Saturday, October 31, 2015

GORR!!

Have I ever mentioned that the second issue of the Fantastic Four that I ever purchased for myself featured them fighting a giant golden gorilla?

See, Gorr's spaceship crashed in Central Park, and, well, he had a bad reaction to earth's atmosphere because comics:


And then he did the whole King Kong bit...which I'm sure had absolutely nothing to do with a brand new King Kong film coming to theaters soon...

So, yeah, it was George Perez drawing the FF fighting a giant (golden) gorilla:


Well, Sue's force field cut off whatever made him big and fighty...

...and he revealed wy he had come to Earth and sought out Reed Richards and company:

Yeah, I was hooked.

See, the High Evolutionary "created" Gorr, and sent him to Earth, so he could bring back help to fight off Galactus.

And not only was Gorr super-evolved and intelligent and talkative...

He was hella strong.

And he had clothes:

...and Perez drew a great talking golden gorilla...

Man, that's already better than anything they've ever given us in a Fantastic Four movie...

Anyway, after the Counter-Earth/Galactus dust-up, Gorr stayed with the High Evolutionary. He had a glorified cameo in a Marvel Two-In-One story in 1980. And then he was kidnapped by the Stranger during a Quasar storyline in 1990, because Mark Gruenwald...and he hasn't been seen since.

Marvel...you've got a super-strong intelligent golden gorilla (who can sometimes grow to giant-size) in your menagerie of characters--and you haven't used him in 25 years!! What the hell?!?

I expect the All-New, All Different Gorr #1 soon, guys.

From Fantastic Four #171-172 (1976)

4 comments:

  1. Giant Gorillas seems like such a...DC sort of thing to do.

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    1. No :/ ...the Fantastic Four is/was published by Marvel :/ not DC :)

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  2. HA! Your blog is great! Great post, too!

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  3. FOOM Magazine said at the time that Roy Thomas was planning to keep Gorr in the book as a regular supporting character; basically he would have been the FF's butler (which sounds like he would have been Jarvis, except that he could throw down when needed).
    Obviously, that didn't happen. I don't know why not, but it may have been related to Thomas leaving FF abruptly. (He left in the middle of the Frightful Four / Brute storyline immediately after this, which went on for another 70 or 80 issues as a cadre of interim writers kept adding onto the plot rather than wrapping it up... seems like one of them could have fit Gorr in somewhere...)

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