Congo Bill
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Congo Bill was a long running DC Comics adventure comic strip, first published in More Fun Comics #56 (June 1940), created by Whitney Ellsworth and George Papp. The strip ran in various DC Comics titles until Action Comics #248 (January 1959), when Congo Bill was transformed into Congorilla, which ran until April 1961. Congorilla was created by Robert Bernstein and Howard Sherman.
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[edit] Congo Bill
The Congo Bill strip was a standard jungle adventure strip, reminiscent of Alex Raymond's Jungle Jim newspaper strip. The strip was a moderate success and switched from More Fun to Action Comics with issue #37, where it stayed until issue #248 when it was transformed into Congorilla.
[edit] Motion Pictures
Congo Bill was filmed as a 12 chapter movie serial by Columbia Pictures in 1948. The series starred Don McGuire and Cleo Moore and was produced by Sam Katzman. The series was reissued in 1957 when Moore had become a famous film star.
[edit] Congorilla
In Action Comics #228, Congo Bill had met a strange golden gorilla, much more intelligent that normal gorillas. Twenty issues later, Bill's friend, the witch doctor Chief Kawolo, told him that he could control the gorilla by way of a mysterious ring, which allowed him to change minds with the gorilla. Shortly after Kawolo told Congo Bill this, he died, Bill used the ring to get out of a cave he was trapped in and Congorilla was born.
The Congorilla series ran in Action Comics until issue 262, after which it was transferred to Adventure Comics, where it ran until issue 283. Since the demise of its own series, Congorilla has mainly been seen as a guest star in other titles, including as part of the Forgotten Heroes. In 1999, DC Comics revived the Congo Bill character as part of a four-issue limited series under the company's mature readership Vertigo imprint.
[edit] References
- Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Congo Bill and Congorilla
- DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes by Les Daniels (1995)
[edit] External links
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