While wandering the convention floor on Sunday morning I came across the booth for Blam Ventures, folks who have gotten themselves a Planet of the Apes license. They’re producing a novel called Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes, and rather than be about events before the movies the book will actually be filling in gaps in the first movie.
In Planet of the Apes we follow Taylor as he discovers the horrors of a world run by apes. But while we’re with Taylor one of his fellow astronauts, Landon, has some adventures of his own. We know how Landon ends up – lobotomized – but we don’t know what happened to him before then. The first book in Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes will fill in those details, and will feature other characters from other movies, most importantly Dr. Milo, the chimp scientist who travels back in time in the third film, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, only to get killed by a gorilla in a zoo.
Dr. Milo went back in time by finding and fixing Taylor’s ship; the second book in The Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes will detail how that all happened. I imagine he gets the information on the ship’s location from Landon before cutting his brain; here’s hoping Blam has come up with some other interesting events to fill that sucker with.
Talking to the folks at the booth I learned they’re also thinking about a book that would take place during Beneath the Planet of the Apes and reveal what Taylor was doing while captured by the mutants. In true obsessive nerd, Star Wars Expanded Universe style I bet there are a lot of stories to be told in the margins of the Planet of the Apes series.
The first book goes on sale in the Spring of 2010. It’ll have 20 paintings by top illustrators, including folks like Jim Steranko. I’m psyched to get a look at the finished product myself.