(Sure-Fire Comics 003a, 1940)
The town of Branton, no state specified, has been struck by a mysterious plague, and X, the Phantom Fed, is suspicious. He infiltrates the quarantine zone around the town in the guise of a doctor and starts investigating the various odd facts of the plague, beginning with 1) the fact that is is being spread by a troop of escaped gorillas that were being used in medical testing and are now apparently just wandering the town and attacking people at random.
Or are these attacks actually random? They are not, and weird thing number 2) is the fact that the gorillas seem to only be attacking the wealthiest inhabitants of Branton, such as young Donald Warden here.
3) Speaking of amazing coincidences, a mysterious doctor just happens to have an antidote to the disease spread by the gorillas, and is willing to provide it for a hundred grand a pop, which is again an amazing coincidence since all of the victims just happen to have that kind of money.
X disguises himself as the deceased Donald Warden and arranges to get the antidote so that he can trail the agents of the mysterious doctor back to their headquarters. There, he makes an amazing discovery: the gorillas are actually men in gorilla outfits, administering fake diseased bites using a weird fork. Let me tell you: it has been too long since we have had some gorillas, real or not, in this online space.
The thing about a gang made up of a bunch of guys in gorilla suits is that it is pretty easy to infiltrate, and X does just that, tagging along as Dr Horton, the supposed researcher who supposedly accidentally lost the gorillas, orchestrates an all-out attack on City Hall to loot the town treasury before presumably wrapping up the entire operation and skipping town. Horton's luck has run out, however, and he is corralled with relative ease by the Man of a Million Faces.
