If Gorilla Grodd sounds like a silly 1950s DC Comics villain, that’s because he is. Or was. He first appeared in the May 1959 issue of The Flash. Not your average 500-pound simian, his powers were super-intelligence, telepathy, and psychokinesis that would make Uri Geller blush.
Grodd hailed from Gorilla City, high-tech and hidden in deepest Africa (seven years before we got a first look at the similarly advanced Wakanda in Marvel’s The Fantastic Four, Black Panther fans). Traveling to Barry (the Flash) Allen’s Central City by way of burrowing nuclear-powered conveyance, all he wanted was to unite humankind and his brethren gorillas. Sort of. As long as he could rule over both.
Over the decades and in the hands of various illustrators, the brainy creature went from sweet-faced and curious, almost cute, to a fanged and terrifying overgrown silverback, from seeking to overthrow human supremacy to wiping them out. Which is why Gorilla Grodd, more than any other comic book baddy, is such a winning metaphor for one too-powerful feature of modern society after another, be it the presidency or Silicon Valley or the N.F.L.
His creator, Carmine Infantino, who did scores of Flash comics into the mid-1980s, and Batman and Elongated Man in Detective Comics in the 1960s, among many others, had a distinctively dynamic, slanting style of illustration. Cut from largely the same cloth as the king of comics, Jack Kirby — hardscrabble New York City kids, hustlers — he entered the world of the working illustrator in the 1940s while still a teen. The hard-core fan might know that Infantino actually recruited Kirby to jump ship from Marvel, where he had come up with just about everything of any staying power, to DC Comics around 1970 to unleash his superhuman creativity on a new universe, his New Gods.
On a shelf above my desk sits a prized hardback of Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” from 2000 and based on the lives of these working-class artists, if not Carmine Infantino exactly, then other sons of immigrants, like Jack (Kurtzberg) Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman).
Speaking of amazing, “Kavalier & Clay” is now coming to the Met as an opera? So much the better. It’s the best kind of American story.