Heavy Metal Magazine will translate Pepe Moreno’s Gene Kong into English for the first time in a two part series.
I know nothing about the Gene Kong, which is probably a good thing, as finding new stuff that is super popular (especially in Europe) is a big deal to me.
Set in NYC in the 1980’s, Gene Kong is the tale of Eugene Wong, a biogenetics engineer, whose secret backroom experiments have out him far ahead of his colleagues. Sick of the crime and degenerates who have taken over New York , Gene dreams of the day he can clean up his city. Gene, being of small stature and no fighting skills, decides to take things into his own hands and begins injecting himself with the altered DNA of a gorilla. Nothing seems to be happening until one fateful night on a subway train when Gene is accosted by a bunch of hoodlums, his anger somehow ignites his Frankenstein chemicals into action. Let the underworld of NYC beware!
Apparently, in the ’80s, Pepe Moreno would take his sketchbook with him while riding the subway whenever he was looking for a character for the tale, and according to Heavy Metal, many of the background characters in the series are based on real people.
Heavy Metal took Gene Kong and broke it into two parts. Part one is available right now in the pages of Heavy Metal #278, while part to will appear in Heavy Metal #279, which is scheduled to arrive in February 2016.
