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I thought Sultin was going to be a major character but he disappeared quickly. When I saw him smoking a cigar, I thought wouldn't been great if Kirby drew him with an eyepatch like a leonine Nick Fury!
As for Flower, I was surprised that Kirby wasn't told to draw bikini lines on her. But man she must have glued her hair to her chest. Too bad she was stuck with Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth who doesn't know about the Birds and the Bees. But then, the Birds and the Bees could have told him.....
I picked up quite a few Kamandi comics from my LCS’ 50c bin recently, and thanks to this thread, I’ve started to read them. I’ve also started Silver Star recently, and just now finished Essential Thor vol III, so I’m on a bit of a Kirby Kick these days.
Henry said:
That aside, I read the novel back in the late 60's and have always felt the movies-- INCLUDING the 1st one, which so many consider a "classic", as vastly inferior to the novel. The main thing is, it's TOO DAMN DOWNBEAT, DEPRESSING and HOPELESS.
I'll take Kirby any day.
I have to say, Kamandi is pretty downbeat, depressing and hopeless itself. It’s the whacked-out comicbook version of Cormac MacCArthy’s The Road! Human civilisation has collapsed, and not even through anything human’s did themselves, but just some natural disaster that snuck up on everybody. Humans in this saga are grunting beasts, and those animals that have climbed the evolutionary tree to take our place, may display animalistic ferocity and primitive territorial instincts, but those traits aren’t far from what our own human history presents. Kirby is holding a mirror up to humanity in every frame of this comic, and it aint pretty.
The Rats and the Tigers behave no differently to human gangsters, thugs and warlords of our own recent history.
Kamandi’s is a desperate daily struggle to stay alive. Unlike his superhero stablemates, Kamandi has to kill or be killed all too often and he hates it. How many other first issues end with the hero trying to blow up himself and a whole civilisation up in a nuclear explosion?
Again and again, we get to see what human behaviour and the mighty Western Civilisation looks like from the other side of the fence. What does it feel like to be labeled less than human, or forced into slavery or to see your loved ones killed by people who only see your value in terms of market prices. Kamandi experiences it all.
I’ve just read issue 6, where poor Flower dies. (That’s the heroes sweet, innocent little friend – DIES!) I don’t know if it was Kirby’s intent or not, but that issue says as much about how we treat our animal charges as any issue of Morrison’s Animal Man.
Humans don’t come out at all well in this series. Further, the fact that it was set up to be open-ended means that there is no fine destiny for the human race for Kamandi to lead them to. It’s just one meaningless and violent episode after another.
I can’t help but see the despair and desolation in the Kamandi concept as a kind of reaction to the cancellation of the New Gods books. The New Gods were about constructing a meaningful framework for the struggles of humanity. Maybe the existentialists are right and we’re just here as a cosmic accident and there is no great destiny for us, but Kirby’s Fourth World was from a long tradition of storytelling that constructs profound meaning out of this life of ours.
With the New Gods gone, despair is all we have left, and an existential dog-eat-dog struggle to live through the day. Far from being meaningful, the world we’re shown is one where cruelty, absurdity and strangeness pile on top of each other. Neither we nor Kamandi have any idea what wild and whacky events are around the corner. There’s no meaning in Kamandi’s world. Even our ascendency to mastery of the planet was just an accident that these stories imply could have happened to any species, and then our pre-imminent position was taken from us with a cosmic click of the fingers.
No, Kamandi is a kind of horror tale, truth be told. Perhaps an entertaining one, but still a horror story.
Yeah, that kinda thing was very popular in the early 70's. I usually lay the blame on PLANET OF THE APES. Everybody kept trying to do something like that. After awhile, the whole science-fiction genre seemed poisoned.
I always figured that was a big reason STAR WARS took off the way it did! "Enough, already!!!"
You might be accusing the tail of wagging the dog there. I've just read through most of the first volume of Swamp Thing.
Completely unrelated to dystopic end-of-the-world sci-fi futures, many of the plotlines there involved people preparing for the end of the world, or the collapse of civilisation, or alternately plotting to bring it about in order to weed out the righteous or start over again with a clean slate.
There was something in the times. As if the culture could sense Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war and the oil crises just around the corner. It was a crisis in the culture, rather than the imminent end of the world.
Ironically, nowadays we really do seem to be heading towards some kind of financial, cultural, and/or ecological collapse and our pop culture is blissfully uninterested in exploring that. Comics are pointedly apolitical (apart from some broad-brush satiric swipes at Bush from Bendis) and the new Dr Who, for instance, determinedly won't look any further than the 2012 olympics to the kind of society we are all going to have to live in after that date.
I can see why it had a longer life, given the newstand sales model. You only have to look at the cover and/or the first page of a Kamandi comic to know what was happening. Last boy on Earth on a world ruled by animals. There you have it. Each issue could have been issue #2, as far as accessibility new readers were concerned.
New Gods was a much different beast. Each issue was a chapter in a grand narrative that built on what had gone before and led towards a final conclusion. The four series were subtly inter-related and really you had to buy the 'Trilogy' (as they call it in the Kamandi letters pages) to get the most out of the series.*
As time went on, in much the same way that 'standard attrition' wears down the numbers of a modern ongoing comic, later issues of the Fourth World books became less and less inviting for new readers, so perhaps the numbers had begun to fall.
It took DC another couple of decades to realise that for an involving and complex series like New Gods to have a chance in the longer term, then possible new readers needed access to the early chapters in collected form. That was standard operating procedure from the late-eighties or so. (Perhaps the early tpbs of Sandman were what really kicked it off. That sales model of the tpbs and monthlies boosting each others sales worked really well.)
Of course no-one could see that then - and I'm not sure I would have myself, but I really hold it against the comics companies that they couldn't figure it out, or something like it at the time. That was their job, to grow the market and try to find ways of sustaining the industry and artform.
The second phase of the Fourth World could have had a shot in the arm if DC had been able to put 4 collected editions of the first 6 issues of each series in bookshops after the first year or whatever.
Only Kirby, it would seem, could envisage that comics could be sold like that, but no-one in the publishing side of the industry had his faith and vision for the artform. They couldn't see beyond disposable trash that would only be good for pulping in a few months time.
With Kamandi, Kirby is largely writing down to that level.
On the letters pages they do admit that Kamandi is an attempt to make entertainment for a wide range of reading ages. It's 'not Ulysses' they write...
Actually the letters pages address a lot of the topics mentioned so far.
The Demon comic may have come form a box of old comics that was then a feature of certain bookshops, so the Disaster could have been any time in the decades after The Demon #1 came out.
Someone asks how Kamandi fit into the Legion timeline. You can almost see the eyeballs rolling in their answer to that.
One of the letter pages states that Kirby had only watched the first 45 minutes of POTA up to that point.
*The Micronauts - a series with many similarities to Kirby's Fourth World, suffered in the same way. For years I was put off picking up random back issues of it, because all of them seemed to start bewilderingly in the middle of what was obviously a long ongoing story. I'm sure possible new readers felt the same way looking at later issues of the series on the stands. The reprinting of the first 12 issues late in the run of the series was at least some attempt to address that problem, even if they didn't manage to invent the trade paperback collection.
I can’t help but see the despair and desolation in the Kamandi concept as a kind of reaction to the cancellation of the New Gods books.
Ironic that Kirby's least ambitious (by his standards) DC series of the '70s had the longest run.
With Kamandi, Kirby is largely writing down to that level.
Actually the letters pages address a lot of the topics mentioned so far.
IIRC, my favorite of issues #9 and #10 was #10, but I picked them both because it was a two-part story, yet all of the beats I remembered were from issue #9.
I just read #9-10 last night. That's a great two-parter. Really fun idea of the astronauts having a 'culture'. They have half-remembered rituals that actually had a meaning in the C20th, but which have been reduced to a hollow pantomime in the future. It is perhaps a foreshadow of what Kirby will do in The Eternals where real events in the distant past are only vaguely remembered as myths and legends in our time.
The Bats are a great savage unreasoning mob of enemies and the whole two issues feels like a John Carpenter movie with everyone trapped in one location as the enemy closes in on them. (It's very like a John Carpenter script now that I think of it, down to the psycho infiltrating the good guys.)
Enjoying reading these, I have to say. I was worried I might be overdosing on Kirby, but it doesn't seem to be happening yet.
"Really fun idea of the astronauts having a 'culture'. They have half-remembered rituals that actually had a meaning in the C20th, but which have been reduced to a hollow pantomime in the future."
This description reminds me of what Chris Boucher did in the DOCTOR WHO story, "The Face Of Evil", where relics of a scientific mission are treated as religious artifacts by the near-cavemen who descended from from, with no idea that their ancestors were astronauts from Earth!
It is perhaps a foreshadow of what Kirby will do in The Eternals where real events in the distant past are only vaguely remembered as myths and legends in our time… (It's very like a John Carpenter script now that I think of it, down to the psycho infiltrating the good guys.)