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Post by MWGallaher on Nov 27, 2019 11:10:03 GMT -5
Interesting! I was doing some research a couple of years back into stories in which human brains are transplanted into gorilla bodies, in order to support my suspicions about the origins of the film "The Monster and the Girl" (1941). I figured there would be a lot of instances, but there are not. This issue of Detective was 10 years after what appears to be the original human-to-gorilla brain transplant story, which I suspect was the unacknowledged source for the aforementioned film. I dug up a scan of the Detective Comics story online, but it's too insubstantial to trace directly to that earlier story, so, unlike the film, it may not have been a swipe job. What was the original story that you found? I'm an aficionado of oddball mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler. In his later years, he claimed that one of his novels, Sing Sing Nights (1927), had been the source of three movies, but there are only two films that credit Keeler's work ( Sing Sing Nights and The Mysterious Mr. Wong). The novel strings together several of his short stories, including The Gorilla's Brain, which, as you can guess, dealt with transplanting a human brain into a gorilla. In my search to determine the third film to which Keeler alluded, I concluded that he was referring to The Monster and The Girl. Since he was not credited on-screen, some might conclude that Keeler was taking credit for a similar but independently-conceived premise, but I think it was either an uncredited yet authorized adaptation or an intentional rip-off for which Keeler wasn't compensated. Not only is the premise more unusual that I had originally supposed (this Detective Comics story is the only one I know of preceding the film), but the film draws much much more from Keeler's novel than either of the other two films, which are only vaguely recognizable as adaptations. It draws not only from the "Gorilla's Brain" segment, but also from the framing story that linked the sections of the novel. In addition, some of the film-makers involved with The Monster and The Girl had also been involved with the Sing Sing Nights film, and so were undoubtedly familiar with Keeler's story. |
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Post by rberman on Nov 27, 2019 11:55:09 GMT -5
Another example is X-Men #151-152 (1981) in which Emma Frost switches minds with Ororo to infiltrate the X-Men. Ororo-in-Emma has trouble convincing Kitty.  |
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Post by MDG on Nov 27, 2019 12:09:42 GMT -5
I feel that this was always a pretty common plot in comics (and, I think, 30s-40s serials). Syurprised no one has mentioned...  |
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Post by Chris on Nov 29, 2019 0:54:23 GMT -5
There's this...  |
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Post by Chris on Nov 29, 2019 1:04:40 GMT -5
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Post by Chris on Nov 29, 2019 1:10:26 GMT -5
I believe the most bizarre type of mind/body switch story happened in Superman #380 in the early 80s. What happened was... explaining it won't work, you just have to see it.      If there's a stranger mind-swap story out there than swapping minds with yourself, I haven't seen it. This went one for three entire issues of Superman, plus a crossover issue of Superboy, which threw in yet another crazy time travel complication of its own. They just don't make comics like this anymore, and that's really a shame. |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,222 
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Post by Confessor on Nov 29, 2019 2:24:10 GMT -5
I believe the most bizarre type of mind/body switch story happened in Superman #380 in the early 80s. That was a hugely enjoyable arc. I bought those issues off of the newsagent's shelves at the time and read them many times. Gorgeous Curt Swan art too. |
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Post by Farrar on Nov 30, 2019 12:50:49 GMT -5
...  ... Oh, poor Superboy!  Thanks to magic, young Kal found himself housed in another perplexing-to-him body, back in Superboy #78 (1960).    |
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Post by Farrar on Nov 30, 2019 13:02:39 GMT -5
One of the first mind-body swap stories I read in comics was the one that began in Captain America #115. From #115: gorgeous art by John and Sal Buscema.  From #117: Gene the Dean's superlative rendering of Red Skull-as-Cap.  |
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Post by Chris on Dec 4, 2019 4:17:48 GMT -5
I believe the most bizarre type of mind/body switch story happened in Superman #380 in the early 80s. That was a hugely enjoyable arc. I bought those issues off of the newsagent's shelves at the time and read them many times. Gorgeous Curt Swan art too. Swan really hit it out of the park with these issues. Some absolutely stunning work in there. This was right around the time Swan started working with Joe Kubert to learn some new things - Swan felt he was "in this groove too long" and wanted to "charge things up" some - and some of the page layouts do have a definite Kubert feel to them. But even then, it still isn't a real departure from anything Swan had done in the past. It was less like Kubert giving Swan layouts and more like Kubert bringing out the best in Swan. |
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Post by rberman on Dec 4, 2019 7:20:48 GMT -5
Chris Claremont did body swapping again in The X-Men and the Micronauts mini-series. Baron Karza and Kitty Pryde accidentally switch bodies. But Karza-in-Kitty is able to also maintain control over his own body telepathically, which hardly seems fair.  Only later in the series after Karza-in-Kitty has been knocked unconscious does Kitty-in-Karza assert herself.  |
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Post by mikelmidnight on Dec 4, 2019 13:07:52 GMT -5
Wasn't Giganta originally a human brain placed in a gorilla? I believe she's simply a hyper-evolved gorilla. Fighting American was such a weird case because after the origin it was never mentioned again in the original series, and nothing which occurred later actually required the brain transplant in the first place. I feel like S&K threw it in simply to complicate the origin story and then completely forgot about it. My favorite mind-swap which I'm surprised nobody has brought up yet is Flash and Lex Luthor in the Justice League animated series. |
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Post by badwolf on Dec 4, 2019 16:03:31 GMT -5
Wasn't Giganta originally a human brain placed in a gorilla? I believe she's simply a hyper-evolved gorilla. Maybe I was getting her confused with Ultra-Humanite. |
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Post by rberman on Jul 14, 2020 9:55:34 GMT -5
I found another one in Daredevil #37 by Colan and Lee. It's an three part story in which Doctor Doom switches bodies with Daredevil so he can attack the Fantastic Four in disguise. (There was another similar story a few issues prior in which The Trickster used a Daredevil costume to sneak up on the FF.) It goes amusingly wrong since Daredevil uses Doctor Doom's body for all sorts of mischief. He calls the FF to warn them about the attack. Then he uses Doom's political office to declare war on Latveria's neighbors. Doom is all too eager to get his own body back from Daredevil at this point. Then Daredevil has trouble convincing the FF that he's not Doom anymore, justifying (thinly) a full-issue FF slugfest by Kirby in which Spider-Man and Thor get roped onto Daredevil's team. Goofy fun.  |
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Post by brutalis on Jul 14, 2020 11:53:18 GMT -5
Fantastic Four #51 where an unknown man transfers Ben Grimm's powers to himself which reverts the Thing to human all in a plan to infiltrate and destroy the FF. In the end he actually saves Reed from the Negative Zone and dies himself where Ben becomes The Thing once more.
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