You know, when I started reading Adventure’s Planet of the Apes series, I complimented Marshall for his intelligence.

As the series winds down, this penultimate issue leaves me considering him beyond dumb.

There’s a big canonical change here—Caesar (you know, Roddy McDowell’s chimp) is resurrected as the Lawgiver (John Huston’s orangutan). So, the way Marshall sees it—a guy writing a comic book about apes—there’s no difference between chimps and orangutans. You know, genetically.

It’s a stunningly terrible thing. But I guess Marshall is rushing headstrong into his final issues. The plot points are stupid and the narrative feels disjointed, but at least he’s trying.

Oh, wait, he’s really not. He’s doing all these wacky things with the characters to make it fit the finale… he’s not fitting the finale to his characters.

The art, after a brief uptick, is dreadful once again. Maybe the worst Wyman ever.

So Marshall’s evil ghost with demonic powers isn’t actually an evil ghost… he’s the Beyonder. Marshall doesn’t so much as borrow full scenes from Secret Wars II just how he approaches it.

I’m wondering if he’s trying to do some kind of commentary on the series actually, as this arc (he intimates it’s going to be the final one) is just Marshall killing off all his characters.

It’s lame and occasionally laughable, but there’s a certain bewilderment value to it. It’ll never be good, but if Marshall’s actually doing something creative, it might be interesting. Unfortunately, the cliffhanger refutes the idea it’s going to be creative. Marshall goes for the absurd instead.

He also never finishes a subplot before he moves on. There’s never any reaction to events. Apes doesn’t build to anything.

But I guess the art’s a little better than last issue. I counted maybe four okay pages.

What an exceptionally bad issue.

First, the art. Wyman has a new inker with Peter Murphy, according to the credits, but I can’t believe Wyman did much but sketch. The art has descended to the laughable garbage of the series’s early issues, before Wyman (with his alternating excellence and competence) took over.

Then the writing… Marshall apparently got a bug for tying into the movies, because he now ties into the movies, all of his ape characters (including giving one a descendent… without explaining how the line would propagate) and throws it all together.

But wait, there’s more.

There’s magic.

The villain is resurrected through evil magic and he can set people ablaze.

It’s terrible, terrible stuff. And it’s strange to see from Marshall, who never did anything incredibly stupid before. But this issue? This issue of Planet of the Apes goes into new realms of stupid.

It’s laughably hideous.