My god...they've finally done it...they blew it up. They...ah, you know the rest. This is Marvel's continuation of the Apes saga, one of the craziest attempts a comic company ever made to develop a licensed property.
The main story is "The Planet Inheritors!" by the omnipresent Doug Moench with nice art by Mike Ploog, whose pencils were directly reproduced instead of being inked. This story is the perfect synthesis of Apes craziness and Moench inventiveness, where in these twenty-two pages we get an ape in a Davy Crockett hat, secret vaults, and giant telepathic brains in glass bubbles.
Next are two text features called "The Remaking of Roddy McDowall, showing his step-by-step transformation into an ape, and "Knowing Your Place on The Planet of The Apes!", an analysis of the social commentary in the Apes films.
Last is "The Warhead Messiah", part two of the Beneath The Planet of the Apes adaptation by Moench and Alfredo Alcala, featuring particularly nice work by Alcala.
A fine issue, headlined by Moench and Ploog's crazy lead feature taking the Apes universe and twisting it and pushing it in ways 20th Century Fox probably came to regret.
One of the more unusual elements of the book has nothing to do with the Apes, though. The back cover features a Hostess ad starring Spider-Man, the only instance in my knowledge of one of these classic ads being run in a Marvel magazine. Ah, if only Hostess had hired Moench and Ploog to do an Apes Hostess ad, then we really would've had something!
2 comments:
I've always wanted to read the POTA magazine comics
I used to have a complete set of these, I miss them.
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