Gorilla Fish

Gorilla Fish was a thought. A background character intended for a larger project conceived of over twenty years ago. The project was “Universe II”, a parallel universe for a primary comic book universe I was developing. Like most comic book universes, there are archetypes most everyone follows. Gorilla Fish was unique in look, but even that look evolved. After setting aside the project, when I revisited it from time to time, I would go through the characters. Gorilla Fish stood out. I wrote up a basic origin, eventually changing it a bit, then fleshing it out.

Gorilla Fish never really fit too well within Universe II. Even though the characters of Universe II were offbeat compared to your main archetypes, Gorilla Fish felt odd. I had planned to move him to another universe I had developed for more oddball characters, but never did.

When inspiration finally hit me to work on a web comic, I went through several ideas. The idea I settled on was Bagboy. The Bagboy Universe was filled with offbeat, oddball, and different characters. I had planned to introduce Gorilla Fish in the web comic as a villain. Unfortunately life has a way of making even loose deadlines become impossible. I was not happy with the way the web comic was going, and shut it down.

I came back to Gorilla Fish. As stated, he never really fit in with the Universe II crowd, but that was his home Universe. Yet, how would he have wound up in the universe of my web comic, the Bagboy Universe? Most of the villains were quirky, and weird. He fit in with them. So I started mulling over multi-verses, travel between universes, all the super-theoretical-physics type stuff. Gorilla Fish could live in both Universe II and Bagboy Universe due to dimensional travel. Dimensional travel was part of the massive Universe II story I was working on anyway, so I had a way for Gorilla Fish to be part of a quirky universe where he belonged, but an original part of Universe II.

Then I expanded the idea of dimension hopping to a whole new level, and had villains from other universes form a group of villains looking to establish criminal enterprises across dimensions. Gorilla Fish was a solid part of this group of villains, a dynamic leader. It was a long route, but then I finally nailed down how I wanted to use Gorilla Fish in a web comic.

Some people may make comparisons to a certain character from a movie that came out a few years back. Which is fine. Two people over multiple decades can arrive at similar ideas. It is the power of large numbers that eventually push odds, and possibilities into probabilities.

Gorilla Fish is simply a product of an experiment gone wrong. I settled on the concept that is being presented on this website years ago.