Planet of the Apes #3 Review

Written by: David F. Walker
Art by: Dave Wachter
Colors by: Bryan Valenza
Letters by: VC’s Joe Caramagna
Cover art by: Joshua Cassara, Dean White
Cover price: $4.99
Release date: June 14, 2023

Planet of the Apes #3 explains how one of the Exercitus Viri members became a member, what apes think about the ocean, and how a circus gorilla learned to read.

Is It Good?

Is it too early to take a setup/breather issue? It feels like it’s too early to have a setup/breather issue. Well, regardless of how you feel about it, Planet of the Apes #3 is a setup/breather issue, and by the time you reach the last page, the overwhelming reaction you’re prone to have is, “That’s it?”

When last we left the world spiraling into chaos, Juliana Tobon was tasked with escorting a group of apes to the CDC from Ghana. With dwindling resources and an increasingly panicked human population, Juliana’s delivery may be humanity’s last hope to find a cure for the Simian Flu.

Now, the series takes a break from the action with a flashback to show how one of the Exercitus Viri members took up arms after the death of his family, how Juliana fought off an Exercitus Viri attack during her military service, and in the backup, show how a circus gorilla learned to speak French.

I’ll give David F. Walker this much credit – at least the apes aren’t sitting sheepishly in cages for the entirety of the issue, so that’s something at least. For everything else, this series is turning out to be a mystery that reads like Walker didn’t understand the homework assignment.

We learn how one of the Exercitur Viri members took up arms against the apes, but you never see his face or learn his name. In principle, this backstory should have been an opportunity to humanize the Exercitus Viri (still a terrible name), but without a way to connect with the individual through his face or name, the potential for humanization is lost.

We see more details about Juliana Tobon’s earlier skirmish with an Exercitus Viri group during a military convoy to transport apes. The scenes fill in more detail about the skirmish, but you don’t learn anything new, and the skirmish has no apparent connection to the plot in the present.

In the present, we see Juliana and Omatete near the end of their ship voyage to transport apes to the CDC headquarters in America when they’re confronted by a small armada of Exercitus Viri ships. The conflict is set up but left for the next issue, and you’re still left wondering how a civilian militia group managed to stay cohesive, organized, and supplied for years better than any military or government agency in the world.

In the backup, we continue to follow Pug the gorilla when he enters an abandoned house and picks up a child’s learning toy that begins to teach him how to speak French. Why? Who knows. Pug doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the main story.

When you put all those pieces together, what you get is a pile of pieces. Parts of scenes with no impact or narrative weight stack on top of the beginning of scenes that don’t go anywhere. It’s as if Walker has an entire movie pictured but decided no one issue needed to have a clear beginning, middle, end, or point.

About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.

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Bits and Pieces

Planet of the Apes #3 reads like a setup/breather issue with a collection of partial scenes, flashbacks, and a backup that don’t appear to have any meaningful connection to the main story and only serve to provide context and background information. Yet again, the apes are given the least amount of page space in a Planet of the Apes comic, which is a bizarre choice.