Sadly when Jack "King" Kirby was not able to finish his epic Fourth World saga as he saw fit, I took that moment to leave DC behind for a bit. I'm sure other matters had something to do with it, but it neatly coincided with the end of the New Gods material and the beginning of Kirby's other projects The Demon and Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth. Consequently I had a disdain of sorts for these latter efforts, allowing my disappointment at not getting epic Kirby to color my appreciation of his other storytelling styles. I've long ago seen the error of my ways and long ago filled in my collections of these books as well as pop for collections.
In Kamandi we get to see the world as it is after having suffered a "Great Disaster". Vague is the word as to what happened exactly, but whatever it was resulted in an avalanche of new evolved species as all sorts of creatures such as Rats, Tigers, Bats, Bears, Wolves, and more were changed from what we know in our world into beings able to create offbeat societies echoing those of men across the years. Mutants too, human or at least appearing so walked this new world and Kamandi, a boy who was raised apart from the world and is discovering through eyes as fresh as our own.
There is some hint he was raised by Buddy Blank, the protagonist of OMAC another Kirby series picturing an earlier dark future. But this is the same "Great Disaster" which we first learned of in the pages of The Atomic Knights and learned more about in Hercules Unbound. In later issues of Kamandi after Kirby had left, these connections are made more clearly in back-up stories.
So as can be seen "The Great Disaster" was arguably the most comprehensive of the post-apocalyptic futures seen in comics, as it spread far and wide thanks to the cleverness of many creators over many years. Now it's just a once-was, disappeared as was so much by the Crisis on Inifinite Earths, but for me it will always loom.
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I don't know why, but Jack's stuff at DC, though entertaining to a degree, never quite resonated with me to the extent that his collaborative Marvel stuff did. His DC work may not have got any worse over time, but neither has it got any better, despite being collected in hardbound (and softcover) volumes. The masses (shrinking though they may be) need to be fed and, hey, - this stuff has already been paid for. To me, Jack's best work at DC was Jimmy Olsen, but the rest of the material seemed to be produced by someone who'd been shackled, not freed. (Maybe that's what being separated from a good collaborator does to a person?)
ReplyDeleteI feel very differently about this as you well know (we've yacked about it many a time) but I might have come to appreciate some of the King's DC stuff more over time as much as I liked it then. Jimmy Olsen does indeed rock and I only wish he'd done a few more of those, set ups seem to have been done with the Guardian and Dubbliex and getting back to the Habitat seemed a natural, though he might never ever have done it. One of those gems that is more of its time and and I like more and more is the Forever People which still needs a new color reprint (all the others have been done now).
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