Ape Week: Andy Gorilla – Prize Pupil 🌭

Every time Wonder Woman gets near a gorilla it’s fucking insane, and I can prove it. I’m about to show you the dumbest, craziest gorilla Wonder Woman comic by any standards, but first, let’s do a brief history of Wonder Woman. She is a clay monster created in 1941 by the inventor of the lie detector to be the Justice Society’s secretary as part of his sexual domination fetish. Done. Now let’s talk about her history with gorillas, starting with the normal stuff, like turning into one.

This happened in 1999 during the 9-part crossover spectacular JLApe, because comics rule and are awesome. This is our baseline gorilla story. A superhero gets hit with an ape ray, struggles against gorilla urges, and screams “DEATH TO THE HU-MANS!” It’s the best. Wonder Woman’s DNA is technically enchanted pottery and this gorilla beam said, “I don’t give a shit. I work on shoes too. Have thumbed gogo boots!” It’s like they say in space, “You will never forget… Wonder Woman Gorilla.”

Which is to say, Wonder Woman usually found a way to make turning into an ape weird. This gorilla incel from the stars, on the cover of her own comic, is telling Wonder Woman, “YOU’RE PRETTY ENOUGH TO BE A GORILLA.” And look at his tummy– he’s wrapped up in the Lasso of Truth. He means that.

This is not the dumbest, craziest gorilla story I mentioned earlier, but let’s look at it anyway.

The star gorilla opens the fight by juggling Earth’s Mightiest Woman with his feet while his friends laugh. This is fifteen disrespectful ideas in a blender. It’s like they got a note from the editor to cut down on the sexual humiliation fetishes and this was their attempt at creating female peril to which no one could masturbate. Ha, you fool. There is no straighter path to failure.

As you no doubt guessed, this gorilla had a gun that turns ladies into gorillas, the 1967 version of trying to get your girlfriend into crypto. Here’s how it worked:

This is from the introductory panel because Silver Age comics liked to start by ruining the story with misdirection. For instance, it might show Green Lantern crushing his sidekick with a giant hand and screaming, “Let me lend you A HAND, Pieface!” And then it turns out to be about helping him unshrink after a potion mixup, or maybe an adventure far from Pieface’s forgotten concerns. Nobody cared. This time it wasn’t a trick, though. It was exactly what it looked like. This really was a gorilla on Earth for a sex trafficking mission, and he really did turn Wonder Woman into a gorilla. And for reasons known only to artist Ross Andru, he drew this scene -in precisely the same way- a second time.

By my count, this is six chances to realize those gogo boots should have thumbs. By all the suffering of Sappho, what a missed opportunity. Things turn out okay in the end, though. Wonder Woman Gorilla, in a story called “Wonder Woman– Gorilla!” spent her very first moments as a gorilla sex slave asking to not be a gorilla sex slave. It worked, for all writer minds shatter against the impossibility of combining Wonder Woman with gorilla. And like that sign language gorilla’s second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and ninth kittens, Wonder Woman’s ape adventure ended one minute after it started. Here’s how it worked, in reverse:

Aaah, FUCK!

Where was I? Gorillas? Okay, in the 1950s, America was absolutely haunted by loose apes. Like the rich flavor of Nestle Hot Cocoa Mix, every Golden Age comic story was at least 27% gorilla parts. It was so normal to run into a maniac gorilla that even Wonder Woman had trouble getting excited, and she literally starts every sentence and thought by screaming “Great Hera!”

This is real. I didn’t change the order or words of these comic panels. A gorilla had her boyfriend’s niece, and Diana Prince left to change into her ape fighting leotard. It’s a terrible moment for heroic rescues, but I can’t imagine a finer day for a public park masturbator.

Wonder Woman fought so many gorillas one of her main human villains was actually a gorilla. Giganta, like Nestle Hot Cocoa Mix, got her start as a baby gorilla being burned alive by a sadist.

You’re probably thinking, “This is a woman in an oven with the mind of an ape child, surely this isn’t another Wonder Woman sexual thing.” Ha, you fool.

The first thing Wonder Woman says when she sees a nude woman emerge from this gorilla kiln is, “Mmm, hell fucking yes.” This is a woman who shouts “SUFFERING SAPPHO” whenever a clever horse can count, yet she is so turned on by this human gorilla she skips entirely past astonishment. This is like a door getting ripped off the plane mid-flight and the pilot coming on to announce, “From best to worst, the top titties in the first class cabin are 2A, 4B, 2B, and in a distant fourth place, their flight attendant Kay.”

On Wonder Woman, the TV show, she fought a Nazi gorilla, and I don’t mean that in a cute way like Melania Trump complaining about her sex life to any nail tech who will listen. I mean Nazis held up a picture of Wonder Woman and gave a gorilla electric shocks, the same way they invented the fleshlight. It’s wild. For an entire episode Lynda Carter wrestled a guy in a gorilla suit. It aired almost 48 years ago, but I’ll see if I can find some footage of it…

Oh. For some reason this is a very documented moment in television history. Plus, it looks like multiple people, I’d argue not the best ones, have made adult parodies of this battle.

This seems interesting to me. At the risk of getting distracted, maybe we should investigate mor–

Okay, you’re right, Wonder Woman. Let’s get to the comic I mentioned earlier. From the swirling ape chaos of 1955 comes “ANDY GORILLA– PRIZE PUPIL.”

This comic violates all you know about apes, Wonder Woman, baseball, and storytelling. It is something Sammy Sosa would tell a second spoonful of Fentanyl.

Look at all the effort that went into explaining both the concept of Wonder Woman and the unthinkable events of the upcoming story. You’ll soon learn how pointless it was. As you can see from Wonder Woman’s thoughts, there are no rules here. There are no stakes here. This is, like my last ten and I’m worried next thirty Google searches, horny insanity near a confused gorilla.

Story-wise, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get Wonder Woman and a gorilla on a 2-person baseball team, but this is a needless complication. We open on a hostile high school takeover per the stipulations of somebody’s grandfather’s will? If I’m understanding correctly, Miss Gates is going to lose her school unless she can beat Mr. Scragg in an anything-goes baseball-like match by the end of the week. But there’s more! This was 8 years before the measles vaccine, so the children in her school were taking two weeks off to mostly die. We are one panel in!

This might be too many twists already. This story is moving at a speed any cocoa plantation boss would call “a nice Nestle brand pace.” By the time we’re done with the second panel, Miss Gates has been forced into retirement, has come back out of retirement by suggesting maybe something with Wonder Woman, and everyone has agreed so long as her evil rival gets to make all the rules. So we have our setup: a misogynist high school tycoon is going to rig a baseball game to defeat Wonder Woman. Strange, but this could turn out to be coherent!

Oh wait, the gorilla.

So one of Mr. Scragg’s surprise baseball rules(?) is… this gorilla? For storytellers so particular about the academic trustee board regulations of Wonder Woman’s friend, this part isn’t very fleshed out. This is, by any fiction standards, a sudden and unexpected gorilla from a different plot. A generous reader can fill in the blanks and assume it needs to be enrolled in the school and qualify as a student athlete, but nobody really says that. Also Wonder Woman is the teacher, in addition to being the baseball team? To put it in cinema terms, our Bad News Bears just crashed into an entire Billy Madison, but an ape parody of whatever that is, starring Wonder Woman. We’re at the fucking top of page fucking two.

Think of everything you have to ignore to make this work. Some animal wrangler has an ape you can rent for petty revenge and corporate sabotage, and it was available on a single day’s notice. Also, is this not beneath Wonder Woman? She’s a grown clay monster who can do whatever she wants, but she’s also a princess, diplomat, rescue worker, and world-famous super-secretary. One could make a strong case that a dozen people die every minute she wastes doing this bullshit. But no. She flies in on her invisible jet to teach “nearest book” to a gorilla in human clothes. She does not say fuck all this, how dare you. She says, “Your romper says ANDY. I’ll call you Andy. PAT – PAT!”

The book ripped!? Oh boy, teaching this ape is going to be a lot of work! Cue the teaching montage!

Wait, you don’t… comic book, you don’t have to explain what happened with the torn book. Just get to the accelerated passage of time.

Stop, no. We are… of all the goddamn things happening, a more durable book is the least important or complicated problem to solve. What are you doing? Why are you still talking about the ripped book? Th– it c-can’t read! Andy can’t fucking read it anyway!

Wonder Woman, stop! We don’t need any of this! This could have said “LATER…” over a picture of Andy staring at a steel-plated textbook. Or someone without kitten-crushing ape strength in their hands turning pages for him. Letters on a chalkboard! But no. We leave to watch Wonder Woman steal a priceless space rock and invent the printing press with karate. This is not any part of the process in teaching a gorilla to read, ask any zookeeper. Primatologists are not watching apes shred reading material and saying, “This is hopeless. If only books were made of meteor… my god. Could it be that simple!? Get me NASA’s gorilla division, arts and leisure section!”

Jesus Christ, do you see that “4” in the bottom left corner? We’re on the fourth page! This story has 780 moving parts and we have spent three and a half of our four pages trying to build a better gorilla book.

No. No. Wonder Woman did all that so she could fucking read to Andy!? That can’t be right. Was the writing process in 1955 just ramming different-sized ice picks into your ear? “This month Wonder Woman faces… Baseball ape. Gg. Meteor book. Gllg. Every Adam Sandler movie at once.”

After two seconds of watching this gorilla grin silently at the brightly colored meat making noises, smug Miss Gates is certain it’s working. And maybe it is; I believe in Andy. All I know is this: if I’m watching a gorilla sit near someone reading Julius Caesar, I don’t turn to the man next to me and whisper, “You dumb son of a bitch, you know nothing about rigging baseball games.”

Since we’re doing (at least) a full Billy Madison, Andy has to master all the skills you learn in high school. Which means crossing guard. And Introduction to Ape Crossing Guard class goes pretty much how you’d expect…

… Andy grabs a kid and tries to stop a car with a punch.

Wonder Woman sees this and acts fast. With lightning reflexes, she announces, “MERCIFUL MINERVA! ANDY DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A TERRIFIC IMPACT A CAR CAN STRIKE AT THAT SPEED! HE THINKS HE CAN STOP THE CAR WITH HIS FIST– AS IF IT’S JUST AN ANIMAL CHARGING AT HIM!”

Forget how long it would take to say that, or how she’s wrong about natural gorilla behavior. The more important thing is Wonder Woman sent her baseball team’s albatross and crossing guard student into the field without explaining to it what cars were. This means she said, “Hello, I’m your crossing guard teacher. Ha ha, what? My class is one gorilla? I’m not a crossing guard teacher, but I’ve got to see what this fucker can do!”

So it’s over, right? Andy can’t read and almost killed a kid. That means he can’t play baseball, Miss Gate forfeits, and her measles-infested, now meteorless school goes to Mr. Scragg.

Okay, I guess none of that mattered? The evil guy doing everything in his power to create these convoluted technicalities simply let it go. And the book stuff was possibly unrelated to this baseball event altogether. I’m not even sure how to judge this. This is like the coach of the Goon Squad saying, “Hey, Porky Pig, we can stop filming early if Michael Jordan needs to get going. I think the movie was about motorcycle racing anyway. Chorb. Pancakes glub chorb.”

Maybe the writer knew he’d made a mess because after six pages, he has Mr. Scragg explain the plot again. He thinks he’s some kind of criminal mastermind for setting up this lopsided baseball contest, seemingly giving no thought to how baseball works. “You dumb fuck, if you throw a 3,000 mph fastball, you don’t need outfielders,” says the famously superhuman Wonder Woman with a WHOOSH.

I know how this is going to sound, but it’s right here where the story goes off the rails. A book torn in two, an ape dreaming to be more, words on a fallen star– those were stupid, sure. Pointless, fine. A love song for Jane Goodall, I’m working on it. But now we’re in the middle of a sports story. Sports have rules. You can’t have the bad guy interrupt with “Oh, I forgot to tell you” and add a bunch of new shit. As officially as possible, you’re telling readers nothing here means anything. Why not go all the way and say, “Wonder Woman only gets one pitch and can’t use her hands”? Oh, you did? Fuck you.

When your rules are the mercurial whims of the evil team’s coach, why have the umpire? Can he make calls? If he thinks it’s a strike, does that stand, or does he have to check with the executor of the strangest nearby will? “Are there any rules against ripping your spine out through your pelvis?” should be the last words Mr. Scragg ever hears.

Eventually, Mr. Scragg lands on the idea of all nine batters on his team forming a simultaneous swinging line. Because, again, he has no idea how baseball works.

Why waste everyone’s day like this? I’m starting to think he could say, “The new rule is all apes and Wonder Women, who must be t-topless by the way, lose… NOW,” and everyone would go along with it. Somehow, through sheer estate law misunderstanding, this dumbass was given unlimited power over everything and he is wasting it on this:

They went through all that, and they still hit it right into Andy’s glove. If it wasn’t the first time a gorilla ever tried to field a ball, this would have been the end of the game. Or it would have required a new rule about how ape catches count in reverse or whatever. Let’s take a step back. Why bother to illustrate this absence of an idea? This is worse than 8 blank pages and the words “I FORGOT AND DON’T CARE.” These batters aren’t even starting from home plate. If I was making this up as a bedtime story, my daughter would say, “I’m not your therapist, you drunk piece of shit.”

After Andy drops the ball, Wonder Woman runs over, picks it up, and easily tags out every single runner leaving from an unmarked spot in left field to home. I guess all eight players who struck out counted it as their hit? And Wonder Woman is allowed to use super speed? This is nuts. What am I missing? Oh, of course. I’m forgetting how every Wonder Woman story is a secret sex fetish. Which means… oh no, whatever this fetish is, I think it also inspired Air Bud.

Mr. Scragg has forgotten all about his ability to change any rule he wants, so Wonder Woman and Andy win! They have saved, at least until the next local grandfather dies, Miss Gates’ schoo– wait, wait. Why was Andy here? All that goddamn gorilla did was fail to open a book, not learn to read, do as badly at crossing guard as you conceivably could, strike out, and drop an easy fly ball. He didn’t have an arc… he didn’t do anything! Why was this a gorilla story at all? Is the pointless ape the sexy part to you? You filthy pervert, are you the one who kept putting Randy Quaid in things!? Happy Ape Week, everyone!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jeff Orasky, the all-ape soccer team that brought down Aquaman.