FIRST ISSUE: GORILLA-MAN

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

 

The cover-art for Gorilla-Man No. 1 (of 3) has nothing to do with the interior action. On the cover, the Gorilla-man is surrounded by fawning bimbos in short skirts and plunging necklines; inside, he spends most of his time in a time warp back in the 1930s or in the jungles of present-day Africa. No women to speak of. Except in the opening sequence in which Atlas operative Ken Hale (aka Gorilla-man) foils a Borgia Omega operation to obtain the head of Lucrezia Borgia, floating in a belljar in liquid suspension. The Borgia Omega people are robots and bountiful women in black wetsuits with the front zipper descanted provocatively. The Gorilla-man apprehends one of the loathsome lovelies and carries her off, as we see in our second illustration, ass-end upwards and shimmering in the sunlight seductively. The cover, to belabor its irrelevance, is by the dapper Dave Johnson; the interior is crisply rendered by Giancarlo Caracuzzo and handsomely colored by Jim Charalampidis. Caracuzzo’s is a somewhat angular style, mostly unembellished by feathering and other linear quirks—so it is attractive and smitteth the eye pleasingly.

Jeff Parker’s story, after the opening dispatching of the Borgia Omega crowd, flashes back to Missouri in the 1930s when Ken Hale was recruited as a young boy by Atlas and then alternates between Hale’s early service to the agency and his present assignment, which takes him to Africa where he employs a hologram to transform his gorilla-guise into something more humanoid. In Africa, he meets a fellow Atlas agent, and the two of them are supposed to shut down Mustafa Kazun’s criminal operation that is giving Atlas a bad name.

 The opening episode is the issue’s completed one; the rest are on-going tales, and except for the gorilla-guise, the whole enterprise is a routine fisticuff contest without many surprises or twists. Why or how Hale has been turned into a giant monkey is not explained in this issue, and I’m more likely to buy the second issue to find out about that than I am to see more fist-fights between changling apes and menacing mobs, one of which emerges on the last page, ending the issue on a suitably suspenseful note.