Review by Woodrow Phoenix
Rex the Wonder Dog, a crime-fighting Alsatian, was among many animal characters such as Champion the Wonder Horse, Flipper the Dolphin, Clarence the Cross-eyed Lion, Skippy the Kangaroo and other dogs including Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, who starred in live-action adventures beside human companions in the 1950s. Rex merchandise included a monthly Rex the Wonder Dog comic and Detective Chimp first appeared in Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog in 1952 as a back-up feature.
Bobo the chimpanzee lives with animal trainer Fred Thorpe in Oscaloosa County, Florida. Thorpe is murdered in mysterious circumstances, and the chimpanzee leads the county sheriff Edward Chase to the killers. Chase takes Bobo home with him and discovers just how intelligent and resourceful Bobo is as he solves numerous crimes, becoming the celebrity Detective Chimp. Written by John Broome, Detective Chimp is most closely associated with artist Carmine Infantino who drew 35 of the 42 strips that appeared between 1952 and 1959.
The Detective Chimp Casebook is a hardcover collection of all those stories, plus ‘Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?’ from 1981 where Rex and Bobo meet for the first time, and become effectively immortal after they both drink from the Fountain of Youth. The collection also includes an assortment of covers by Infantino, Joe Kubert and Brian Bolland; preliminary pencil art for Bolland’s cover; and one more Infantino page featuring Detective Chimp for Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe. The Bolland art is also used for the cover of this volume, which is confusing because there is no explanation anywhere as to why Bobo is holding the very distinctive helmet of Doctor Fate. The answer is that a new retconned origin for Detective Chimp in 1989 increased his intelligence and gave him the power of speech; he became a private detective, then part of a group of magical beings during DCs Infinite Crisis and eventually became the next Doctor Fate himself.
None of that later history is relevant to this collection, however. It’s a 1950s artefact, with amusing, gimmicky crime-solving in short stories reminiscent of such TV shows as Murder She Wrote. Infantino is at his playfully distinctive best here as an illustrator/designer on the feature he always said was his favourite work. All gathered together here, you can see why. This was one of the few strips where Infantino inked his own pencils, giving it an individual, unorthodox style unlike the sleekly corporate look of his work on DCs flagship titles. The Detective Chimp Casebook is very much of its time, but the charming blend of small-scale mysteries and ingeniously silly heroics in stylishly rendered period settings still works.
