First Appearance: Wonder Woman 9 (1944)
Creators: William Marston and H.G Peter
Abilities: Scientist with phenomenal strength (and size) rivaling that of Wonder Woman herself.
Backstory: One of Wonder Woman’s deadliest enemies, Giganta’s size and shape-shifting abilities are rivaled only by her scientific genius. In the Golden Age, however, “Giganta the Gorilla Girl“ was actually an artificially mutated ape, whom a scientist named Professor Zool transformed into a red-haired strongwoman of huge proportions. There aren’t many villains in Wonder Woman’s rogues gallery who are a match for the Amazon in a physical fight, but the woman called Giganta is one of them.
Caged away in the national zoo, was a huge creature know as the strongest in the world—ripping apart steel with ease and tossing people like rag dolls, yet, this incredible beast was overwrought with grief and wasting away after her daughter had perished the previous year. Giganta’s grieving motherly instinct would later kick in and she would imprint onto a young girl visiting at the zoo. Giganta destroyed her cage to snatch the girl to flee into the wild, refusing to ever be separated again.
Eventually Wonder Woman, would succeed in rescuing the girl, and Giganta, rather than being euthanized as a danger, was sent to the the lab of evolutionary ape enthusiast Proffessor Zool. Through experimentation Giganta became a giant of a woman with the incredible strength of a gorilla. Based on the principle that a regular woman could lift a bus if her daughter was in danger, her strength was magnified and swore revenge against Wonder Woman for stealing away her baby.
Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, Giganta reappeared as Dr. Doris Zeul, a scientist who was dying from a rare blood disease. She captured Wonder Woman and planned to put her own “life-essence” into Diana’s body, but the process was interrupted and her consciousness instead ends up in a test animal gorilla named Giganta.
While still inside of the gorilla’s body, Dr. Zeul abducted a comatose circus strongwoman named Olga with metahuman size-changing abilities and successfully transferred her consciousness into Olga’s body, leaving Olga’s own mind stranded inside the gorilla.
Keeping the name Giganta, she embarked on a career as a super-villain, often for hire, fighting with Wonder Woman several times, both alone and with a variety of different villain teams. But through it all, Giganta has a tender side and briefly enjoyed a romance with the Atom. More recently, her origin was altered again. Doris Zeul became a child who was often bullied and afflicted with a rare blood condition. She was cured by a scientific procedure which also gave her size-changing powers, a side effect of which was a far more limited intellect.
