It is with no small amount of shame that I note it has been over a year(!) since I promised to take a look at Planet of The Apes Weekly. Um. Prizes for the best excuses! Er, I mean reasons. Look, we're all adults so let's all just put it behind us and move on. As a special Christmas Treat, and as a small act of atonement, please find the covers to the first 31 issues of Planet of The Apes Weekly. If you like 'em I'll do some more. And, okay, we'll see what we can do about, y'know, going on about the contents in word form. No promises, mind. Special BONUS: from hereonin I (mostly) shut my mad yapper and let the pictures speak. Merry Christmas!

Anyway, this...

Oh, context: Planet Of The Apes Weekly was a repackaging of Marvel's PoTA material for the British market. It was spurred by the enormous popularity of the PoTA TV show. The PotA strips were hacked into episodes of about six pages and backed up by whatever mad sci-fi based stuff Marvel had to hand. Turned out Marvel had plenty. The weekly schedule really burned through the scant PoTA material and filling each issue must have been quite an adventure. The movie adaptations constantly rotated in and out and the Killraven strip was rejigged from a disco themed continuation of H.G. Wells' War of The Worlds into a disco themed continuation of PoTA via the genius of the addition of badly drawn ape heads on anything that wasn't moving. PoTA began in 1974 and ran under its own title for 139 issues before being subsumed into other Marvel reprint titles and finally expiring in 1977. Which is when the children's entertainment Star Wars hit...Anyway, we'll get into all that later. Maybe. For now, the singular visual magic that was 1970s Marvel reprint comics covers: