This story arc would also feature a Captain Nemo pastiche.Įscape from the Planet of the Apes was reprinted close on the heels of Beneath in that same month. Īt the same time, the comic began to reprint the surreal fantasy of the “Future History Chronicles”, a piratical sequence of ape adventures by Tom Sutton. They carried on in the pages of the first landscape title, The Titans from October 1975. In August, reprints began of Lee, Thomas and Colan’s stultifying spaceman saga, Captain Marvel. However, this hybridised strip was mothballed by mid-May as Marvel’s version of the mutant-ridden sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes began in June 1975 and concluded in September.įurther Marvel adaptations appeared as back-ups in the summer of 1975: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and The Day of the Triffids. ![]() Basically, this was a reprint of the mongrel Adams/Chaykin/Trimpe Killraven/War of the Worlds series…with Martians substituted by apes.Ībsorbed as I was by any and all of Marvel’s sword-wielding barbarians, I owned exactly this one issue of Amazing Adventures (from Stonehouse in ’73) so I was more than happy to read a bastardised into of Carmilla Frost and Grok the Clonal Man. The response to this crisis, in March 1975, was one of the most notorious creations of Marvel UK: Apeslayer. The weekly publication schedule quickly devoured US Apes material. At some point in this period, we were taken to see the first POTA movie and Escape from. The friends would continue to appear in increasingly -bizarre adventures with a frontiersman named Steely Dan.īack-ups now tended to be Marvel adaptations of bleak sci-fi stories from Worlds Unknown, like “Black Destroyer”, “Killdozer” and “Arena”. ![]() This serial was followed by Marvel’s first original story arc, Terror on the Planet of the Apes: a Moench/Ploog collaboration which introduced long-running protagonists, Jason and Alexander. The adaptations of the Apes movies began, of course, with the Charlton Heston original which ran from October ’74 to the first week of January’75. I was intrigued by Conway and Colan’s first couple of dread-soaked outings but was far less keen on Ploog’s Werewolf By Night and the antiquated adventures of the literary Frankenstein’s Monster. I did come across occasional copies of Dracula Lives in the following months, in the homes of neighbours’ kids. Meanwhile Thomas and Kane produced a pastiche of ERB’s Gods of Mars in Gullivar Jones (Even having read a couple of issues of DC’s Weird Worlds, I failed to pick up on the resemblance for years!) Ka-Zar, Lee and Kirby’s riff on Tarzan’s New York Adventure, segued into the Conan-esque sword and sorcery of the Petrified Man by Gerry Conway and Barry Smith. By the second issue, I was captivated by the “savage tales” reprinted within.ĭespite my love of Kirby’s whacked-out post-apocalyptic cartoon Kamandi and its dolphin society however, or the talking worm in Shazam, the simian satire of POTA didn’t grab me the way the back-up strips did. I suspect I was subtly guided towards the POTA comic and away from Dracula – my parents being quite unaware of the references to lobotomy, gelding and other gruesome experiments in the script and oblivious to the Joy of Sex Man in bondage on the cover. Furthermore, one of the the first “grown-up” books I read was the novelisation (which I probably got in Safeway, where the Blish Star Trek paperbacks were sold). I had been allowed to watch the 1958 Hammer Dracula one Friday night in STV’s Don’t Watch Alone slot and my brother and I had been taken to see Battle for the Planet of the Apes at the cinema in East Kilbride, possibly in early ’74. In the strike -bound mid- 70s, you could get a hamburger and a coke for about 50p in Baxters in Strathaven). ![]() My parents permitted me to add only one new comic to my weekly standing order ( Four comics equalled 32p a week. Marvel had published it as a response to high American tv ratings for winter screenings of the Apes films. POTA reprinted material from the US magazine of the same name. In ’74, the two new comics were a departure from the Sixties super-hero fare of the original trio of weeklies. Neither, of course, satirise Sixties and Seventies culture the way the originals did. I’ve cast a desultory eye over both Tim Burton’s campy 2001 re-imagining of POTA and 2011’s “reboot”, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The Apes tv series began its UK run in October 1974 but, ape-allingly, was never picked up by STV (although it probably was in broadcast up here in the North East)! Apparently Channel 4 showed the series twenty years later but I didn’t have a telly for much of 1994 so I wouldn’t know. It’s a staggering forty years since the launch of Marvel UK’s fourth and fifth reprint titles, Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives.
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