What anti-climatic drivel.

I won’t even bother with Marshall’s mutant apes with super-healing powers. Or how he has Burles try to visualize the brainwashed female chimp’s attempts at remembering things.

No, I’ll stick to the conclusion of this issue.

Marshall earned points when he started Adventure’s Apes because he was willing to look at the ape society, with the barbarism of the gorillas, and deal with it. This issue undoes all that work he did. In fact, it reaches a point of uselessness I’m not even sure how he’s going to continue the story.

Maybe the problem is a bad editor. Marshall’s plots come and go and there are lots of things without presence from issue to issue. But he resolves the previous issue’s cliffhanger with magic. Worse, he has his characters acting completely against how he’s previously established them.

The series’s plummet seems to be speeding up.

With the exception of the addle-brained storyline about the amnesiac chimp, I thought Marshall was back on track this issue. It really seemed like things were going well. He had the missing female chimp reunited with Ape City, he had the human fugitive deal with his gorilla captor… Things were moving along nicely.

Until the female chimp gets brainwashed with a watch.

And then it becomes infinitely clear why Marshall never feels like he’s told a complete issue. Because he’s dragging things out far beyond their expiration date. The problem with A, B and C plots is when a C plot never becomes anything else. It needs to either graduate or go away.

Clearly, Marshall has a longterm plan for Planet of the Apes but he’s completely unconcerned with that plan having a nice narrative flow.

The issue ends on a decent cliffhanger. Burles’s atrocious art ruins its impact.

Yeah, Marshall’s definitely plummeting, if not plummeted.

It’s little things, like the female chimp narrating again. If he’s not doing it for style, he’s doing it for exposition, but he’s got too many characters to do expository flashbacks for every one of them… and he doesn’t. Just the female. And the narration is really bad.

Then there’s her (now missing) companion, who goes on this wacky adventure. Only, it seems like he’s hallucinating the whole thing. But Burles’s artwork is so bad, it’s impossible to tell. The bad artwork really stings now, because there’s not even a decent story—and it’s making the comic on a whole incomprehensible for the first time. It used to just be incomprehensible scenes.

Marshall’s big problem is how he’s developing the plot. Absolute power corrupts absolutely… big yawn.

And the cliffhanger, though it suggests new life for Apes, seems like a capitulation to expectations.

It’s Christmas on the Planet of the Apes, which means there’s a guy with a cart who travels around with presents.

Now, I’m a fan of comic books playing with narrative tropes and doing special issues. But a Christmas issue with a Santa analog? Marshall’s lost his grasp.

He’s been faltering for the last couple issues, but the combination of Santa ape and then Marshall narrating from the female chimp’s point of view? Apes is getting dangerously close to without value. It’s already got crappy art, it can’t handle weak writing too.

Once again, Marshall seems to be running out of story. He pads with showing off little apes playing soccer or the interlude with the stranded chimps. Maybe it’s just his finite cast–the setting is huge, but we only follow six or seven apes.

A comic book is a serialized narrative, yes, but it’s not a TV show.

D 

CREDITS

Travellin’ Jack; writer, Charles Marshall; penciller, Kent Burles; inker, Barb Kaalberg; letterer, Mark Moore; editors, Mickie Villa, Dan Danko and Chris Ulm; publisher, Adventure Comics.

Marshall finally takes a complete misstep. It’s well-intentioned and I see what he’s trying to do, but it’s a pointless waste of half the issue. It’s nice to see him falter, putting Apes on shaky ground for something other than Kent Burles’s terrible art.

This issue, Marshall juxtaposes a fight scene—which takes up most of the issue’s length—against the goings-on of the cast. The fight scene’s not interesting for two reasons. First, the town ruffian who starts it is a new character. Second, the art. How’s anybody going to get excited about a Burles fight scene?

The rest of the issue is fine; it covers the political machinations of the secretly villainous religious leader. Marshall’s in danger of putting the series back to zero (with the good apes against the bad for political control), but he’s also introduces some troublesome nomadic apes.

Shame about the rest.

Marshall makes an interesting choice with this issue, breaking the fourth wall. The protagonist of the issue is a new resident of the Ape City… his (or her) name is “Reador.” The entire issue is from the point of view of the reader, which is kind of cute… but it seems like Marshall is using it as a gimmick.

Planet of the Apes isn’t a kids book, it isn’t a fun book. It’s about lying, deception and racism. Being all happy and upbeat—after Marshall covers the nastiness especially—makes the issue silly.

It might have worked as a little back-up, but not a whole issue. Why, for example, do we have to spend time with the annoying buffoons.

Worse, Burles has gotten so bad I couldn’t tell the different between gorillas and orangutans. I think I can identify the chimps….

It’s a misfire, but a mildly ambitious one.

Marshall finally takes care of his continuity issues. He starts the issue talking about the second plague, which rendered most of the humans mute. Obviously, this development doesn’t fit into all of the Apes continuity, but at least it explains the ground situation of this comic series.

This issue is a bridging issue, revealing certain things going on off panel during the last four issues. There’s also a mystery, but Marshall doesn’t concentrate on it. When the culprit is revealed, his identity is nowhere near as interesting as his motives… or the personal repercussions.

For a comic with such hideous artwork, Marshall’s Apes is affecting because it’s so cynical.

It’s also revealed religious fundamentalism is ruining the Planet of the Apes, a standard trope for the series. But Marshall executes that plot point well—and a lot more subtly than he could.

Marshall’s a rather creative plotter; his Apes works.

Marshall runs into some big problems here.

First and foremost, he writes a big complicated action issue and Burles can’t draw it. There are fight scenes, there are battles scenes; they’re completely incompressible. And there’s even a climatic finish to one of the fights. Again, the awful art kills the dramatic intent.

The second problem is a minor continuity one. Marshall’s ignoring of the final two Apes movies is even more acute here. Either he didn’t see them, or he did and forgot them. Given Marshall’s not writing to suit his penciller’s absolute inabilities, I imagine he just forgot the movies’ contents.

Finally, he changes the mood of the comic. This issue’s end is practically upbeat. It makes the comic seem light and slighty naive.

The comic, even with the awful art, should have been much better. It’s too bad Marshall fell off the quality wagon, though his dialogue’s fine.

CREDITS

Battle; writer, Charles Marshall; penciller, Kent Burles; inker, Barbara Kaalberg; letterer, Clem Robins; editors, Dan Danko, Chris Ulm and Mickie Villa; publisher, Adventure Comics.