In June, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self was well-primed for the debut of a comic book series based on the Planet of the Apes media franchise. True, at the time I’d seen only two out of the five extant movies — Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), both of which I saw in theaters (to this day, I have no idea how or why I missed catching the fifth film, 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, at the movie house, but there it is). But I’d read the English translation of Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes, the 1963 French novel on which the first film was based, as well as Michael Avallone’s paperback novelization of the second film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and, most recently, David Gerrold’s corresponding effort re: Battle. So I was about as up-to-date on my “Apes” lore as it was possible to be in those pre-home video days, given that I’d missed the broadcast premieres of the first three films on The CBS Friday Night Movie the previous autumn (perhaps because I was out with friends, but more likely because my parents wanted to watch something else, and we were a one-TV household at the time). In any event, I was more than ready for more Apes content.
Marvel’s Planet of the Apes arrived on newsstands in the summer of ’74 as part of an expansion of the publisher’s black-and-white magazine line on two fronts — the first being an increase in the number of titles being released, the second an increase in the page count (and corresponding price point) of a select number of those titles. PotA #1 was the third publication from Marvel to come in at 80 pages for $1.00; it followed close on the heels of Savage Sword of Conan #1, which had been released just a couple of weeks prior, and which had in its turn been preceded by the non-comics magazine Monsters of the Movies, the first issue of which had shipped in April. With the majority of Marvel’s black-and-white books remaining 64 pages for 75 cents, the launch of Planet of the Apes in the larger, more expensive format suggests that the company had high hopes for the new title.
It’s not hard to understand why Marvel thought the POTA franchise would prove a good long-term bet. While the 20th Century Fox film series appeared to have run its course as far as new releases were concerned, the CBS telecasts of the first three films had garnered very good ratings — so good, in fact, that the network had greenlit production of an all-new one-hour weekly Planet of the Apes television series, scheduled to premiere in September, 1974. Meanwhile, Fox had re-released all five films to theaters to run as a marathon (see poster at left), and Mego Corporation had launched a new line of POTA action figures and other toys. (For the record, your humble blogger doesn’t remember the movie marathon coming to his town, nor did he have any real interest in the toys; on the other hand, he was keen on catching the new TV series from the moment he first learned about it, which may well have been by way of the first issue of Marvel’s magazine.)
Like most of the Marvel magazines of the 1970s, Planet of the Apes featured a combination of comics and illustrated text features, and the cover of the first issue seemed as intent on promoting the latter as it was the former; for example, the name of Rod Serling, one of the first movie’s two credited screenwriters, was highlighted as prominently as anything else in the magazine. (And with good reason; an interview with the Twilight Zone creator was quite the “get” for Marvel in 1974, or so at least it seems to me.) The cover illustration — seemingly inspired by one of the latter scenes in the first film, though I may be wrong about that — was by Bob Larkin, who’d go on to paint numerous further covers for the magazine (though he wasn’t responsible for all of them, by any means).
Turning past the cover, we readers in June, 1974 were greeted first by a photo-accompanied masthead and table of contents, and then by an introductory two-page text piece contributed by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, before we finally got to the first of the magazine’s two comics features: the initial installment of what would prove a long-running serial, “Terror on the Planet of the Apes”… which was itself prefaced by a photo-illustrated text introduction:
Thomas’ editorial had referred to “Terror” as being Marvel’s version of “a sixth ‘Planet’ movie, by Rhesus!”, and this anonymously-penned intro does seem to place the strip as taking place some time after the events of Battle of the Planet of the Apes in the film series’ somewhat circular chronology, in part through its invocation of the character of the Lawgiver — a key figure in the POTA mythos who’d appeared in a framing sequence in that film (a sequence which was itself set some six centuries after the movie’s main action, we should note).
As suggested by the credits slug at the bottom of the story’s actual first page, writer Gerry Conway had been attached to the “Terror” feature early on; according to most accounts, his input basically consisted of conceiving and naming the two protagonists, Jason the human and Alexander the chimpanzee. Doug Moench, who’d go on to script not only every installment of this particular feature, but literally all of the magazine’s other comics content over its 29-issue run as well, appears to have come up with just about everything else.
The artist was Mike Ploog, who’d previously proven his facility for rendering fur-covered characters with his work on Marvel’s Werewolf by Night. Ploog was an artist whose material always looked best when he inked it himself, which was fortunately the case with this as well as several succeeding chapters of the serial — or when the published artwork was reproduced directly from his pencils, as would in fact occur with a few other later episodes.
Reading this story for the first time in 1974, my younger self assumed that the Lawgiver we meet here is the same one that appears in Battle for the Planet of the Apes — the figure whose historic legacy, including the statue that was shown in the photo illustrating “Terror”‘s text intro, was a significant part of the world-building in the first two POTA movies as well. The fans who maintain the Planet of the Apes Wiki don’t seem to think so, however, and hey, maybe they have better information than I do. (I do have to admit that for someone who’s supposed to be extremely wise, the Lawgiver of “Terror” makes a number of truly boneheaded decisions over the course of the serial’s fifteen published chapters — beginning with one we have coming up on the very next page…)
After delegating his authority to Xavier — who’ll quickly prove to be just as unfit for the role as Jason and Alex suspect — the Lawgiver makes a quick departure. Curious, our two protagonists attempt to follow him out of the city, but quickly lose track of him; naturally, that doesn’t stop them from speculating…
Jason accepts Alex’s mild rebuke in the spirit it’s offered, and the two friends part ways for the evening, each heading for their respective homes. Jason lives farther away — “on the other side of the stream” — so the chimp arrives at his destination first. There, he walks in on a shocking scene:
Meanwhile, Jason’s parents are sitting quietly at home, waiting for their son’s return, when they hear the unexpected sound of hoofbeats outside. They go to the door to see what’s going on…
While the theme of racial conflict had been present in the Planet of the Apes films from the beginning, and had become ever more central as the series continued, I’m not sure that any scene in the five movies that preceded this story had hammered the real-world parallel home quite as strongly as did this sequence by Moench and Ploog, with its hood-wearing, torch-throwing, night-riding gorillas.
Having completed their grisly work, the gorillas prepare to ride away, just as Jason arrives on the scene…
Jason runs into the forest after the riders, but, inevitably, they leave him far behind. The young human sinks to the ground in exhaustion and despair as our story’s first chapter ends.
Alex doesn’t try to argue further with Jason; rather, after acknowledging that “Maybe it is time for some new laws,” he chooses to accompany his friend in going after the murdering gorillas.
The message is passed on to “the Leader” — a gorilla who goes bareheaded within the walls of his command post, but puts on his hood prior to appearing before the returning riders, who have yet to prove themselves in his eyes…
Alex and Jason fight as hard as they can, but eventually fall to their attackers’ greater numbers. Meanwhile, back at the ape supremacists’ encampment…
Brutus is unperturbed by Jason’s angry accusations, and seems to find it amusing when the human prisoner calls him “a disease-ridden murderer“…
Jason is held prisoner until the next morning, at which time Brutus — the Lawgiver’s duly appointed Peace Officer — hauls him before Xavier, calling for him to be hung to death for the crime of killing Zena. And as he’d said he would, Brutus has “fully a dozen gorillas — the most respectable citizens of this village” on hand to testify as eyewitnesses to Jason’s guilt…
This first chapter of “Terror on the Planet of the Apes”, featuring a thoughtful as well as suspenseful script from Doug Moench and stunning artwork from Mike Ploog, unquestionably gets the serial off to an impressive start. But its somber tone hardly gives any inkling of the extravagantly imaginative directions the strip would take in future issues… a topic of which we’ll have more to say later in the post.
Immediately following the magazine’s 25-page “Terror” installment comes its clutch of photo-illustrated text articles, beginning with Gary Gerani’s “Escape from the Battle for the Conquest Beneath the Planet of the Apes: An Overview of the Apes Series”. Next up is the aforementioned interview with Rod Serling, as conducted by David Johnson, while a piece by Ed Lawrence about the movies’ prosthetic makeup techniques brings up the rear.
That brings us to the magazine’s second comics feature, as well as its final feature overall:
The credits slug evidently got left off the opening splash page of Marvel’s adaptation of the first Planet of the Apes movie, so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that Doug Moench wrote the script, while the art was handled by George Tuska (pencils) and Mike Esposito (inks). The pairing of the latter two gentlemen wasn’t what you’d call a major draw for your humble blogger in 1974 (and isn’t much more of one fifty years later, either, if I’m going to be honest). But that really didn’t matter a great deal to my younger self, if I recall correctly — at least, not as much as it would have with the all-original lead feature. That’s because while I knew the basic outline of the 1968 film’s story, I still hadn’t seen the actual movie, itself; and so I was less interested in what the creative team might bring to this project in regards to their own artistic vision, and more in a straightforward, faithful adaptation of the source material.
Generally speaking, Marvel’s adaptation of 1968’s Planet of the Apes was indeed quite faithful to the movie — as were the four other film adaptations that would follow it. While there were occasional discrepancies between Moench’s scripts and what readers had seen on their movie and TV screens, due to the writer having to work from the “official” screenplays provided by 20th Century Fox versus what was actually filmed and released to theaters, these were generally minor. And the more-or-less unlimited number of pages that Moench and company had to work with — all of Marvel’s adaptations would run for at least six chapters, of twenty or more pages each — meant that, unlike the one previous Apes film-to-comic project published to date (i.e., Gold Key’s single-issue take on Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which had appeared in 1970), they could include virtually everything that was in the screenplays, up to and including the long, ruminative log entry by spaceship captain George Taylor that opens the present narrative.
The main aspect of the films to which the creative teams were unable to remain faithful was something that they didn’t have any control over; Marvel’s license from 20th Century Fox didn’t include rights to actors’ likenesses, so the human characters didn’t look like their on-screen equivalents. According to an account given by Roy Thomas in aspecial Marvel-themed 9th issue of the UK Planet of the Apes fanzine, Simian Scrolls (July, 2004) (download available here), the studio was especially concerned about Charlton Heston, who played Taylor in the first two movies:
…we couldn’t do any likenesses of Charlton Heston, who had a history of going over the financial books of his movies with a fine-tooth comb and being very litigious, and they didn’t want to split the (relatively small) money with him… That was fine by us.
In fact, artist George Tuska was specifically instructed to avoid making the hero of the comic adaptation of the first movie, to appear in the b&w PLANET OF THE APES #1 and following, look anything like Heston, and he did as instructed. But the approval process with 20th, which had the right of approval on all the art and copy, was very slow… and at one point we were close to missing our shipping date waiting for them to get back to us about the contents of #1 that we’d sent. So I was instructed by [Marvel’s publisher] Stan Lee and president Al Landau (I guess it was– it wasn’t just Stan) to talk to our attorney, and do what he said. The attorney said it should be okay, so let the issue be printed.
The issue was being printed when we got the word from 20th that the hero looked too much like Charlton Heston. They were obviously being over-cautious, as there was little real resemblance except for the general heroic look. So we had to change lots of things at great expense and delay to Marvel not sure if George or John Romita did the corrections, but it was pretty frantic.* I ended up with a copy of one of the 16-page “signatures” of the rejected PLANET adaptation, which ran in the back of the issue and had already been printed… kept it for a long time and wish still had it so I could offer visual proof that the 20th people were being over-cautious. Only thing that saved my editorial hide was the fact that I had followed orders and done what the Marvel attorney said, not acted on my own…
In addition to being able to let talky segments like Taylor’s log entry run as long as needed, Marvel’s format also allowed for the inclusion of extended dialogue-free passages, such as we see with the following three and two-thirds page-long sequence depicting the film’s events from Taylor’s entering hibernation to the spaceship’s crash-landing on an unknown planet:
Could another artist have made the preceding sequence slightly more visually dazzling? Maybe — but I think that with his use of quick back-and-forth cuts from the exterior shots of the ship and planet to the closeups on the ship’s viewscreen’s unheeded “DANGER!” warnings, as well as his careening, vertiginous camera angles, George Tuska did a highly effective job of graphic storytelling here.
OK, we’re going to skip the part where Taylor and his colleagues discover they’ve crashed in a lake, and scramble to get out before it sinks… actually, we’re going to skip the next several scenes as well, mostly because I figure most people reading this will already be pretty familiar with the movie’s story (and if you’re not, access to the film’s not all that hard to come by). We’ll pick up near the end, just after the stranded astronauts have discovered a population of what appear to be human beings much like themselves — except that they’re quite primitive, and, even more concerningly, lack the power of speech…
Sure, Marvel made us readers wait until the 23rd page of this 25-page story before giving us as much of a glimpse of an ape — but then delivered with a fine staging of one of the original movie’s most iconic scenes. (All these years later, you still can’t get any more Planet of the Apes than “apes on horseback chasing down running humans”, can you?) In any event, I doubt that there were many (if any) POTA fans who got to the end of this first issue back in July, 1974, and didn’t feel they’d gotten their dollar’s worth.
Planet of the Apes #1 set a template which the next twenty-eight issues would follow, with some occasional variations. Generally there would be two comics features of roughly equal length — one being a brand new story, the other being the latest installment in the ongoing series of movie adaptations — with the remainder of the page count being filled out by text features. Every once in a while, an issue would double-up on the adaptation content, squeezing out the original story material; this ultimately allowed Marvel to get through all five films within 28 issues (a lucky thing, given that the following issue would be the magazine’s last). Following the conclusion of the first movie adaptation by Moench, Tuska, and Esposito in issue #6, Moench would proceed to collaborate with a rotating cast of mostly Filipino artists to bring the remaining four films to the comics page; the most prominent of these were Alfredo Alcala and Rico Rival.
Meanwhile, “Terror on the Planet of the Apes” would roll along through the magazine’s entire run, its fifteenth and final chapter (which, alas, did not wrap up the ongoing storyline) appearing in #28. The notion of it representing a “sixth movie” seems to have been abandoned relatively early on; though enemies come and go, and some specific situations do get resolved (more or less), Jason and Alexander’s adventures never quite arrive at a point that feels like the climax of a film; rather, the whole enterprise reads more like an never-ending movie serial, or if you prefer, a typical Marvel comic of its era. As noted earlier, over the course of the series Moench’s imagination takes him to places, characters, and concepts undreamed of by the people who worked on the original Apes movies and TV shows (perhaps due mostly to the budgetary restrictions faced by the latter media; but then again, perhaps not). Among the most memorable of these are: a pair of riverboat-riding frontierspersons named Gunpowder Julius (a gorilla) and Steely Dan (a human); a crashed alien spaceship called the Psychedrome, ruled by multiple-eyestalk-waving extraterrestrials and served by winged monkey-demons; a human collector of artifacts from the time of “the Ancients” (i.e., the 20th century) who lives inside Abe Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore; a colony of apes whose culture emulates that of the Vikings; and a set of cyborg apes dubbed the Gorilloids. While some of this material is clearly intended to cast a satirical eye on our own times, a portion of it seems to embrace nuttiness simply for its own sake; regardless of intent, however, the whole thing makes for a wild, mostly entertaining ride, though one that never loses sight of the cautionary themes regarding bigotry, the risk of nuclear war, and so on, that were baked into the Planet of the Apes franchise from the beginning.
Mike Ploog remained on board as “Terror”‘s principal artist through its 10th installment, which ran in PotA #19 (Apr., 1976); his pencils for that chapter were inked by Tom Sutton, who went on to draw the next couple of episodes on his own before being replaced by Herb Trimpe for the final three chapters. Sutton was also the artist for what was probably the most impressive of the magazine’s all-new comics feature outside of “Terror” — the five-episode “Future History Chronicles”, which debuted in issue #12 (Sep., 1975). With this strip, Moench eschewed any overt connection whatsoever to the specific concepts or characters of the Apes films, giving readers instead an almost hallucinatory vision of a seagoing culture where human slaves provide the manpower to drives massive city-ships ruled by apes; a vision that was captured by Sutton, a master stylist, in almost obsessive detail, as exemplified in this double-page spread from the feature’s third installment in PotA #17 (Feb., 1976):
Unfortunately, “Future History Chronicles”, like “Terror on the Planet of the Apes”, had its continuing storyline abruptly truncated by the subsequent cancellation of the magazine in late 1976.
This is probably as good a place as any to note that while Marvel’s Planet of the Apes magazine ran from 1974 through 1976; it wasn’t the only Apes periodical released by the publisher while it held the license. July, 1975 saw the debut of Adventures on the Planet of the Apes — a full-color reprinting of the first two movie adaptations that ran for eleven issues, with the last shipping in September, 1976. Making rather more of a splash — at least on the other side of the pond — was the Planet of the Apes title released by Marvel’s United Kingdom publishing arm. “Apemania” was evidently such a popular phenomenon in Britain that Marvel UK’s PotA was issued weekly, beginning in October, 1974; as you might guess, this accelerated schedule meant that the British title blew through the available U.S.-produced Apes content pretty damn quickly. This led Marvel UK not only to fill some of their pages with non-Apes Marvel comics material, but also to take the drastic step of radically reworking some of that latter material; more specifically, to convert several early installments of Marvel’s future-set “War of the Worlds” series from Amazing Adventures into Planet of the Apes yarns, as the original feature’s hero, the Martian-fighting Killraven, became “Apeslayer”. You really can’t make this stuff up, folks.
But all good things must come to an end, as they say, and such was true in regards to Marvel’s Planet of the Apes publishing ventures. The original, U.S. black-and-white magazine, following a reduction in size (to 48 pages) and price (to 75 cents) with issue #14, ultimately folded with #29, which was released in December, 1976; the UK version, on the other hand, soldiered on a bit longer, finally wrapping up with #123 (!), published in February, 1977. (A merger with Marvel UK’s version of another U.S. black-and-white title, Dracula Lives, as of issue #88 probably contributed to the title’s longevity; even so, that’s still quite an impressive run.) By this time, “Apemania” had pretty well run its course, at least in the U.S.. The live-action Planet of the Apes television series that premiered to high hopes in September, 1974, had been cancelled after only fourteen episodes, and an animated follow-up, Return to the Planet of the Apes, came and went during the 1975-76 TV season. By early 1977, the franchise’s moment seemed to have passed. (Of course, by the middle of 1977, another, brand-new science-fiction media franchise — one focused on a faraway galaxy in a long-ago time, rather than on our own Earth in the far future — would be taking up most if not all of the available pop-cultural oxygen, anyway… but that’s another story.)
If your humble blogger is going to be honest here, however, he must admit that he’s not even sure he noticed the passing of Marvel’s Planet of the Apes in the winter of ’77… as he’d stopped buying the magazine long before that. How long before? Well, I’m really not sure. Unlike with most of the comics I purchased half a century ago, I don’t currently have access to my back issues of PotA (meaning that I’ve either managed to somehow actually lose them over the past five decades, or they’re buried in a box out in the garage with a lot of other boxes full of old paper, so that they’re as good as lost, at least until I get off my butt and clean out the garage [please don’t hold your breath for that, OK?]). And my memory’s not giving me very much help here. I know for sure that I bought the first issue, and several thereafter, but that’s as far as it goes.
If I had to make a guess, however, I’d figure that I may have dropped the title with issue #5, which was the first not to include an installment of Moench and Ploog’s “Terror on the Planet of the Apes”. That would have been pretty short-sighted of me, given that the serial resumed with the very next issue; it would also mean that I bailed on the last two chapters of Moench, Tuska, and Esposito’s adaptation of the first movie, which strikes me as odd. Maybe I’d just lost some of my enthusiasm for the franchise by the time PotA #5 came out in December, 1974; I do recall that I was generally underwhelmed by the live-action TV series (and I have no recollection of ever tuning in the following year’s animated series at all). At this late date, all I can really do is speculate.
Of course, one nice thing about comics is that even if you missed them back when they were new, you can still read and enjoy them now, when they (and you) are old. True, for much of the last half-century, most of Marvel’s 1970s Apes material was only available if you were willing to track down the original back issues. But, in 2017, BOOM! Studios reprinted the entire magazine series (comics content only) in four Archives volumes; while now out of print, they’re still likely to be easier (and cheaper) to come by than the original issues. More recently, Marvel Comics has reacquired the Planet of the Apes license, and, along with producing new comics content, they’ve released an omnibus edition of the color versions of their first two film adaptations, as originally presented in the eleven issues of Adventures on the Planet of the Apes. Given the current popularity of the whole Apes franchise thanks to the ongoing rebooted film series, can “Terror” and Marvel’s other classic black-and-white comics material be far behind?
Or, to put it another way: it’s never too late to Go Ape.
Additional cover art credits, per the Grand Comics Database and Mike’s Amazing World of Comics:
- Planet of the Apes #2 by Bob Larkin.
- Planet of the Apes #4 by Bob Larkin.
- Planet of the Apes #19 by Bob Larkin.
- Adventures on the Planet of the Apes #1 by Rich Buckler and Joe Sinnott.
- Planet of the Apes (Marvel UK) #23 by Ron Wilson and Mike Esposito.
- Planet of the Apes #29 by Malcolm McNeill.
- Planet of the Apes Archive, Volume One: Terror on the Planet of the Apes by Malcolm McNeill.
- Planet of the Apes Adventures: The Original Marvel Years by E.M. Gist.
*According to the Grand Comics Database, John Romita did the art corrections on Taylor’s face.
