Forbidden Zone is quite a surprise, and not just because a young Leonard Kirk is on the art. It’s surprising because writer Lowell Cunningham takes a departure from the regular Adventure approach (even of their good entries) and goes it alone.

This story is set after the regular series and before the movies. It seems to feature an aged version of John Huston’s Lawgiver character (breaking the internal continuity of Adventure’s Apes comics) and deals reasonably with the character.

The bad guys are the mutants from the second Apes movie and Cunningham comes up with a nice way to involve them. He also creates the first intellectually curious gorilla, which is long overdue.

Cunningham’s future manages to be interesting not just as an Apes tie-in, but also as a look at the “apes as slaves” period, which has never really been covered.

It’s not great, but it’s reasonably compelling.