The Last Boy On Earth - Part Two!

In the eleventh issue of Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth, our titular hero while escaping the the destruction of Tracking Site with Ben Boxer and his friend loses track of them and  gets picked up by Leopards who are functioning in the post-Great Disaster world as pirates of the Caribbean.

They gather up all sorts of goods and such and are transporting it to Sacker's Department Store.

Among their booty are slaves, both animal and human. Kamandi despite  his apparent intelligence is brusquely added to the latter where he finds himself confronting a giant creature the Leopards dub a "Devil".

That Devil is in fact an enormous Grasshopper who Kamandi quickly bonds with and which he names "KlickKlack".

The Leopards deliver their cargo in what was once Florida to the Sacker's organization which is headed by Mr. Sacker, a giant Snake.

Mr. Sacker takes a liking to Kamandi and immediately sees his worth as a potential rider in the upcoming races at Hialeah Park, an event at which Sacker makes enormous profit due to the wagering. Kamandi meets a beautiful girl named "Spirit" who is identical to his lost "Flower" and it turns out is in fact her sister.

Thrown into the kennel with the other humans Kamandi trains for his race at Hialeah and bonds to some extent with Spirit.

He learns that a human thug named Bull Bantam had driven Flower away with his brutal attentions and that same Bantam turns out to be Kamandi's primary opponent in the upcoming race. The races are a festival for the assembled animals as the humans are run through all manner of events including motorcycle races for strawberry shortcake and other minimal prizes for the entertainment of the mob.

The main event at Hialeah turns out to be the race between Bull Bantam atop a giant Bison and Kamandi riding KlickKlack.

The face is a ferocious event and only a clever bullet from the visiting Prince Tuftan of the Tiger Empire saves Kamandi at one precarious moment. But eventually Kamandi and his steed win the day, though KlickKlack is injured severely forcing Kamandi to put his ride down forever. Saddened Kamandi is discovered by Tuftan and Professor Canus who work to smuggle him out of Hialeah and away from Mr.Sacker's forces.

The reassembled friends head north into what was once Virginia around the Washington DC area.

They fall victim to a cult of Apes who worship mysterious and powerful voices in the heart of what was once the capitol of the United States itself.

It turns out these Apes have discovered the lost Watergate Tapes and are using some weird remaindered technology to turn those voices into a deadly weapon.

Tuftan and Canus are captured and Kamandi is with the help of the Tiger forces to invade the Apes temple and rescue his friends.

The satirical aspects of the strip really dominate these issues as modern consumer society is ridiculed as well as the particular political nonsense which was the defining event of the 70's, the Watergate scandal. It's rare for Kirby to do a push on something as specific as Watergate, but it's telling that he felt comfortable doing it at an institution like DC. 

In the sixteenth issue of Kamandi The Last Boy on Earth we finally learn something substantial about how this wild world of talking animals and feral humans came to be. Kamandi gets separated from his friends Tuftan and Canus (not unlike a true pet, Kamandi seems to constantly wander off on his own, he definitely needs a leash). Under the broken streets of what was once Washington DC he finds an underground lab belonging to the Apes.

One Ape in particular Professor Hanuman is trying to recreate the Cortexin experiments which in the days just before the Great Disaster succeeded in boosting the brain power of the animals when it got unleashed into the waters of the area. In a rather clever story Kamandi follows a parallel story which follows a journal of Michael Grant, the man who discovered Cortexin.

Kamandi finds himelf in the clutches of the Apes of Washington who are waging a ferocious battle against the Tigers of Tuftan who still look for Kamandi.

The Apes steal away with Kamandi as their prisoner into the relative wilds of Ohio where Kamandi escapes and eventually teams up with the weird gopher people who live under the mysterious mounds of that area. They are mutated humans and have limited intelligence but maintain an arcane machine which has a purpose Kamandi cannot really fathom.

While the Apes led by Sgt. Ugash search for their lost prize the Gopher People's machine is destroyed and its purpose is revealed when the giant worm it held at bay with its arcane noise rises up and attempts to consume everything in its path.

Kamandi is lucky to escape but many of the Apes and the Gopher People are not.

Heading on into what was once Chicago Kamandi finds himself waylaid by what appear to intelligent human beings, but humans who act and talk for all the world like gangsters from the early part of the 20th Century.

Ugash and his Apes come into conflict with these oddball humans too and the battle rages between the two groups.

In the twentieth issue the secret of the gangster society is revealed.

They are in fact merely elaborate machines who operate according to their programming maintained by a vast network of computers deep in the heart of what was apparently a museum of sorts built before The Great Disaster. Chicago itself is destroyed but its infamous legacy lives on in a way through the simulations. Kamandi is distraught that the human society is not in some sense real.

The tempo of the Kamandi stories really picks up. It had already quickened in the previous arc, but these stories fly by at a brisk and breathless pace as Kamandi is constantly swept up in one weird adventure and environment after another. Kirby's invention is on display, but you can also see he is parsing it out a bit more sporadically as the series seems assured of a long life. Also on display is Kirby's eccentric fascination with the gangster era of early America, specifically the Roaring Twenties and the Depression Era. These are clearly the characters of both pop culture and reality who made the greatest impression on  Kirby and he rarely passes up a chance to work them into his stories, even if that means some wicked contortions. That's certainly true here. I was much reminded of the Fantastic Four story featuring The Thing when he lands on a Skrull planet which likewise seems fascinated with the classic gangsters.

D. Bruce Berry becomes the regular inker and letterer on the series, which is a mark downward alas. Capturing the flavor of Kirby was a challenge, and Berry is adequate but lacks the depth supplied by Mike Royer for so long while Kirby worked at DC. Royer was exhausted keeping up with the King and needed a break. Berry stepped in and kept things looking pretty good, but you can see it's not quite the same.

More to come.

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