I feel bad for Marshall.
He comes up with this conflicted tale—the gorillas are the bad guys, yes, but not all gorillas. It’s lack of proper nurturing (there are no gorilla females in the Apes franchise, are there?), not their nature. Then there’s the humans behaving very badly.
And he has a big action scene to show these issues colliding… and Burles can’t do it at all. I wonder what Marshall’s scripts look like, because he’s got a flashback visually juxtaposed with two different contemporary scenes, all connected. If Burles came up with that composition—wouldn’t one think he would know how to actually render the images?
Anyway, there are some more dramatic incongruities, but it’s a lot better of a comic than I was expecting. The Marvel series showed Apes could be good comics. This one seems to show the potential exists, even when the art is lousy.
CREDITS
Escape!; writer, Charles Marshall; penciller, Kent Burles; inker, Barbara Kaalberg; letterer, Clem Robins; editors, Dan Danko, Chris Ulm and Mickie Villa; publisher, Adventure Comics.
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