After a month of spotlighting the strange (if endearingly strange) history of comic books (and especially the Silver Age), I think it is worthwhile to show the comic books of the Silver Age that are simply great stories period. Here is an archive of all the Silver Age comics features so far!

Today we look at a sampling of John Broome and Carmine Infantino's delightfully odd Detective Chimp back-ups from the pages of The Adventures of Rex, the Wonder Dog. I picked a year at random (as they are all fun strips) - so here is a sampling of two cool 1957 Detective Chimp tales!

Enjoy!

Here is the basic concept for the strip from Detective Chimp's first appearance back in Rex #4 in 1952...

The twist on the series is that Bobo is a bit of an idiot savant. He is brilliant at certain things and hopelessly naive at others. To wit, he's smart enough to build his own bathysphere, but doesn't know what a submarine is.

That comes up in our first story, "The Mystery of the Talking Fish," from Rex #32...

As well as our second, "The Case of the Chimpanzee's Camera," from Rex #34...

Broome and Infantino (who was inking his own pencils here) only had six pages in each issue, so it is remarkable the amount of charm they packed into these pages. These are cute stories with an endearing lead character in Bobo. And the formula was an easy one to continue with new adventures every issue, as Bobo is just that inquisitive and naive. Very cool stuff.