Keller's Comics Corner: Big Ben and his Traveling Ape-Stars

In an earlier article, I mentioned in passing that DC had published several series of Strange Sports Stories. While perusing the run of Action Comics that included the subject of my most recent article, a DC Comics "house ad" for reprints of several of those stories in DC Special # 7 provided the perfect segue into discussing these standalone stories. I was originally planning to discuss all of the baseball-themed stories (in order of publication) in a single article, but after reading the specific baseball story reprinted in that issue, I realized that it deserves its own article on Royals Review, because it might (just might - perhaps I'm reading too much into it) possibly connect to a single point in Kansas City baseball history.

Background

No one is sure why gorillas have long held such a great fascination for readers of comic books. Perhaps it's part of a greater pop-culture phenomenon that started with King Kong, or maybe it goes all the way back to Tarzan, but there's no question that of all animals, gorillas made a particularly effective drawing card on the covers of comic books. The theme was so common, that DC once dedicated an entire reprint issue to the subject. Benito Cerino, writing for the web site Comics Alliance, wrote up a well-researched history of the phenomenon, and has this to say about how popular they became:

The real turning point for gorillas, the year that really made them a star, was 1951. This was the year that Strange Adventures #8 came out, featuring the story "The Incredible Story of an Ape With a Human Brain." At this time, editors were anxious to grab on to any trend they could that would increase sales (plus ça change...), and apparently Strange Adventures #8 sold pretty well. Legendary DC editor Julius Schwartz once recalled that "[DC editorial director] Irwin Donenfeld called me in and said we should try it again. Finally all the editors wanted to use gorilla covers, and he said no more than one a month."

Soon they were pushing that "one gorilla a month" rule to the limit. DC's sci-fi/fantasy/horror titles such as Strange Adventures and Tales of the Unexpected have since become notorious for their gorilla covers. Even in this not-quite-Silver Age era, superheroes were getting into the gorilla mix, with Batman fighting the Gorilla Boss of Gotham in Batman #75 (1953), Superboy battling Kingorilla in Adventure Comics #196 (1954), and Wonder Woman, uh, playing baseball with one in Wonder Woman #78 (1955).

So it should come as little surprise that when DC Comics decided to experiment with stories that blended science fiction and sports, that one of these stories would involve gorillas. That story appeared in the August-September 1963 issue of The Brave and the Bold:

(First to get one thing out of the way: yes, there's something messed up about that cover image. The bag is in outside of fair territory, and the ball is being thrown from, and the runner sliding in safely from...where, exactly? And why would the base be in the middle of the baseline rather than by the wider dirt area (seen beyond) which represents the basepath from first to third? The cover is clearly based on of the lower of these two panels inside the story:

As you can see, the uppermost panel has a reasonably drawn (albeit with the pitcher's mound a bit off-center) bird's eye image of a standard baseball diamond between second and third base. In the lower one, though, the runner seems to be sliding dustily into third base...on grass, with the basepath dirt several feet behind them. My guess is that this was a colorists's error, and the green and brown areas should have been reversed. Somehow, when the cover artist (the same one as in the interior - Flash artist Carmine Infantino, who was hand-picked for the sports stories assignment due to his talent at portraying dynamic motion) adapted that scene for the cover, something must have gotten flipped, and the coloring mistake probably followed from the interior panel.)

Play Ball!

The titular "Gorilla Wonders of the Diamond" are the nine simian wards of John Emerson, a scientist who theorized that a prehistoric event he called a "solar blight" is what caused gorillas to not evolve the mental capacity that would eventually blossom in humankind. He developed a cure for this and administered it to a number of adult gorillas in the African jungle, and when these gorillas had children, he took them in to raise himself and to educate so that they could exercise their newly-restored "rightful" intellectual capacity. (Yes, evolution doesn't quite work that way. Just enjoy old-time children's sci-fi as its own genre, OK?) While they proved intelligent enough to learn, they had poor memories and forgot all of their lessons overnight. Emerson solved this problem by taping his lessons, as their learning returned with just minor memory-jogging beforehand. The gorillas eventually swiped his tape recorder to use overnight and excelled in their studies. As a reward Billy, one day's top student, Emerson gave one of he gorillas the blue baseball cap he generally wore, and the very next day, all nine were wearing copies of it. Over the next few years, they progressed quickly, developing fire, primitive tools, and eventually advanced scientific devices based on principles that human beings had yet to develop. Then one day, Billy read in Emerson's newspaper that a team of major league All-Stars were coming to a United States Air Force base in Turkey to entertain the troops with an exhibition. Billy suggests to Emerson that the gorillas would enjoy, and excel at learning to play baseball and playing against the major leaguers, and after an initial refusal, he relented. Thus came about the first inter-species baseball game.

We don't have the complete lineup for any of the teams, but what we know of the players is as follows (and since there are only nine gorillas, they were all somewhere in the starting lineup of every game:

Gorilla Wonders
Pitcher	"Big" Ben	Wears uniform # 31, and can throw 150-mile-per-hour strikes. (While it's always possible that the gorillas don't play the same position every game, he's referred to as "the pitcher"in the text often enough that it can be assumed he always pitches.)
Position Unknown	Ted	Wears uniform # 3
Position Unknown	Billy	The only other named gorilla, he's not mentioned by name during any game action. He might or might not be one of the ones wearing the uniform numbers that can't be connected to a name.
Second base	# 4
Position Unknown	# 12	Serves as third base coach when the team is at bat
Position Unknown	# 9	Seen scoring after a grand slam had been hit
Position Unknown	# 7	Only seen from behind in a crowd shot
Position Unknown	# 10	Only seen from behind in a crowd shot

There is also one gorilla seen from behind in a crowd shot wearing a uniform with a two-digit number starting with 1. This might be a gorilla not listed above, or might be # 10 or # 12, mentioned above, or Billy, whose number we do not know (and who might himself be # 10 or # 12).

Major League All-Stars
Pitcher	Blaze Thomkins
Center Field	# 7
Second Base	# 3
Right Field	# 6

In the top of the first inning, the first gorilla batter hits a home run over the center field wall, but score no more. In the bottom of the first, Big Ben strikes out the side. The top of the second inning sees the leadoff gorilla bunt a single down the first base line, to be driven in by the next batter, who triples to right. By the time the second inning is over, the text says the gorillas have amassed a "total of eight runs" (at least one of which came via another home run) though it's not clear if that's eight in the second inning alone, or eight including the leadoff home run in the first.

That's all the game action we see in Turkey, and while it's obvious that the Gorilla Wonders won, there's no indication of exactly what the final score was. We're left with knowing only that the gorillas scored at least eight runs.

The manager of the human All-Stars offers to pay one million dollars for the gorillas, but John Emerson says that they are for science, not for sale. The manager then suggests that the team do a barnstorming tour of the United States, a suggestion enthusiastically received by the team, but less so by Emerson. By the next morning, though, Emerson's resistance has disappeared, and the Gorilla Wonders are cleared to play major league baseball teams across the United States. At the press conference greeting them, they declare their plans to score one run in the first inning, two in the second, etc., for a total of forty-five runs in every game. They start their tour against the World Champion New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. None of the Yankees are named or numbered. As for the game action, what we see is a 3-unassisted ground out and a leaping-above-the-wall fly out to right field in the first inning, and the scoreboard indicating that as of the third inning, the gorillas accurately followed their scoring plan, and that the Yankees managed a run in the bottom of the second. The final score is reported as Gorilla Wonders 45, Yankees 2, with no information about when the Yankees' second run was scored.

The tour moves on to Chicago - no indication of whether this is against the Cubs or the White Sox (after all, the use of the Yankees and Yankee Stadium would indicate that this is intended to be in a "real world" setting), the uniform trim appears to be green, which matches neither team, and the stadium backdrop does not have any distinguishing features.

Chicago
# 7	During this time period, this number on the Cubs was worn by catcher Sammy Taylor through the 1962 season, and by Merritt Ranew, also a catcher, starting in 1963. On the White Sox, it was worn by first baseman-outfielder Bob Farley until June 24, 1962, at which point, he was traded for Charlie Maxwell, who played the same positions and took over wearing the same number as well.

The Chicago leadoff hitter (the above-mentioned # 7) starts the game's home-team offense with a double, but is promptly picked off of second. That's all we know of the game action, aside from the fact that the Gorilla Wonders won. Then the tour continues...

Wait, what? Dallas? Major league baseball didn't come to Dallas until 1972!

But...this issue's cover date was August-September, 1963. That means that it hit the newsstands in May or June 1963. I can't honestly say I know just how long the script might have been written before the issue saw print, but maybe...just maybe...it was written in mid-1962, when it looked possible, or even likely, that the Kansas City Athletics would be playing in Dallas the following season! (It was September 18, 1962 when that possibility was quashed.) Definitely speculative, but a tantalizing thought when writing for a Kansas City-dedicated baseball site. (Against this theory is the fact that one panel shows what appears to be part of a movie poster for Lawrence of Arabia, which was not released until December of 1962. Of course, the art was no doubt drawn after the script was completed, and also, promotional posters for the film were probably hung well before its release.)

(The only detail about any of these other games is the hit that one gorilla got by bouncing the ball off third base. It's implied, I suppose, that this is the Washington game, but it might have been the Cincinnati one. There's no context hints as to which player it is, what inning it was, or how many bases the player gained.)

The final game on the tour is in Los Angeles against the Dodgers (they're depicted as wearing red caps, a very un-Dodgers-like color; I assume the colorist used red to contrast with the gorillas' blue caps), who we only see in the field.

Los Angeles Dodgers
Pitcher	# 17	During this time period, that number on the Dodgers was worn by Phil Ortega, who was indeed a pitcher
Shortstop	# 6	During this time period, that number on the Dodgers was worn by Ron Fairly, who only ever played first base or the outfield
Third Base	# 3	During this time period, that number on the Dodgers was worn by Willie Davis, who only ever played the outfield.

The only game action we see - no idea what inning or what score - is the gorilla Ted hitting a double and successfully stretching it into a triple (depicted above, in the discussion of the cover). However, while sliding into third base, his cap comes off, and he then absent-mindedly wanders off the base, whereupon he is tagged out. The gorilla third-base coach puts the cap back on Ted's head, at which point, Ted apologizes for his mental lapse and returns to the dugout.

And now...the rest of the story

Noting Ted's absent-mindedness when his cap came off, and having previously noted that the gorillas never intentionally removed their caps, John Emerson speculates that without the caps, they would revert to ordinary gorilla intelligence. (Well, knowledge, at least. Intelligence refers to learning ability, which the gorillas seem to have had even before they stared wearing caps. But with their poor memories, they couldn't really make much use of that.) That night, Emerson stays awake late so he could look into that, but then sees Big Ben sneaking out of their hotel. Curious, he follows Ben and watches the gorilla pitcher walk up to a power station and bury some sort of device. When Ben returns, John overhears him telling the others that he had planted the last of the devices which would, when activated at 3 PM the following day, would reduce the human population of Earth to animal-level intelligence, and the gorillas would enslave them and rule Earth...and eventually, other planets. The baseball tour was nothing more than a cover for the gorillas to visit the largest cities in the United States, where there would be power plants capable of powering the mind-altering devices. (Did I fail to mention that earlier in the story, the gorillas had already invented a mind-affecting ray, which is why John Emerson changed his mind, twice, about bringing the gorillas on tour? No? Yeah, I saved that for the big reveal.) Horrified, Emerson immediately alerts the authorities to search around power plants in the cities where the Gorilla Wonders had played, and the devices are found and removed, saving the human race from being enslaved to gorillas. John Emerson then pumps sleeping gas into the gorillas' rooms and steals their baseball caps, which each contain a small device to jog their memories. (Lucky for humanity that one of the caps came off just before the barnstorming tour came to an end!) The nine gorillas, now showing no signs of greater-than-gorilla-normal intelligence, are housed in nine different zoos, and the caps of the team that never lost a game are put on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown.