Apeslayer!

Neal Adams finds his Killraven artwork, "improved upon,"
by an uncredited, "collaborator."

Somehow, no matter how hard one might try, it's the subject that can never be escaped.

It's the power and majesty of Apeslayer!

Just twelve Planet of the Apes covers posted two days ago were enough to bring out the reader demands for Apeslayer covers

Reader, I cannot let you down.

As we all know, in the 1970s, always happy to jump on a bandwagon, Marvel UK took to reprinting US Marvel's Planet of the Apes stories.

There was only one problem.

The UK Planet of the Apes came out once a week and the US ones only came out once a month.

Needless to say, this meant that, within weeks, the UK mags had run out of material to reprint.

This might have defeated lesser men, but the editorial staff of Planet of the Apes were not lesser men. Not for them the barren wasteland of despair. Instead they had an idea worthy of Peter Griffin himself. They simply got Amazing Adventures' War of the Worlds stories and redrew the Martians to look like apes.

They then renamed Killraven, "Apeslayer," called Carmilla Frost, "San Simian," and Bob's your uncle - not to mention being a monkey's uncle.

It was a brilliant plan. There was not one person who could possibly notice the trick they'd pulled.

Well, of course, everyone noticed the trick they'd pulled. It was a little difficult not to, what with there being tripods blundering around all over the place.

But no true British comic lover could care about that. Despite the basic duffness of the idea, it's hard not to look back on Apeslayer with affection - and I suppose it could be claimed he was Marvel UK's first super-hero, beating even Captain Britain to the punch.

Anyway, here are the covers to the breathless issues our hero featured in.

He's very macho, isn't he? I get the feeling he'd have got on with Bill Savage from 2000AD's Invasion strip.

A rare chance to directly compare Apeslayer to Killraven.

In fairness to Apeslayer, he might not have been what you could call original but he could at least fight bad guys without looking like he'd just blundered in from the set of Zardoz.

Hold on. Where's Apeslayer? All of a sudden, he can't even make the front cover of his own comic.

How could anyone have guessed they were really reading a War of the Worlds story? I mean, it's not like there's a load of tripods around to tip us off.

Sadly, after this issue, Apeslayer was never seen again.

What happened to him?

Who can know? But, judging by the fact that the comic carried on for years afterwards, I can only assume he failed totally in his mission to rid the Earth of the Apes' rule.

Poor old Apeslayer. All that hard work for nothing.