While having apes watching MTV might be outlandish, having spaceships in a Planet of the Apes comic seems even more disjointed. Maybe because the apes themselves show no sign of having the technology, so it’s like there are time travelers from the past….

I forgot to mention the last issue—Marshall wastes at least three pages recapping the previous issues. He did it the issue before too. He certainly doesn’t understand the half page Marvel recap.

Ape City finishes, besides the art, fairly well. I enjoyed reading it, even though Marshall’s handling of the giant ape named Cong is awful. But it was a stupid idea, so it’s not like it’d get any better. There’s a lot of action and some thriller moments. And spaceships.

Well, one.

And it might have looked amazing if it weren’t for the art. Mann’s inks make the art appear two dimensional. It’s incredibly ugly.

The art gets worse this issue. I wonder what Wyman’s pencils look like without inks. From a few panels, I wonder if he even bothered with full faces. Adventure really didn’t put much effort into their Apes comics as far as the art (Wyman, at one point, being the exception).

But Ape City is almost engaging enough it should have been the flagship. Marshall mixes all the elements–mob apes, ninja apes, biker apes and a bunch of violent Americans–quite well. They just don’t belong in a limited series. He needs room to let them relax and expand.

The highly touted (by Marshall) explanation of Adventure’s Apes sequels is, sadly, not worth much touting. It’s kind of expected and there’s little or nothing revelatory about it. With these European apes (Marshall skips explaining what happened to different languages,) so amusing, why bother with the boring American Iron Age ones?

Interesting.

I don’t know what else to say about this issue of Ape City except… interesting. Imagine me sort of pensively scratching my chin as I think.

Marshall, besides making a… ahem… big King Kong reference, introduces Charlton Heston’s character’s daughter. She’s come to the future to make things better once her dad shows up. Marshall needs to explain his timeline to the reader, a big problem on the regular Apes series too, and his characterization of her is a little slight.

But he does manage to confound with the intricacies of his plot machinations, as opposed to just being confused.

He’s also reduced his cast to a mismatched team of misfits, which always reads well, on the run from three sets of bad guys. The silly factor, even with a giant ape, is down a little from the first issue too.

I just wish Mann was a better inker.

There used to be a cable network with chimps doing scenes from old movies. Ape City is a lot like those commercials. But Marshall does make it mildly compelling because of the threat factor. He introduces a bunch of time traveling humans sent from the past to kill apes in the future. It’s not to prevent the world from being overrun with apes, it’s just meant to be vicious and kill apes.

It seems like a realistic taking human nature into account.

There’s some really weak dialogue—Marshall’s trying to distinguish his characters’ speaking and he fails miserably. None of the characters are particularly strong either. Actually, instead of a comic book featuring a narrative, Ape City would work better as an annotated description of M.C. Wyman’s character designs. Why this ape looks this way and so on.

Ape City’s okay, but nowhere near as charming as Marshall thinks.