So, our heroes have jumped into the river and swam to safety. These are the heroes who were being chased by the angry mob of chimps from that small isolated town with the strange mutated apes in the mountains surrounding said small town. Remember all that?
Note: This recap may contain spoilers!
Anyway, they swim to safety, but of course Cornelius can’t just be thankful he escaped and run away. No, he has to double back and try to satisfy his curiosity. Of course, this gets them caught all over again. The townspeople blindfold them. But as the townspeople are trying to lead them away, the zombie looking monkeys ask to come back to town too. I’ve been trying to figure out what these Apes are for quite a while. It seems they are disfigured, but otherwise normal. Well, not normal. They can make you hallucinate all kinds of crazy things. But besides that, and the disfigurements, I can now conclude they are normal apes (that can talk).
So the mutant chimps want to come back to town with the normal chimps, but the normal chimps aren’t too keen on that. This triggers a new round of hallucinations, from which the town chimps flee before their brains can get scrambled.
Meanwhile, over at Ape City, the chimps are basically being turned into slaves. The gorillas are saying it’s because of the emergency and the need to deal with flooding and fires and starvation and rebuilding the city and whatnot. But really the chimps are being turned into human chattel (or ape chattel, if you like). So, some of the chimps are plotting and conniving.
But let’s get back to our heroes dealing with the mind bending apes. The town is about to give our heroes the death penalty for what they saw, when the monster apes come out of the caves and into the valley. It turns out these are the children of the town’s residence. Years ago, an earthquake altered the flow of the river, so that the water that feeds into the village comes from the forbidden zone. This caused mutations in the children. You might be thinking about the humans that have this same ability, who live in the forbidden zone. I know I am thinking of them. And remember Zaius barely saved himself from being killed by one. But that’s not the point of this issue.
The point of this issue is that the mutated children have grown older, so they are learning how to control their powers. This includes making apes see them as normal. So the leadership of the town allows Milo and Cornelius to buy the food they came to buy, and Milo promises in return to say that painted valley has been destroyed. Everyone is happy (for now).
But the story isn’t over. The chimps at Ape City are getting angry about the arrest of Cadmus from last issue. And they aren’t about to let themselves be turned into a slave society, and now that the foraging party is back, they have a new recruit. This episode ends with Cornelius revealing what he found at Panted Valley (the part about Chimpanzees rising up against their Orangutan oppressors in ancient times. I don’t know if he is going to reveal the mutated Chimp part. We’ll have to wait and see).
Rating: 4 / 5 Stars
