, in a different fashion, over the toothsome hottie Angel, ably rendered by artist Bob Oskner. Probably those Silver Age fans who remember AATA at all recall that it was one of the first times any comic satirized the figure of Marvel editor Stan Lee, in the form of Sam's wacky editor Stan Bragg. However, Stan himself had already produced better self-satires than anything in this comic.

The only story that stays on point in spoofing detective cliches is issue #3. In "The Curse of the Avarice Clan," Bridwell produces a decent sendup of the "old dark house" subgenre, in which some mystery killer seeks to murder all the heirs to a fabulous will. But how many kids in 1968 even knew what an "old dark house mystery" was? 

The last story in the last issue was the only one in which there was a very minor suggestion of gorilla romance. In it, Angel goes on a date with a handsome rich guy, and Sam spies on their date, allegedly because he doesn't think the judo-savvy lady detective can defend herself against a masher. The main schtick of the story is that Sam repeatedly masquerades as human beings like waiters and cabbies, and that only Angel can see through his transparent disguises. It wasn't much of a story, but it's the only one in which there's a little conflict between the two principals-- and though the jealousy angle is only potentially present, it would finally get some development (albeit not much better executed) in the 1991 ANGEL AND THE APE reboot, to be discussed in a future post.     

ADDENDUM: I posted the house ad on CHFB and another poster thought the "leaf" was a bunch of bananas. If any of the serrations along the edge of the shape were rounded, I would agree that this was a good possibility, since banana jokes were frequent in AATA. At the same time, I admit that the shape dividing the characters doesn't look like a real fig leaf-- and in both canonical and pop art, most fig leaves need to have those compound blades in order to cover all the unmentionables.  My revised theory is that the house-ad artist knew he needed to leave room for the letterer to place the logo on the shape, so what he produced is more like a standardized serrated leaf-- and there's no reason to associate leaves with angels and apes unless you're thinking about primeval angel-ape encounters.

ULTIMATE PRIMACY

Returning to the matter of clansgression once more, I've been meditating upon the involved nature of what Bataille called "right relations" as I put if forth in CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 1: 

...there's no cultural consensus that an Old Suitor is automatically to be preferred to a New one, or vice versa. It's not difficult to call to mind multiple examples of Hollywood movies in which it's right and proper that a New Suitor should displace an Old Suitor...

If one were to transpose these "Old Suitor/New Suitor" criteria into familial relations, one would get something along the lines of "primogeniture" (the firstborn's right to inherit from the parents, and, by extension, all other privileges descending from that status) vs. "ultimogeniture" (the exact opposite re: privileges being conferred to the youngest-born). But age is only sometimes a criterion. Often it has more to do with being first to "call dibs," as it were.

A typical example of "right relations" being governed by the "I saw him first' principle appears in the 1960s comedy teleseries I DREAM OF JEANNIE. As the story goes, modern-day Air Force pilot Anthony Nelson opens an antique bottle and frees a beautiful genie named Jeannie, who then schemes for the next four TV-years to get Nelson to marry her.

In the third season the show introduced Jeannie's sister, also called Jeannie, distinguished only by brunette hair. I don't believe that it was ever established which one was older-- maybe it hardly counted once both of them passed 2,000 years-- but regardless, Jeannie II's attempts to move in on her sister's territory was a clear example of alloting right relations by virtue of Jeannie I being "first in line."

 In contrast, from the same time-period, we have the teleseries THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Unlike JEANNIE, this one starts out with a kooky couple that's married from the first episode: i.e., Gomez Addams and wife Morticia. However, in the show's second season, a two-part episode from 1965 revealed that Morticia also had a near-twin sister, Ophelia.

In this flashback tale, it's revealed that Ophelia actually "had dibs" on Gomez, in that their respective families had arranged a marriage between the two. Ophelia was willing to marry Gomez but was also too ditsy to really feel anything about him one way or the other, while Gomez was frankly terrified of the crazy, occasionally violent broad. However, at first sight he falls in love with her milder sister Morticia, and she with him. The comic scenario in which the lovers who are destined to be together is only possible because they have to find some way to get around Ophelia's privilege as both fiancee and (I believe) older sister.

So in both of these examples, we're dealing with a "true love" and a "false love," irrespective of which female character meets the male character first. However, a complication comes up when there's something along the lines of a "No Exit" situation, where three characters are destined to remain apart.

DC Comics' original ANGEL AND THE APE series from the 1960s was a lightweight comedy series about a girl and a gorilla, two detectives who solved weird crimes. Aside from the following house ad, which carried a strong "King Kong" vibe, Angel O'Day and Sam Simeon (guess which is which) had no relationship beyond their business partnership.

A 1991 mini-series by Phil Foglio revived the concept with a little more sexual interplay, and also added a new continuity-wrinkle: lady detective Angel was the sister of another 1960s DC character, "Dumb Bunny" from the INFERIOR FIVE series.  In one issue of the mini-series, the sister with the questionable intellect reveals that she's interested in Angel's partner.

Then, a little later, Sam the Ape has a confrontation with long-time super-villain Grodd (his grandfather, actually), and this results in the revelation that Sam doesn't have any feeling for Dumb Bunny, but that he does carry a torch for his partner Angel-- who certainly doesn't have any reciprocal feeling for him.

This does cause Dumb Bunny some aggravation for a time, though by the story's end she's shunted off to a more acceptable romantic interest (who is at least of her species...)  There's no indication that "the one who saw him first" will end up with Sam, possibly because of that whole "not-the-same-species" thing, though Angel and Sam are still partners at the end of the mini, which to my knowledge remains non-canonical in DC continuity.


So does "clansgression" in the sense of "sister-competition" over a male even exist here, given that one sister wants Sam for a boyfriend, but doesn't get him, while the other doesn't want him, but does remain at least in his company? I would say that Foglio is toying with the more normal trope seen in the previous examples, but has deliberately flummoxed the pattern because he doesn't really want to depict an interspecies romance. Yet one may still say that clansgression exists here in the same I said it could in Wilkie Collins' novel THE MOONSTONE:

My verdict is yes, but with the qualification that the MOONSTONE's "incest" is only transgressive-- and clansgressive-- *in posse.*  Because a unison of two near relations of roughly the same age strongly *suggests* a unison between blood-siblings, the basic situation of a sexual relationship between cousins will always carry a potential for transgressivity, no matter whether the author makes use of that potential or whether the audience recognizes it.-- CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 4.

If Sam had been a human character, I would expect that in a roughly similar scenario Foglio might have left the door open for some future liaison between the detectives-- in which case the sibling-rivalry would have become *in esse.*