I didn’t think Blood could get worse.

I thought Mann had established the bottom and was comfortable lurking around it. I was very, very wrong.

He breaks with the franchise’s “reality” so abruptly at the end, I wish I’d read Blood first, so I could have either enjoyed other Adventure Apes comics more or just not read them all together. If I were an Apes movie fan and I read this garbage at the time, I’m not sure what I would have done. Maybe sent monkey poop to the Adventure offices.

But Mann doesn’t just have moronic plot developments, he’s got some terrible writing habits as well.

For example, this issue he doesn’t narrate from any character, just an omniscient third person. But this omniscient third person sometimes over-acknowledges the reader, sometimes under-acknowledges. There’s no balance.

Blood is a terrible series with an even worse finish. It’s dreadful.

While this issue of Blood isn’t any better than the previous ones, with Mann and his artists operating at their established their quality level, they can’t exactly disappoint.

Here, Mann joins the creative continuity club of Adventure’s Apes comics and establishes the main ape settlement (from the movies and the regular series) knows about all the colonies.

More than knows about them, there’s some kind of “ape-o-gram,” to send messages between the settlements.

Much like Mann breaking one of the franchise’s primary details just to tell this terrible story, this latest development changes the Planet of the Apes once again. If there’s some lush world beyond the regular city, why doesn’t everyone just leave?

Okay, maybe I did have some more vitriol left than I thought. It’s just how Mann refuses to follow the basic franchise guidelines. Was Adventure really so desperate, they’d hire anyone to write Apes?

Artists Darren Goodhart and Bruce McCorkindale find an interesting way to be faithful to the source material. Their apes look like people wearing cheap masks. Instead of embracing the limitless possibilities, Goodhart and McCorkindale maybe have the “cheapest” ape design I’ve seen in an Apes comic.

Mann’s script continues to be Blood’s biggest problem though. Here he starts (or maybe he started last issue and I just blocked it) using thought balloons for his protagonist ape bounty hunter. These thought balloons are probably Mann’s worst writing, which is quite a feat, since there aren’t a great deal of them. It’s usually the protagonist making some obvious observation or Mann uses them for exposition.

This series, it turns out, ties into not just the regular Apes series, but also Urchak’s Folly. Mann reminds suffering readers the branding duped them into this bad investment.

It doesn’t even have a good cliffhanger.

So this terrible comic book is about what I was expecting from Adventure’s Apes franchise.

At least the flagship series started well, even if it did eventually go to pot. Blood of the Apes starts in the pot and kind of just stirs around a little.

Because they’re based on an existing franchise, I accept there are a number of constraints to an Apes comic book. But writer Roland Mann’s solution isn’t to be inventive within those restraints, it’s to break them. Here, he breaks that cardinal rule–ape shall not kill ape. His protagonist in Blood is a bounty hunter who loves killing apes. Man-lovers, but still apes.

But this development breaks one of the agreements of the franchise, turning Blood into a lazy knock-off. Actually, it turns it into fan-fic, not a professional, licensed tie-in.

Anyway, crappy writing, crappy art. It’s a terrible time.