Planet Of The Apes [2023] #3 - Marvel Comics

PLANET OF THE APES No. 3, August 2023

Considering that almost the entirety of David F. Walker’s script for Issue Three of “Planet Of The Apes” is arguably designed to simply set up this ongoing series’ next edition, there's surprisingly still plenty of plot to keep the comic’s audience hooked throughout its fifteen pages. In fact, it’s debatably difficult not to come away from this periodical without some sympathy for the leader of Exercitus Viri, considering just how traumatic the tragic death of his entire family hits him, despite the anti-simian terrorist subsequently launching a mass attack against an ocean liner packed full of hapless apes, chimpanzees, and orangutans.

Quite possibly this book’s best moment though lies in Juliana Tobon’s short-lived defence of some monkeys in Florida during 2015, in which the U.N. Peacekeeping soldier guns down a handful of misguided “pendejos” who attempt to cold-bloodedly murder her furry friends. This flashback sequence not only provides the publication with some much needed, adrenalin-fuelled fighting. But also demonstrates that the ofttimes politely spoken woman is definitely not to be trifled with when it comes to her mission to ship “the world’s last sizable population of apes in captivity across the world”.

Competently pencilling the Ringo Award-winning author’s script is Dave Wachter, whose panels during the aforementioned gun-battle really help sell the notion of a straightforward, stand-up firefight between two bitterly opposed military forces. Sadly however, the “American artist best known for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” doesn’t debatably deliver quite so well when it comes to the more sedentary scenes, especially those set a hundred miles east of New York, with many a simian and human figure appearing strangely square-headed.

Curiously, the same can’t really be said for the illustrator’s work on this comic’s secondary tale, “The Smartest Gorilla In The World”, which focuses upon a group of surviving apes searching through the house of a long dead couple in Calais, France. Despite some quite word-heavy narration by Walker at the start of this story, the vast majority of Pug’s experience with a child’s electronic word game is visually told, and Wachter does an excellent job of showing how the titular character shockingly begins to vocally form words using the handheld toy as a speech prompt.

Writer: David F. Walker, Artist: Dave Wachter, and Colorist: Bryan Valenza