Month: January 2017

Kamandi Challenge no. 1

Cover B by Keith Giffen and Scott Koblish

Cover B by Keith Giffen and Scott Koblish

“The Rules”
Story and Art: Dan DiDio, Keith Giffen, Scott Koblish
Colors: Hi-Fi
Lettering: Clem Robins
Editor: Brittany Holzherr

Kamandi Challenge no. 1 begins with a prologue: an ordinary teenage boy (as yet unnamed) is running late for school, gently encouraged by his grandmother. The set-up is classic, reminiscent of Peter Parker and his Aunt May, or any number of fairy tales. Threading his way through an idyllic small town after missing the bus, the boy encounters similarly benevolent townsfolk (including a couple named after Kamandi creator and “king of comics” Jack Kirby, and his longtime inker Mike Royer), all of whom know him and are watching out for him. Their solicitous treatment turns out to be more than mere small-town friendliness, however, when a piece of the sky cracks off and falls to the ground: the boy’s home is actually an enclosed dome, a Truman Show-style simulation of a normal life, and that shelter has finally been pierced by his (unknown, at least to him) enemies.

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The friends and neighbors who so recently were encouraging him to get to school are suddenly armed and ready to fight off the threat; they are, in fact, robots, programmed solely to protect the boy! Attacked by one of the invaders, the boy is horrified to come face to face with a humanoid, talking rat. There is so much about the outside world that he did not suspect! At home, “grandmother” shoves him into a mysterious glowing chamber, a sort of stasis capsule, before fighting off the intruders with one final explosion. In his artificial sleep, the boy receives more instruction, including an order to “remember Command D”–not, apparently, the name of the bunker in which he was raised, as in the original Kamandi stories, but perhaps a code or protocol.

After an indeterminate time in suspended animation (but long enough for the boy’s hair to grow long), the chamber is opened and the boy is reawakened by manlike tigers, scouts for the Tiger Empire ruled by King Caesar. The tigers assume that the phrase the boy keeps muttering, “Command D,” is his name, and thus Kamandi is christened, a new name for a new world. Taken for a savage animal, Kamandi is thrown in a paddy wagon and driven to Tiger City where he will fight in Caesar’s gladiatorial arena. His protests are interpreted as the unintelligent parroting of a wild beast who has learned to imitate speech–everyone knows “animals” can’t talk. Thrust into the arena, Kamandi is pitted against “Tiny,” a giant, Kong-like gorilla.

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On that cliffhanger the prologue ends, with Kamandi (and the reader) given a crash course in the premise of the series, both its story (Kamandi is referred to as “the last boy on earth” a couple of times, and one of the robot guardians insists that he is to be protected as if the fate of the world depends on it; and we get an introduction to the upside-down “animals ruling over humans” formula that was also essential to the series) and the test of the creators’ inventive powers: “What’s the matter, boy? Afraid of a little challenge?” one of the tigers jeers Kamandi as he throws him into the arena. Those might as well be Dan DiDio’s words to the next team to pick up the story: get him out of this, if you can, guys.

Dan DiDio is both the architect of this series and current Co-Publisher of DC Comics, so his influence is felt far beyond the stories on which he has writing credits, but I personally associate him with the New 52 version of OMAC that he and artist Keith Giffen collaborated on in 2011. OMAC, the “One-Man Army Corps,” was another creation of Jack Kirby’s, and the liberties “The Rules” takes with Kamandi’s origin story has some similarities to the way DiDio and Giffen expanded on OMAC, with an emphasis on mysterious conspiracies and secret identities, not to mention all those robots. Visually, Giffen and Koblish are in similar territory, with an updated Kirby-by-way-of-Kubert style that makes for a good introduction to this new version of the character.

DiDio writes in an afterword to Kamandi Challenge no. 1 that one of the rules of the series is that not only is each writer-artist team to end their chapter on a cliffhanger, leaving it for the next team to resolve, but they must write a note indicating how they would have continued their story, to be included in the letters page. As an example, he states that he would have resolved the cliffhanger at the end of “The Rules” by having Kamandi trick Tiny into throwing him into the audience of the arena, where he would meet and befriend Prince Tuftan. In addition to the window this opens into the writers’ creative process, I imagine it also guarantees that the cliffhangers play fair: there has to be some way out for our heroes. (I also like the implicit invitation to play along: “Can you solve it before they do?” a blurb on the cover asks.)

“K–is for ‘Kill’!”
Writer: Dan Abnett
Artist: Dale Eaglesham
Colorist: Hi-Fi
Lettering: Clem Robbins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

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In the next chapter, Tiny attacks Kamandi; the tiger people in the stands cheer on the fighters and assume that the puny human will be no match for the champion ape. Instead of tricking Tiny into throwing him into the stands, as DiDio had suggested, Kamandi lures Tiny into an electrified wall surrounding the arena, knocking him out and proving himself more clever than the tigers had originally thought. Suddenly the “wild animal” has value, and Prince Tuftan turns Kamandi over to Dr. Canus, a humanoid dog, for training as a full-time gladiator.

Canus at first assumes that Kamandi’s speech is just parroting, as before, but he is soon shocked to realize that Kamandi is intelligent and can fully understand him. Kamandi tries to remember his home, but is only able to recall the dreams from his long sleep (a montage of images suggests that his “dream” consisted of events from the original Kamandi series), and the mission his “grandmother” gave him: “find your parents, save the world.”

To Canus, however, Kamandi is still an animal and the boy is kept on a leash as he is shown around the tigers’ city. Kamandi and Canus witness the return of King Caesar, back from a victorious campaign against the leopards, and bearing with him military weapons taken as the spoils of war, including a giant missile. Kamandi breaks away from Canus and investigates the forbidden Hall of War, an enormous stockpile of weapons from the old, human world. (Is the eye-shaped insignia seen above the Hall entrance and elsewhere a reference to OMAC’s Brother Eye, a seed for later writers to pick up on, or just coincidence?) Attacked by flying jackdaw guards, Kamandi almost escapes but is recaptured by Canus, who emphasizes that he’ll pay with his own life if Kamandi escapes on his watch.

They return to the main square to witness King Caesar attempting to “awaken” the recovered nuclear missile, taking it for a god of the ancients. Kamandi recognizes the missile for what it is and tries to warn the tigers about the danger it poses, but he is too late: King Caesar has armed the warhead and set it on a countdown for detonation! Unless Kamandi can halt the countdown, he–and everyone else–has only five minutes to live!

“K–is for ‘Kill’!” (gotta love comic book titles) continues the remix spirit of “The Rules,” hitting the beats of the original classic stories but combining elements in different ways in the interest of telling a new story: “Tiny,” introduced in “The Rules,” appeared in the original series (Kamandi no. 7, where the similarity to King Kong was both more explicit and more tragic); likewise, in the original series Kamandi’s first stop after escaping his bunker was the Tiger Empire, where he was forced to fight as a gladiator (the orange and blue tunic he wears in this chapter is a nod to his costume in that episode), and Dr. Canus was one of the first friends he made in the post-human world.

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In “K–is for ‘Kill’!,” Canus is more skeptical of Kamandi than in the original stories, and the political realities of the Tiger Empire are more explicitly drawn: not only does Canus’ life depend on serving Caesar, he openly admires Caesar’s strength and has wholeheartedly adopted the tigers’ martial ethos. “War is our way of life and our salvation,” he tells Kamandi. Elsewhere it is made clear that the arena serves to keep the people occupied and happy, and that Prince Tuftan, who runs the city in his father’s frequent absence, is eager to prove himself.

This chapter also highlights the series’ similarities (never far from the surface) to the Planet of the Apes movies: examining Kamandi’s backpack, Canus asks, “Why would an animal have books?”, echoing Charlton Heston’s famous question, “Doctor, would an ape make a human doll that talks?” King Caesar’s attempt to commune with the godlike nuclear missile (an element present in Kirby’s original) echoes the underground cult in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Of course, the motifs of captivity, barbarism ascendant, and the worship of ancient weapons and relics are common in post-apocalyptic stories, so this observation is intended in the spirit of comparison rather than criticism: Prince Tuftan’s assumption that Kamandi simply stole his books illustrates just how far down the evolutionary ladder humanity has fallen, especially for a first-time reader who is exploring Kamandi’s world alongside him.

Finally, Dale Eaglesham’s art in this chapter is particularly appropriate, capturing the classic sense of adventure and exoticism like an old-school Sunday comic strip. Tiger City is a richly-realized environment, full of stone temples, statues, and walkways, thick with vines and palms. The characters, including the animals, are expressively rendered and fluid in a way that’s not very Kirby-like at all but is quite beautiful; it’s a great fit for the material.

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Introducing the Kamandi Challenge!

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I’ve written before about my interest in Kamandi, “The Last Boy on Earth,” the futuristic adventure series Jack Kirby created for DC Comics in 1972. So when I learned about DC’s upcoming Kamandi Challenge, described as a “round-robin, no-holds-barred storytelling extravaganza told in 12 issues,” with a separate writer/artist team picking up the thread in each installment, I knew I would be adding it to my pull list at my local comics store (shout-out to Prairie Dog Comics in Wichita). The book will apparently be more than just a showcase for talent: running up to the 100th anniversary of Kirby’s birth (1917-1994), the teams are invited to make things tough for those who follow them: “Each issue will end with an unimaginable cliffhanger, and it’s up to the next creative team to resolve it before creating their own. It’s a challenge worthy of ‘The King’ himself!” They already had me at “Kamandi,” but when cliffhangers are involved, how could I resist?

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To recap, Kamandi (named for “Command D,” the military bunker in which he was raised by his grandfather) is the last ordinary human in a post-apocalyptic world that has been taken over by intelligent animals: not just apes, but tigers, dogs, reptiles, and more. Other humans have been reduced to nonverbal animalism or have developed mutant powers themselves. Monstrous creatures roam the earth, and new animal societies have developed in the ruins of the old world, patterned on the Romans, pirates, or Chicago gangsters. Kirby had been tinkering with Kamandi as a concept for several years (his original idea was to be a newspaper strip called “Kamandi of the Caves”), but the final version owes a clear debt to the popular Planet of the Apes movies while remaining pure Kirby. It’s a set-up ripe for adventure and wonder, and after Kirby’s run on the original series it continued to inspire comics creators (not to mention the influence it had on cartoons such as Thundarr the Barbarian, for which Kirby contributed concepts and designs, and more recently Adventure Time).

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Perhaps to prime the pump for the upcoming series and get new readers caught up on the character and his setting, DC released the Kamandi Challenge Special this week, reprinting the double-sized Kamandi no. 32 (which included a reprint of the series’ first issue) from 1975 and including a pair of “lost” stories. Other than a full-page ad for the Kamandi Challenge, there’s no editorial hand-holding, and even the first issue, which introduces Kamandi and sets his feet on the path of adventure, is printed after the story from Kamandi no. 32, which begins in the middle of the action (just as it was in the original double issue–the reprint is always the backup in such cases). I guess they assume that fans can look up all the context on the internet, or perhaps the real audience is fans like me who’ve ready everything at least once already.

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Of most interest is a pair of stories that were intended for Kamandi nos. 60 and 61, but which were abandoned when Kamandi was a victim of the “DC Implosion,” when rising production costs and a slump in sales led to DC management cutting a third of the publisher’s titles without warning. Finished but unused stories from all the cancelled titles were printed in-house in ashcan editions (low-quality, low-circulation black and white copies); in addition to piecemeal reprints, scans of those stories have circulated online for years, but this is the first time the Kamandi stories have seen print in an official publication.

I’m not sure what a new reader will make of these “rediscovered” stories, to be honest: Kirby had left the book he created some time before its cancellation, leaving it in other writers’ and artists’ hands. In typical Kirby fashion, he had breathlessly filled his issues with ideas and characters, leaving many loose threads and never dwelling on any one idea for longer than a few issues. Writers who followed (including Gerry Conway, Dennis O’Neil, and Jack C. Harris) introduced some ideas of their own, but also revisited and fleshed out many of Kirby’s original concepts, using Kirby’s map of “Earth After Disaster” (also included in the Special) and tying the continuity together (for example identifying Kamandi’s grandfather as OMAC, the “One Man Army Corps,” another orphaned Kirby creation) while crafting some longer, less episodic arcs.

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The “new” stories form the end of one of those arcs, the quest of Kamandi and his friends to help stranded space alien Pyra (the final form of the energy being encountered in the first story reprinted in the Special) power up her spaceship by opening a “vortex” in a mysterious giant energy field in Australia, guarded by the “Kangarat Murder Club.” Kamandi, sucked into the Vortex by a mysterious voice, witnesses the infinite possibilities of the multiverse, and comes to understand that there are many versions of himself living different lives, including some in worlds that did not suffer the “Great Disaster.”

kamandi-pyra

Given a choice, Kamandi ultimately decides that he owes a duty to his friends, still in danger; before coming back, however, he is picked up by servants of the Sandman, the master of dreams, who mistake him for the Sandman’s friend Jed. (You see, Jed is one of the many alternate lives that Kamandi could have lived, had circumstances been different.) Kamandi’s encounter with the Sandman mostly serves to tee up an unused Kirby Sandman story in which Jed enlists the Sandman’s aid in proving to a miser that Santa Claus is real (this involves a trip through dreamland to the North Pole and a battle with a band of “Seal Men” who are unhappy about the Christmas presents they’ve received in the past). No, it doesn’t fit very well in the (admittedly fantastical) world of Kamandi, but the reprint was mostly to buy time as Harris and company geared up to take the book in a new direction, with Kamandi traveling into space and having yet more bizarre encounters. It was never to be. Nevertheless, it isn’t every day that a story sees the light of day (officially) nearly forty years after it was first meant to run.

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In any case, this is all preamble: the real action starts next week, with the release of Kamandi Challenge no. 1, written by Dan DiDio and Dan Abnett with art by Dale Eaglesham, Keith Giffen, and Scott Koblish. I’m so excited, I’ve decided to accept this challenge: I’m going to review and discuss each issue as it comes out. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you’ll join me.

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Remake, Revisited

tarkin

A couple of years ago, writing about the 2004 sci-fi adventure film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I commented on the use of repurposed footage of Sir Laurence Olivier, long dead, to represent the film’s villain, Doctor Totenkopf:

At least since 1997, when scenes of the late Fred Astaire from Easter Parade and Royal Wedding were digitally modified to show him dancing with a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner for a series of commercials, it’s been possible to change the context of an actor’s appearance using the same technology that can put Jude Law in an airplane when he’s actually on a sound stage. The Dirt Devil ads, although licensed by Astaire’s widow, were controversial, and raised questions that have still not been settled: who owns an actor’s image, and are there limits to the uses to which it can be put? More importantly, does legal ownership give someone the right to tinker with a classic film? The battle lines are not always clearly drawn, as colorizing enthusiast Ted Turner became the patron of a classic movie channel that is widely respected for its thoughtful presentation of all kinds of film, and George Lucas, who spoke out against colorization in the 1980s, has defended his right to modify his own Star Wars movies because they’re “his” films.

I’m less offended by the use of Olivier’s image in Sky Captain than by Astaire in the Dirt Devil ads–or by the use of Audrey Hepburn’s image in Dove chocolate commercials just this year–of course: however pulpy it may be, Sky Captain is a work of art, not a commercial. But it is worth noting how far we have come, that such things are not only possible but routine. Connie Willis, in her 1995 novel Remake, depicted a future Hollywood dominated by digital effects, in which hardly any new movies were made, but instead older ones were remade by computer with digital copies of past stars (Back to the Future remade with River Phoenix, for example). We’re not quite to that point, but it hardly seems like science fiction, does it?

Some things have changed since I wrote those words: George Lucas, whom I referenced as the bad guy in ongoing debates about the legacy of his Star Wars films, sold Lucasfilm and his right to tinker with the franchise in 2012, and since then new owner Disney has begun a slate of new Star Wars films. The march of technological progress has also continued, and at the end of last year we saw a full-fledged digital recreation of actor Peter Cushing (dead since 1994) in the Star Wars prequel Rogue One, reprising Cushing’s role as Grand Moff Tarkin in the original 1977 film. Although the filmmakers had their reasons to undertake this effort and appear to have not taken it lightly, I found it garish and disturbing; even a completely undetectable CGI job would raise questions.

Repurposed footage, as in Sky Captain, is one thing: in addition to the CGI Cushing, Rogue One also inserted unused footage of pilots in X-Wing cockpits from Star Wars‘ Death Star battle for its own climactic dogfight (again, Rogue One takes place immediately before A New Hope, so this was just one of many threads meant to connect the two stories). Perhaps I’m a hypocrite, but that didn’t bother me at all, and in fact I found it a clever touch (longtime readers will recall my love of stock footage and my general wonder at the magic of editing, though).

I should clarify that I’m not against computers, either: I love music created on synthesizers, and I enjoy computer-generated animation. I also respect that CGI has made practical filmmaking easier in many cases where the casual viewer wouldn’t even suspect that stray wires or other intrusions have been seamlessly erased.

But I think part of what I love about the art of film is its rearrangement of a tangible reality: I’ve written before about my love of animation for its ability to create a wholly new world through the illusion of movement, but even filmed live action involves quite a bit of assemblage–of cuts, of effects, of performances–in all but the most extreme cases of fly-on-the-wall documentary and avant-garde cinema. The end result is not exactly a mirror held up to the real world but a mosaic in which many facets of it are reflected, an arrangement of fragments that make up a whole picture.

In theory, the current digital toolbox is just an extension of all the image-making that has come before, but in reality it has its limits, and its frequent use as a cost-cutting measure is dispiriting. It’s all so literal: particularly in the case of Rogue One, there’s no real need to include Grand Moff Tarkin except for the desire to position this story right before Star Wars. In addition, it’s somewhat insulting in its implication that viewers wouldn’t accept a different actor in the role. I enjoyed Rogue One, I really did, but my enthusiasm flagged at the very end when it became clear just how closely it was meant to dovetail with the original Star Wars. I felt the same way at the end of Episode III, when George Lucas felt compelled to leave nothing unsaid, dumping information that was already (or would be, depending on the order in which one viewed the saga) revealed elegantly in the original trilogy. Both cases are typical, though, of a tendency to fill in any and all gaps in pop culture mythology, bowing to perceived demands from fans to reveal every detail, even when leaving something to viewers’ imaginations could have a greater impact.

The issue became more than academic in December with the sudden, tragic death of Carrie Fisher, who of course played Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy and who had returned to her iconic role in the new trilogy that began with 2015’s Episode VII. (As it happens, computer imagery had also been used for a brief appearance of “young Leia” at the end of Rogue One.) Reportedly, Fisher had already filmed her scenes for Episode VIII, but her death puts her role in the last film of the trilogy in doubt. Disney issued a statement to calm speculation last week, assuring fans that they had no plans to create a digital Leia for Episode IX. Is the difference simply that Cushing has been dead long enough that no one is likely to be outraged by his digital doppelganger? Is it “too soon” to do the same with Fisher? In fact, isn’t the cyber-Cushing atypical precisely because he’s been gone for so long? In recent years, digital imagery of this sort has largely been used to make up for the loss of a star during filming (most notably Paul Walker in Furious 7). It’s likely that Fisher, aware of the direction technology is headed, had explicit directions in her will regarding the use of her image, but it’s also true that Leia is a more significant character than Tarkin, and she was expected to carry both more scenes and more dramatic moments. There are still practical limitations on how seamlessly an actor can be recreated digitally.

The Star Wars films have always been showcases for the latest in special effects. If Cushing’s appearance in Rogue One was meant to be a test case for a new technology, it wasn’t reassuring, for either this audience member or (I imagine) living actors who now not only have to compete against each other, but against their predecessors.

R.I.P. Peter Cushing, 1913-1994

R.I.P. Carrie Fisher, 1956-2016

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