Looking at Burles’s “art,” I’ll bet he really likes Kirby. He sort of draws Kirby bodies, but poorly. His faces too… Kirby-esque, only horrendous. I wonder if inker Kaalberg helps or hinders.

Again, Marshall comes up with some great action scenes and Burles butchers them. There’s one of a gorilla—the good gorilla, named Grunt—taking down a horse. Should be epic. It isn’t.

Marshall runs into a lot of logic holes this issue, even when he comes up with good material. For example, he has a couple chimps find the Statue of Liberty. They think it’s cool and interesting and whatever. It shows the inhabitants existing in the world, something the movies were really bad about.

Unfortunately, he also has the weird unspeaking human thing. It’s like Marshall never saw the fifth Apes movie. He’s inventive enough I wish he’d explain it.

So, besides the art, it’s fine.

CREDITS

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

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.

Charles Marshall sets his Apes maybe sixty years after the last movie. This time period avoids continuity problems, I suppose, but Marshall also makes a bunch of strange decisions.

Most humans can no longer talk, even though in the future epilogue of the final movie… they can.

He also has an excerpted quote from the 1982 World Book, but it’s from the real World Book, not one from the Apes universe. I get what he’s trying to do in the scene, it’s just a missed opportunity for better detail.

Marshall gets around to having an ape finally going power mad–a gorilla, of course–and it’s one of the better developments in this issue.

Adventure didn’t have a good production budget–Kent Burles’s pencils are awful–but “mistakes” aside, Marshall does show some ambition.

He also knows how to pace a comic. Lots happens here, it’s not a skimpy read.

CREDITS

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