As I have repeatedly been saying during the late 60’s, early 70’s the great superhero boom ended unexpectedly and publishers like Marvel and DC were desperate enough to try just about anything else. Of course just about everything else they tried were also failures but if nothing else they were frequently interesting failures. And high concepts didn’t get much higher than the private eyes Angel O’Day and her talking gorilla partner Sam Simeon, a.k.a. Angel and the Ape. Created by E. Nelson Bridwell and penciled by Bob Oksner and inked by Ted Blaisdell (later issues featured stories by John Albano and inks by Wally Wood). Before the actual comics appeared Angel and the Ape were introduced via a striking series of house ads and the memorable (well, I still remember it) “Who are they? What are they? Angel and the Ape!” slogan.

They made their first appearance in Showcase #77…

Then went onto have a series of their own that ran six issues…

…and one issue of Meet Angel. You know, I bet there’s an interesting story behind that; I just wish to hell that I knew what it was. Angel and Ape was, if nothing else, absolutely original, overstuffed with pure potential but it was always one of those concepts that always worked better in theory than practice. It should have but never quite worked, not creatively and certainly not with readers but times being tough and having already invested in six issues of it DC obviously decided to give the series another chance. Maybe, the thinking probably went, the premise just needed a little tweaking, and clearly someone at DC decided the problem with Angel and the Ape was the Ape.

Which upon reflection seems an insanely counter intuitive thing for DC to do, this being the publisher who essentially institutionalized the convention that an ape on your cover equaled increased sales. Even before the title change Sam began to be downplayed on the covers; starting with #4 the word “Meet” was inserted above the logo (along with a miniature Angel head) and the “Angel”portion grew to the point it dwarfed “the Ape”. And obviously that unknown “someone’ decided introducing elements of horror comedy might also help because the same sort of comic relief monsters who appear on the cover of Meet Angel #7 show up on the cover of Angel and the Ape #5. Naturally in neither case do the monsters actually appear in the comics themselves and having been drawn by Bob Oskner they naturally look like they escaped from an issue of The Adventures of Jerry Lewis.