Kamandi

Kamandi is a DC Comics comic book character created by acclaimed artist Jack Kirby. The bulk of Kamandi's appearances occurred in the comic series Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which ran from 1972 to 1978.

Kamandi is a young hero in a post-apocalyptic future. After a huge event called "The Great Disaster", humans are a persecuted minority in a world ruled by intelligent, highly evolved animals.

Origin of the concept

The concept for Kamandi seems to have come from four different sources:

• The name "Kamandi" was recycled from a newspaper strip idea Kirby had once pitched, entitled "Kamandi of the Caves."

• In Alarming Tales # 1, September 1957, Kirby drew a story entitled "The Last Enemy." In this story, a man travels in time to the year 2514, where he finds that humans are extinct and the world is ruled by tribes of intelligent tigers, dogs, and rats. Kirby's drawings of these animals are very similar to his later drawings in Kamandi.

• The 1968 movie Planet of the Apes also portrayed an animal-ruled world. The cover of Kamandi # 1, showing a demolished Statue of Liberty, was clearly inspired by the similar scene in this movie.

• The premise for the book was suggested to Kirby by DC publisher Carmine Infantino. It is unknown whether he was familiar with Kirby's works mentioned above, but he certainly knew of Planet of the Apes.

As with the other books Kirby drew for DC in the 1970's, the plot was very much art-driven. Kirby's imagination would come up with a grandiose scene involving a battle between animal armies or a robot-run artificial satellite, and he would create a plot to go along with his artistic vision.

Overview of the series

Kamandi's world is set on a future Earth, often referred to as "EARTH A.D. (AFTER DISASTER)!" The rulers of this world are intelligent animals who stand on their hind legs and have human-level intelligence and humanoid hands; these include gorillas, tigers, dogs, lions, cheetahs, and other mammals. Other animals have not changed their physical appearance but are still intelligent and can speak; these include snakes, dolphins and killer whales. Some small animals have acquired gigantic size or have mutated in a variety of ways; these include insects and crabs. Horses have not been affected -- probably because Kirby delighted in drawing gorilla and tiger cavalry regiments riding into battle.

Early in the series, it is revealed that the former United States is divided into regions. The largest regions are ruled by gorillas, by tigers, and by lions. The city of Chicago is populated by robot gangsters, and bulldogs rule England.

Most humans in the series do not talk and are dependent on the intelligent animals. There are some exceptions, such as Kamandi's mutant friend Ben Boxer.

The nature of the "Great Disaster" was never explained, but it "had something to do with radiation". In Kamandi # 16 an explanation is given for the talking animals. A gorilla doctor reads the diary of a dead human doctor that was written at the time the Great Disaster occurred. As the night goes on and a battle rages between the gorillas and the tigers in the ruins of Washington D.C. the gorilla doctor reads how Dr. Michael Grant invented a chemical called cortexin. The chemical apparently spilled into the water supply and when the animals ingested it it gave them greater intelligence. These effects have been passed on to the animals' descendants. Many of the original intelligent animals came from the Washington Zoo. In issue # 16, the gorilla doctor has recreated this chemical. While he is dying he sees the same effects occur with the formerly animalistic humans; this implies that perhaps humans will someday regain their intelligence.

One of the key issues of this series is issue #29 in which Kamandi discovers Superman's costume, thus linking Kamandi to the first time to the DC Universe proper. Kamandi is thus shown to live on one of the many parallel Earths that filled the DC Universe before the Crisis on Infinite Earths. After this, Kamandi occasionally guest-starred in DC Comics Presents and The Brave and the Bold teaming up with Superman and Batman. But for the most part Kamandi continued to live on his parallel world separate from the other DC characters.

Kirby stopped writing the series around issue 35, but he continued drawing it until issue 40. Although many other Kirby titles were cancelled when he left, DC continued the title through after issue 59. Issues 60 and 61 were written, pencilled, and partially inked, and can be found in Cancelled Comics Cavalcade.

After the series was over

The late 1970s series, Hercules Unbound, tried to tie together and explain several of DC's 'after disaster' series such as the Atomic Knights, Kamandi, and others, and tried to explain where the intelligent animals from Kamandi came from, building on what was revealed by Kirby.

Toward the end of the Kamandi series, ties to OMAC were set up, which would be used in later stories.

When the maxi-series Crisis on Infinite Earths unified all of the future timelines in the DC multiverse, the character's placement in the DC Universe was drastically altered. In the revised timeline, Kamandi is the son of OMAC, and was left in a shelter until he was rescued and renamed to Tommy Tomorrow - the name of a character that predated Kamandi by twenty years. As a tribute to Kamandi the boy was found in "Command D", which was the name of the bunker that had given Kamandi his name in issue # 1.

A tribute was paid to Kamandi in the 1988-1992 Superboy series when Superboy appears in a Kamandi like world in a homage to the series.

A later miniseries, Kamandi: At Earth's End was issued in 1993, but had little relation to the Kirby comic except by name.