Back in my misspent youth, when comics were brain-rotting, life-ruining reading material (My Mom said so; she wouldn't lie to me, would she?), I read a lot of comics. (Explains quite a bit, doesn't it?) One of my favorite comics was STRANGE ADVENTURES, a science-fiction anthology-type comic. Besides the more usual types of science fiction, with space aliens, shrinking serums, invisibility rays, giant monsters and the usual ilk, SA had... gorillas. Quite a lot of gorillas, actually.
For whatever reason, writers for SA really loved gorillas. Or maybe they were just scared of gorillas.
Gorillas might also have been intended as a stand-in for Communists. Communists were friggin everywhere back in the 50's and 60's. (That monster in your closet when you were a little kid? Commie.) You couldn't actually see very many Communists, but you knew they were there, somewhere, plotting.
Back to gorillas. Gorillas in STRANGE ADVENTURES might seem, at first, to be a mixed bag of unrelated and different stories, but once you realize that there was an extended story arc being told non-sequentially, you can see the entire far-reaching saga of Gorilla Vs. Human:
Our first mistake is giving gorillas familiarity with human thought processes.
Then we took advantage of their increased intelligence.
Resulting in some pretty pissed-off gorillas.
The First Gorilla Rebellion ended poorly for gorillas.
So gorillas realized they had to fight smarter, not harder,
if they were going to overthrow their human overlords.
Oh no! The gorillas have developed a super-weapon! What could it be?
Could it be... GIANT FLYING GORILLAS?
Don't be silly. No, their super-weapon is...MORE GORILLAS! FROM SPACE!
Whaddya know? Looks like the plan worked.
And we all end up as gorillas' pets, bred down to chihuahua size.
What a... STRANGE ADVENTURE!
Gorillas are still seen in comics even today. Gorilla Grodd, Monsieur Mallah, Brainiape, and others. Even a few as heroes (Detective Chimp) instead of villains. Which may mean that gorillas are still a valid meme today...
...or perhaps only that mind-altering drugs available to comics writers in the 1950's are still available to today's comics writers.
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