From Planet Of The Apes #101
Highlighting the glib, hip, slightly cringey style of dialogue Marvel persevered with well into the 1980s. On page 2, our hero* Derek says '--it's time to make quick like a BUNNY!!' whilst thinking 'Lord knows where I found the flippancy...' or, indeed, why?
* I've never particularly cared for the human characters. I'm in it for the apes.
Issue 94, week ending August 4th, 1976.
Obviously inspired by the incorporation of Dracula Lives into the Planet Of The Apes comic in issue 88, this cover gleefully ramps up the usually neglected gothic horror aspect of the series to exhilarating effect.
I have a more or less lifelong obsession with the original Planet of the Apes series. As a kid my regular fix of Ape Action was the UK version of the Marvel cash-in comic. Unlike its US counterpart, the UK comic was published weekly, so the British publishers soon ran out of source material and started making up their own stories, some of which were then reused by the Americans when they ran out.
I have many issues of this much-loved (but not particularly good) comic in my possession, so I'm going to share some of the covers with you, starting with Issue 60, from the week ending December 13th, 1975. There's quite a lot going on with it.
The back cover of the issue is this rather ambiguous exclusive 'pin up' of the great Roddy McDowell. Roddy was a superb and underrated actor and, by all accounts, a kind and lovely man, but is this the sort of picture anyone, particularly a child, would want hanging over their bed?
No, thought not.
