SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for The Flash #58, by Joshua Williamson, Rafa Sandoval, Jordi Tarragona, Tomeu Morey and Steve Wands, on sale now.
Even in a world full of superheroes, Gorilla City is pretty weird. It's a secluded city-state that belongs to a group of super-intelligent gorillas with technology that surpasses anything else on Earth. And now, it looks like Gorilla City is gone.
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In The Flash #58, Barry Allen feels compelled by the Speed Force, which gives him his powers, to travel to Gorilla City. He brings Iris West, his girlfriend, along for the ride, and the two arrive at a devastated Gorilla City that's filled with numerous apparent casualties on the last page of the issue.
Before its destruction, Gorilla City was the next stop on the Flash's ongoing "Force Quest." Shortly after he defeated the telepathic Grodd -- Gorilla City's most famous resident earlier this year -- the Flash learned about the existence of the Speed Force's counterparts, the Strength Force and the Sage Force. To learn more about these cosmic forces, Barry decided to travel the world to connect with his own abilities on a more spiritual level.
Like Grodd, Gorilla City was created by Carmine Infantino and Josh Broome in 1959's The Flash #106. While the hidden city's origins have changed some over the years, it was initially formed after an alien object fell to Earth and made a nearby group of simians super-intelligent. Over the years, it's been ruled intermittently by Solovar, a friendly telepathic ape, and Grodd, a would-be world-conqueror who's one of the Flash's most fearsome foes.
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While it hasn't been at the forefront of the DC Universe, this hidden kingdom has remained a consistent part of DC's world and even appeared in a slightly more realistic form in The Flash on the Arrowverse's Earth-2. Since Grodd and his simian supporters have been busy causing trouble in Damage and Justice League lately, at least some of Gorilla City's former residents are probably still alive out there somewhere.
While it's not totally clear who destroyed Gorilla City, Hunter Zolomon seems like the most likely candidate.
After he returned in the lead-up to the "Flash War" storyline, the evil speedster, who's also been called Zoom and the third Reverse-Flash, essentially broke the Speed Force and unlocked the power of other new cosmic forces. As Williamson and Scott Kolins revealed in Flash #57, he started hunting down other Flash-related characters and Speed Force users, starting with an alternate reality Flash.
Since Grodd recently used the Speed Force's healing properties to cure an otherwise incurable disease, Zolomon could've destroyed Gorilla City in an attempt to take out Grodd.
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However, Zolomon's motives could be more personal. Before he was a speedster, Hunter was a police profiler who was friends with Wally West. In 2003's Flash #193, by Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins, Hunter was paralyzed from the waist down in an attack by Grodd. When Zolomon tried to use the Flash's Cosmic Treadmill to turn back time, he ended up with super-speed abilities and the twisted obsession with the Flash that made him Zoom.
While Zolomon is still on the prowl, the Flash is set to begin investigating what happened to Gorilla City, so it probably won't be long until these two speedsters run into each other once again.
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