Wasteland Wednesday: Prepping for Apes Victorious

No, not prepping for a session of Goblinoid Games' Apes Victorious, but for the real thing.

Sort of.

You may have seen this video that hit the web recently, showing an escaped animal drill at a Tokyo zoo.  Apparently, it's a yearly thing that always involves someone dressed up like an animal.  This year's is especially poignant, though, since we know how things are going to eventually play out...

Oh, and a note:  I have a love/hate relationship with zoos.  On the one hand, it's awesome that people get to see wild animals.  On the other hand, they're essentially prisons, which makes them pretty miserable places by nature.  I avoid them, but I've never let go of the hope that zoos can be done "the right way" (whatever that would be, exactly), and there may even be some out there doing it the right way as I type this.  With that said, I have no idea if this zoo does it anywhere close to the right way.  But hey, the monkey suit caught my eye.

I love this old comic book ad...

"Hey kids, sell this mysterious salve so we can send you weapons with which you can threaten an escaped zoo animal back into its inhumane habitat!"

I really need to get better about noting where I find ads that entertain me.  Came across this one yesterday while looking through some saved images.  I'm pretty sure it's from the 1950s...not sure of much beyond that...

Dogwood City Regrets: Apes! (Part 2)

In the first edition of Dogwood City Regrets, I lamented the dearth of apes that I managed to put into my month-long journey through a comic book setting.

It's really a shame.

It's even more of a shame considering that I discovered one simian character that was almost too amazing to exclude.  This is the Six-Gun Gorilla:

And he's pretty much exactly what you think he is.

Turns out he's looking for revenge on the Strawhan Gang, a bunch of Old West bandits who murdered his owner.  As his name implies, he achieves this using a six-gun.  So simple.  So perfect.

6GG, as he lets me call him, ultimately didn't make the cut for Dogwood City due to the fact that I shied away from Western characters that wouldn't have a huge impact on the present.  He also appeared as a feature in the British story paper The Wizard, while I focused on more traditional comic book characters.  However, he's definitely filed away for the day I decide to explore the Weird Western history of Dogwood City.

I suppose I should have been familiar with this ape, as he apparently had a couple of comic book appearances in 2013, including one from BOOM! Studios.  I somehow missed those, or...if I saw them...didn't get the historical significance at the time.  I'd love to know how they are, if any of you have read them.

By all means, check out Six-Gun Gorilla on the PDSH Wiki and especially at the website of geek extraordinaire Jess Nevins, who very kindly scanned and posted the serial.

Dogwood City Regrets: Apes! (Part I)

So, after spending 26 days in Dogwood City, I ended up with a few regrets over themes that I wanted to include, but didn't for one reason or another.  After all, a respectable superhero setting should have some sort of standards, right?  And yet I went the entire month without featuring...for example...a single freaking ape?

I'll aim to correct some of these oversights.  To start, here's a Dr. Mortal tale from Weird Comics #5 that features a candidate for a simian denizen of Dogwood City.  (And yeah, as far as I can tell, that last page really is the end of the story...even if it doesn't quite feel like an ending.  All the more reason for the ape to show up again...!)