It's no real secret that Jack Kirby was an artist who rarely wasted a concept, though it might be many many moons before it bloomed into full flower. Kamandi is just such a concept, which finds its origins in, of all places, the halls of Harvey Comics in the late 50's.
The Simon and Kirby studio had been working for Harvey, producing horror and sci-fi material. One such book was Alarming Tales, and the story in it which informs the later Kamandi series is titled "The Last Enemy!".
Alarming Tales is a really important book with several short sci-fi adventure yarns, several of which would appear to influence later Kirby work at DC. The cover story titled "Donnegan's Daffy Chair" suggests to my Fourth World-eye the Mobius Chair of Metron. Another story called "The Cadmus Seed" seems clearly an early rendition of the gene-cracking concepts behind both the DNA Project and the Evil Factory in the Jimmy Olsen books. And for Kamandi fans we have "The Last Enemy!" which has a man encounter all sorts of intelligent and organized talking animals who have adopted various aspects of human civilization. The story is both penciled and inked by Jack Kirby. Take at look.
Our time traveler might well have visited the post-Apocalyptic world of Kamandi, at least some early version.
More Kamandi to come.
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Always a pleasure to read this story!
ReplyDeleteJust think - if Carmine Infantino hadn't asked Jack to come up with a Planet Of The Apes type series (after losing a bidding war to Marvel for the rights), he may never have dusted down this old idea (and his Kamandi Of The Caves newspaper strip proposal) and turned it into The Last Boy On Earth.
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