Review: Kong on the Planet of the Apes trade paperback (BOOM! Studios)

[A series on Planet of the Apes comics by guest reviewer Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

Must there be a Skull Island? If there’s a Statue of Liberty on the planet of the apes, it stands to reason that we might find other Earth landmarks beyond the Forbidden Zone. That’s the premise that distinguishes Kong on the Planet of the Apes from its crossover predecessors; rather than relocate other properties onto the eponymous planet (or, in the case of Tarzan on the Planet of the Apes, bring the apes to Tarzan), Kong presupposes that the big ape was always already there, safe from the radiation that warped the world into an evolutionary jumble.

In a franchise (over)laden with alternate timelines, paradoxes, and sliding continuities, Kong picks up after the end of the first movie, imagining that Doctor Zaius might pursue Taylor into the Forbidden Zone. When Zaius too finds the Statue of Liberty, his first impulse is to destroy it, hoping to conceal the precarity of his civilization’s hidden past. (“For the good of apekind,” he declares.) Just beyond the Statue, however, the body of an enormous ape washes onto the beach — the last, we learn, of the female Kong species. Doctor Zaius conscripts Zira and Cornelius to counter the military expedition of General Ursus, bearing all of them to Skull Island in search of what might be a god, a weapon, or just the undoing of ape society.

Writer Ryan Ferrier is no stranger to the art of the crossover, having co-written Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II with James Tynion IV. He’s joined by no less than Carlos Magno, who I would daresay is my favorite Apes artist (at least until Michael Allred or Phil Noto go beyond cover duty and turn out a full story). Magno, you may remember, had acquitted himself well with the Planet of the Apes Omnibus I reviewed back in 2021, and so there’s an unintentional feeling of coming full circle with his return.¹ Overall, there’s a kind of “dream team” aura on Kong, particularly with the bulk of the series given over to a quartet of recognizable apes at center stage; I’ve complained about certain apes being shunted to the background (Zaius, primarily), and on that count Kong delivers and how.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

At the same time, Kong also manages to grow the universe of the Apes, again in a way that feels of a piece with Magno’s earlier Apes work. If you’d ever wondered about what lay beyond Ape City (formerly New York, more or less), Ferrier has the answer. It is, after all, a planet of apes, and so we encounter an entirely separate ape society in present-day Kenya. This glimpse of Warm Water Island almost resembles the ape city Derkein from the 2001 Tim Burton film, while calling to mind the political scheming and global perspective of Magno’s previous BOOM! Studios run with Daryl Gregory. Where there’s one ape city, there may as well be two, and if there are two, I would have loved to see more in subsequent stories.

Kong fans too will find much to enjoy in this volume. As a Skull Island neophyte, I spent a little too much time trying to parse out whether this Kong was our Kong, though this book seems to pick up the tail end of a genetic line of Kongs. This idea of a civilization in decline, particularly juxtaposed with Doctor Zaius’s efforts to keep his society from crumbling under the weight of ontological truth, is a fascinating narrative playground, and throughout, Magno’s depiction of Kong’s tear-stained face is frankly heartbreaking. All the same, though, Magno gives Kong ample space to cut loose, especially in a memorable rampage through Ape City. Skull Island gets its due, as well, with striking kaiju versions of squids, raptors, and pterodactyls assailing our apes.

With the inclusion of the humans on Skull Island, however, Kong begins to crumble under its own scope. Because I’m not well versed in the King Kong lore, I expected a jungle of savages, yet this Skull Island is inhabited by a tribe of warriors, with protagonist Ni’Ta closer to Linda Hamilton than Fay Wray (despite one near-splash panel with Ni’Ta announcing Kong’s rampage with a well-timed “***AAIIEEEE!***”). Still, Ni’Ta has some underlying yet unexplored connection with King Kong, though it’s far from amorous. Meanwhile, among the book’s other King Kong archetypes, Doctor Zaius fairly becomes Carl Denham, unveiling Kong as proof positive “that ape was meant to walk this earth [as] the superior species … we were meant to inherit this world.”

By the book’s ultimate chapter, one wonders if Kong on the Planet of the Apes was supposed to have a seventh issue, because the plots never quite converge and the book slams on the brakes in its final pages. The body of astronaut Maryann Stewart washes ashore, with Dr. Milo discovering the spacecraft that brought her and George Taylor to Ape City; Ursus accidentally drives Kong and Ni’Ta into the mutant stronghold of Queensboro Plaza; and the mutant leader Mendez leads his congregation in worship of the dying Kong, while Doctor Zaius demands of Zira and Cornelius, “Keep your lips sealed, and life goes on.” It would seem that Ferrier is trying to imply that his story essentially replaces Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with the detonation of the Doomsday Bomb and the flight of Cornelius and Zira to follow in the moments just after Kong concludes. As a climax, though, it’s inside baseball, resulting in a story that merely stops rather than ends; the mutants only appear on the last three pages, and even then it’s unclear whether they intend to explode their bomb or simply replace it with Kong as the figurehead of their faith.

Kong on the Planet of the Apes starts strong, but it sustains that momentum for too long, resulting in a book that slams headlong into its own denouement. As a thought experiment, it’s fun to imagine these two properties together, especially with a perusal through the variant cover gallery and the painterly main covers by Mike Huddleston. Yet in much the way that the original films are boxed in by their own bootstrap paradox, Kong falls into the trap of the closed time loop without quite finding a way to resolve its own internal tensions. It’s slightly stronger than Tarzan, but as crossovers go, Green Lantern and Star Trek: The Primate Directive still take the cake — or, as it were, the top banana.

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1. Magno also illustrated BOOM!’s 12-issue Kong of Skull island, making him a natural choice for this crossover.  ↩︎