Ape Nation #3



"Pawns"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Clem Robins
colors: David De Vries
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: C-

Here we go again.

Instead of the plot thickening, Marshall starts playing every scene for comedy (like we need another Ape City!), starts having lapses in logic all over the place, and provides stilted, repetitive dialogue that contains absolutely zero subtlety. It isn't Marshall's worst work, but isn't it sad that I have to even say that?

Really not worth going into a full review on this one at all.


plot synopsis: Roto, Caan, and Simon team up (Don't ask. It truly doesn't make sense), Heston and Caan's sister team-up, and the evil alien commander decides he wants Ollo killed.

Ape Nation #4



"Pains"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Clem Robins
colors: David De Vries
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: D+


A very Marshall issue. It begins with a saccharine sweet portrait of Heston, Caan, and Elysia together with the clashing title of the story ("Pains") directly beneath it, provides another highly stilted and unnatural journal entry introduction by Heston promising that his "tale is drawing to a close" (seriously, who stops a story to write that?), and solves the problem of an unstoppable hybrid ape/alien invading army by having Roto, Simon, and Caan defeat them by themselves. Uh, what now? Simon got his butt kicked by just two antagonists in the second issue, and Caan's been getting his butt kicked left and right. So Roto held off a whole army? Caan offers that the soldiers seem like they might have been drugged as part of the explanation, but that makes no sense. Drugged by who? When? Seriously stupid crap.

The resolution tries to cover too much ground as well, having Packer, a character we all but forgot since the first issue, having his soul merged with Winnepeg, the Lightfoot's, and then going off to live with the Lightfoots (why? who cares?), and then ends with Heston reflecting and seeming as if this adventure fulfilled him and left him happy, never once hinting in all this inner reflection that he's mourning the loss of his wife and unborn child (as we just saw in POTA #13).

And, by the way, aren't all of Ollo's followers dead now? Doesn't that kind of mark the end of his little movement? No importance is assigned to this in the story at all.

Bad story. Typical Marshal story. It's all pretty much the same.


Plot synopsis: invading forces get defeated, aliens go home.

Planet of the Apes (Malibu/Adventure) #15



"Countdown Zero: Part Two"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Mark Moore
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: C-


Wow. Steven Butler's cover art is getting out of control. It's been obvious for a while now that this guy loves drawing apes torturing scantily clad busty women, and it's also become clear that none of his covers depicting this reflect anything occurring in the actual comic, but somehow this one goes farther, as this one features an ape (seemingly) intentionally tearing the shirt off of an absurdly busty women while staring at the reader defiantly. These covers kind of creep me out. I don't know what Butler's "into" in his free time, and I don't think I want to.

As for the story, itself, it isn't much. The three humans are still running from the apes, they get a car and have fun running some apes over, get five seconds of re-enacting Dawn of the Dead when they find an untouched K-Mart, and the rest is really really stupid.

A few winning moments in this issue:

- So our protagonists have LITERALLY been running for six days, and yet one of them is just now complaining about running on an artificial leg.

- They finally get a car, do 70 miles per hour, and two weeks later somehow still haven't run out of gas. After all, modern pumps are run by electricity, and there is no electricity anymore.

- After doing 70 mph for two weeks, they still irrationally believe the tribe of apes pursuing them on foot is still close behind.

- After doing 70 mph for two weeks, the tribe of apes pursuing them on foot is still close behind.

- Marshall establishes that these astronauts did not go through a time vortex or anything. They literally left Earth for Mars, came back sixteen months later, and, in that brief time, the pet plague came, humans took apes into their homes, apes evolved into intelligent beings and led their revolution, and mastered the ability to speak and build weapons. It was implied in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes that it had taken nearly two decades for all of that to occur (and another decade after for the ability to speak and build things). Now it all happened in sixteen months??? I doubt even the Ape Management building could have been built that quickly.

- Also, clearly, nuclear disaster was not involved this time, as there is no apparent radiation. Technically, this aligns with the explanation offered in Marshall's Ape City mini that the nuclear damage was caused later by apes that didn't know how to run the nuclear power plants. All the damage that our protagonists see would have been caused by human madness on the cusp of succumbing to the second plague.

- Oh, and you've got to love who the feminist protagonist that Marshall is trying so hard to write as a believable woman has sex with the guy who's on the verge of going crazy just to cheer him up.


And, if there was any doubt left as to whether or not Charles Marshall was a competent writer, allow me to share his forward to this issue (he writes one each issue) which particularly encapsulates both his complete lack of focus as a writer and his complete lack of depth:

I don't mean to toot my own horn, but the reason I like the "Countdown Zero" stories so much is that it explores one of the major ideas portrayed in the Planet of the Apes films...that the rise of the Apes was made possible by the depths to which the human population had fallen.

August (named after my two-year old daughter, by the way) mouths the line that I think is the key to really understanding the reason the human race collapsed.

"We're our own worst enemy.
"We always have been."
Charles Marshall
May, 1991


Note: this is one of his LONGER forwards.

So having apes as pets is a depth to which mankind had fallen, making us our own worst enemies? Because that's what August discovered before uttering those lines at the END of the issue (revealed in the forward; nice). And, btw, he named this woman after his two year old daughter and then has her cheer f*cking her half-crazy comrade in the issue? Niiiice.


So, yeah, at least we have Wyman on the art, though even he doesn't seem to be taking it seriously anymore.


To be fair, the action in this story was fun at times, but everything beyond that is just so...stupid.

Planet of the Apes (Malibu/Adventure) #17



"Countdown Zero: Part Four"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Mark Moore
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: B-


Another pretty stupid issue with one major exception. I won't bore you with the details of why this issue was every bit as stupid as the previous ones, but I will tell you what's different. For the first time in all of his Apes stories, Marshall does something extremely subtle and quite clever. This story, taking place in a time closer to the time of Caesar than the present day of the series, ends with only one remaining intelligent human -- and she's pregnant. Without dropping any unnecessary clues, Marshall has left it reasonably evident that this is Simon's mother, and that this whole story is providing the explanation for where the last two intelligent humans on the Planet of the Apes came from. It's a pretty clever move.

So, dumb issue, clever concept behind it.


plot synopsis: One human tries to kill the other out of jealousy, the wounded one uses his final energy to save them from the attacking apes, the one who tried to kill him kills himself out of guilt, leaving one pregnant intelligent human on the Planet of the Apes.

Planet of the Apes (Malibu/Adventure) #18



"Gorillas in the Mist"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Mark Moore
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: C+


It's frustrating to see Marshall try to do something bold and meaningful and watch Wyman give his best effort to make it happen, but ultimately see the final product tarnished by Marshall's utter inadequacy as a writer.

First off, we're used to having covers that have nothing at all to do with what's inside, but it's even weirder to get a comic with a title that has nothing at all to do with the story inside. "Gorillas in the Mist" refers to nothing at all in the story, even though it is a nod to a now forgotten film from the time about Jane Goodall.

Secondly, Marshall spills the beans AGAIN, telling us up front that this is an issue about death. Then, he has a character unnecessarily mention DEATH as a figure of speech in the very first panel. and of course the rest of the issue is all about teasing us as to who is going to die. He throws us some very very stupid red herrings that serve no purpose for the sake of storytelling other than to throw us off (the bit about Alexander and Coure's kids was especially unnecessary), only to have the ultimate death be the one that we saw coming six pages into this issue. Had Marshall not felt the need to tease us in advance with the knowledge that someone would die, this might have been a powerful surprise ending.

Add to that the fact that the spectre haunting Dr. Moto as a representation of his inner guilt (oh, but that was supposed to be a surprise revealed at the end. Of course, it was painfully obvious from the start) is Max, Coure's murdered assistant from way back. The question is why Dr. Moto would even remember this guy so many years later (this story, for some random reason, takes place in the time frame following Ape Nation, not the regular time period of the main series). Max meant less than nothing to him and was just another human to murder. In fact, when Max begins explaining how much Coure meant to him, I'm left to wonder how Dr. Moto would have suspected this or why he would have even cared. At what point were we ever given clues to suggest Dr. Moto felt any guilt about what he did to humans, lower life forms, and (occasionally) apes, and why would Max be the ultimate symbol of that guilt? It's bad writing; nothing more.

Wyman's art still makes the ending more powerful than it should have been, but Marshall definitely dropped the ball on this one.


Minor details:

- How are there still rabbits on the planet? If they'd survived the pet plague, wouldn't humans have been more likely to take them in as replacement pets than trained apes?

-Alexander and Coure have two young children in the future, Zina (named after Zira?), and Milo (Interesting. I guess that means Sebastian and Miranda from the Urchak's Folly series got to Ape City by this point and shared the contents of Dr. Dixon's journal. Timeline-wise, Urchak's Folly was only two years ahead of the main series, while Ape Nation was much further ahead).

- Jason, Coure's firstborn, appears to have been murdered by Ollo at this point in the series. All we definitely know is that Ollo did something horrible to him and that he isn't present in this story. I suppose it's possible the reference was to when Ollo kidnapped Jason in POTA #12.


Plot synopsis: After the events of Ape Nation (still many years ahead of the current time period), Dr. Moto's guilt (in the form of Max, Coure's murdered human assistant) prompts him to kill himself.

Planet of the Apes (Malibu/Adventure) #19



"Quitting Time"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Mark Moore
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: A-

It seems to me that Charles Marshall is either as bored with Alex, Coure, Ollo, and Simon, as I am at this point, or at least that he has no idea where to take them next. He's skipped around in time, shifted focus to other characters, and now we're given a story that outright takes place as part of the fourth film in the series, entirely outside of (and making no effort to connect to) the subset of that universe he's been developing over the past year and a half.

And, believe it or not, it's working this time. This story isn't just good; it's a worthwhile companion piece to arguably the greatest film in the original franchise.

This is the story of a human writing pamphlets for Governer Breck on how to train/control your ape. The attention to details from the film is excellent (our protagonist even ends up being the human who gets his sock polished in the film), the narration and thematic concepts are decent, and Wyman really blows us away once again with those contemptuous looks on the faces of each ape we see.

Ultimately, this story offers us an opportunity to see the events of Conquest from the point of view of an average human. Not a particularly ape-loving guy, and not an ape hater either; just an ordinary guy caught in the mechanism of the times.

The story also fills in minor details that make the events of the film seem more fluid, with a rising sense of ape defiance growing throughout the city, Breck ultimately ordering a stop to ape imports as a result, and ape management finally refusing to take in any new apes for reconditioning in response to the crisis.

Indeed, the story also emphasizes isolated acts of rebellion performed by individual apes as a result of learning of what Caesar has done. Essentially, it sells us on the idea that Caesar's actions inspired copycat incidents of willful rebellion, thus explaining the rise of apes as a dominant species. And, of course, according to Marshall in earlier stories, once the second plague comes (and he's now suggested that both plagues were engineered by humans for the purpose of warfare, and both went awry), humans go crazy, trash everything, and are ultimately wiped out, leaving relatively intelligent and empowered apes in charge to pick up the pieces.


minor detail: why draw attention to the governer's request for a new pamphlet, have the protagonist wonder what it is, and then never reveal it?


Really, this is far better than I'd come to expect from Marshall. I'm impressed and just may actually re-read this ONE issue from the entire Malibu/Adventure comics run in the future.

Planet of the Apes (Malibu/Adventure) #20



"Cowboys and Simians"
writer: Charles Marshall
pencils: M.C. Wyman
inks: Terry Pallot
letters: Mark Moore
editor-in-chief: Chris Ulm

grade: D+

It's obvious that Marshall is taking an extended break from Alexander and the dense continuity he'd been trying to build for the first 13 issues of this series, and I wonder if he's ever coming back to them. Judging by the covers of the remaining issues, it doesn't look good. For a while, I'd wondered if this had been an editorial decision in response to sales, letters, or just plain good sense, but Marshall's letter at the front of this issue outright thanks the editorial staff for the total freedom they continue to give him, suggesting to me that this is all Marshall's choice. Even he's beginning to realize how much what he was doing sucked.

So this issue offers another attempt at a fun diversion from the main road of this POTA series. This time, it's the return of the Ape Riders, who were briefly seen in the POTA Annual, and who still fail to win me over on any level. There's some almost cool aspects to the characters, like the leader, a career actor who considers being a hero just another acting role, and Shiloh, the Lightfoot who can conquer poison in his body through meditation, but the execution is clumsy, the pacing is off, the humor mixes weirdly with moments that (I assume) are supposed to be more serious (we've got Dirty Hairy, King Louis [Marshall's second reference to the Jungle Book in this series], and Dolenz, Tork, Nesmith, and Jones), and there are tons of logic problems with this issue, including a Lightfoot expounding his past and the customs of his people to a king he knows nothing about when his people are supposed to be enigmatic and rarely seen, as well as apes killing apes all over the place like it's a totally normal thing (except for Shiloh; They make it clear that Lightfoots don't kill, even while so many other stories in this series have perpetuated the severity of the edict that all apes shall never kill ape, including in the "Blood of the Apes" mini running alongside this one).

So yeah, pretty stupid stuff.

One world building bit, though (this seems to be a major focus of either Marshall or Ulm at this point): we learn in this issue that all the settlements to the West are small and new and (presumably because of the level at which Apes understand human technology) resemble the Old West, though why these guys aren't using more modern guns is beyond me.


If you've noticed, I come and go with plot synopses as of late, largely because they generally aren't worth it and truly aren't fun to relive. this one is no exception.