Kamandi

Kamandi Challenge no. 12: the Conclusion

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Cover by Frank Miller and Alex Sinclair

“The Boundless Realm”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artists: Jill Thompson and Ryan Sook
Colorists: Trish Mulvihill, Laura Martin and Andrew Crossley
Letterer: Clem Robins

“Epilogue the First: The Answers”
Storytellers: Paul Levitz and José Luis Garcia-López
Inker: Joe Prado
Colorist: Trish Mulvihill
Letterer: Clem Robins

Editors: Dan DiDio and Brittany Holzherr

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Kamandi Challenge‘s double-sized twelfth issue (“The Boundless Realm,” written by Gail Simone, and “The Answers” by Paul Levitz and José Luis Garcia-López) performs the difficult task of reconciling and bringing closure to all that came before. That it does so with the help of a little Deus ex machina is understandable, but the appearance of Jack Kirby himself as an angel of (re)creation makes the yearlong tribute to the King of Comics explicit (Kirby’s name, and those of his chief collaborators, has been dropped here and there throughout the series, but only here is he presented as the man himself, rather than in winking references). As Kirby himself says in the course of the story, “D’jinn–genie–genius–what’s the difference?”

But before the fourth wall breaks completely, Gail Simone provides a labyrinth of nested and interlocking narratives: “The Boundless Realm” begins with a genderswapped retelling of the first pages of Kamandi‘s very first issue (stylishly illustrated by Jill Thompson), as “Kamanda, the Last Girl on Earth” is shown rafting through the flooded ruins of New York City. She finds Kamandi, face down in the water, and brings him aboard, praying that he will recover. When he regains consciousness, unsure of how he got there, the two exchange notes: she explains her upbringing in the bunker “Command A,” mirroring the origin of “classic” Kamandi, and he struggles to recall the small town he grew up in, protected by robots. She warns him of the threat of rats, run by a warlord named Gnawbit.

Just as it seems that these two were made for each other (“I feel like I’m falling,” Kamandi says) and the plot turns toward romance, Kamandi is awakened from this pleasant dream and we find that he is still falling through the upper atmosphere with Silverbeck and Royer, the apes with whom Kamandi assaulted the Misfit’s Tek-Moon before being ejected into space at the end of the last issue. Kamanda was only a dream, a hallucination preceding death.

Ryan Sook takes over the artwork for the remainder of “The Boundless Realm,” providing a visual contrast and grounding this part of the story as the “real” events with his classically rendered, near-photorealistic style. (Sook has prior experience with this world, having illustrated the Kamandi story in Wednesday Comics in the style of a Hal Foster Sunday page; here he takes full advantage of the dynamic possibilities inherent in the comic book page, using interesting panel layouts and shapes, as opposed to the old-fashioned illustrations-with-text approach he borrowed from Tarzan and Prince Valiant for Wednesday Comics.)

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As the trio falls to Earth, Silverbeck honors Kamandi by adopting him into the gorilla tribe and encourages him to prepare for death. Not quite ready to give up, Kamandi finds the gauntlet that controls the jet pack he got from the shark in the last episode and summons the (slightly malfunctioning) pack to him. With the jet pack, he is able to grab Silverbeck and Royer but can only slow their descent. Silverbeck directs Kamandi to fall in the jungle (“I’ve always wanted to die in the jungle”) and takes the brunt of the impact, saving Kamandi and Royer at the cost of his own life. Royer recognizes Kamandi as the new chief, claiming to be too old for leadership himself.

Almost instantly, Kamandi and Royer are confronted by rats; hearing the name of their boss, “Gnawbit,” Kamandi realizes that the dream of Kamanda was somehow a warning, and he fights back, shocking the rats with his ability to speak. When the rats subdue Royer, however, Kamandi knows that he must surrender. The rats, having heard Kamandi speak, are now reverent and promise to take him straight to Gnawbit, who has predicted his arrival.

Gnawbit is a rodent Che Guevara, a revolutionary leader commanding his forces from the ruins of an old bank in the city. Although blinded, he sees with the help of an amulet in the shape of OMAC’s Brother Eye; he describes to Kamandi the “Farm” at which humans are bred in a manner similar to contemporary factory farms. Although he admits his disgust at the practice, he defends himself against Kamandi’s horror by pointing out the cruelties practiced against rats by humans in the past; all of his atrocities were born of the best of intentions. His goal was the same as Kamandi’s: to save the Earth.

Inside the bank, the letters of the sign (“Continental Annuity”) are teasingly rearranged into “Continuity” over the vault containg Gnawbit’s treasures, long boxes full of old comic books (including–somehow–Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth). It was in the pages of these comics that Gnawbit read of Kamandi’s impending arrival, and he shows Kamandi the possible futures that the comics portray in their narratives of heroism and self-sacrifice (note that all of the characters shown are, like the Legion of Superheroes, heroes of the future, and leave it to Gail Simone to make sure that one of those heroes is Space Cabbie instead of the usual suspects).

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Cross-cut with Kamandi’s encounter with Gnawbit, the Misfit, dying alone in his disabled Tek-Moon, dispatches one last superweapon to destroy all life on earth: the giant robotic Terror-Naut. Gnawbit has seen this, too, and calls upon his rat forces to form a “rat king,” a giant-sized collective figure that can meet the Terror-Naut head-on (the rats need Kamandi to “drive,” directing them by pulling their tails in a sort of reverse-Ratatouille); armed with Renzi’s “cyclo-heart” from issue no. 6, the rats defeat the Terror-Naut. Although this is the requisite comic book action for the episode, it feels almost incidental, a loose end that needs to be tied up before we can get on with the real thrust of this episode: Kamandi’s discovery of who he is and where he came from. The eye amulet that Gnawbit wears reveals the spirit of Kamandi’s “father”–Jack Kirby!

In “The Answers,” Kirby-as-godhead pulls Kamandi completely into his orbit, giving him the opportunity to remake his reality in the classic “three wishes” formulation. Kamandi still doesn’t quite understand who Kirby is, and verbally spars with him in the same way he argues with almost every other authority figure he comes across. His first wish is to be reunited with his parents; when this turns out to be a video farewell message, he rebels. For his second wish, he asks for the leaders of the world to be brought together, as he has a few words for them: the gallery is filled with King Caesar, Prince Tuftan, and Doctor Canus; the leader of the jaguar sun cult; and other characters from Kamandi’s previous adventures. Vila, the plant girl, is among them, and she encourages Kamandi to say what he came to say. Kamandi urges the leaders to work together to make peace and to make the world a better place for everyone. As Kirby observes, Kamandi has become more powerful through his experiences, and he is at this moment taking possession of the birthright implicit in his name: to command.

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This leads into Kamandi’s final wish, and the final hidden meaning in his name: Kamandi took his name from the bunker Command D in which he was raised, but Kirby guides him into speaking his name as “Command-D,” the computer command for redrawing or resetting a file (a retcon, to be sure, but a clever reimagining of Kamandi’s identity and purpose). After a giant “Whooosh,” Kamandi–or Cameron–is back in his small town, with short hair and dressed in regular clothes, walking past a zoo containing normal, nonspeaking animals. Putting his bizarre experiences in Earth A.D. down to a dream, he meditates, “Humanity’s too smart to ever have that kind of Great Disaster, aren’t we? . . . Aren’t we?” The spirit of Kirby hovers nearby, reminding the readers that while Kamandi may think everything’s back to normal, something has grown and changed inside him.

Interestingly, the last word goes not to Kamandi or Jack Kirby, but to Detective Chimp (from within the walls of the zoo), who addresses the reader directly to thank us for reading and bid us farewell. “This is comics at its best, breaking rules and having fun,” he says, and after this final issue it’s hard not to agree. (He also commiserates over that “Command-D” pun to make sure we know that they know it’s a groaner.) (The choice of having Detective Chimp deliver this epilogue makes for an interesting link between the futuristic talking animals of Earth A.D. and the mainstream of DC continuity; his appearance is also a nod to writer Paul Levitz’s contribution to the DC Challenge of 30 years ago: see below.)

Now that this series has reached its conclusion, it’s interesting to look back and see how it did (or didn’t) coalesce into a single narrative. The first and last few chapters have the most direct involvement with the “save the world” narrative, while the middle chapters have the luxury of being more episodic. Interestingly, Tom King’s “Ain’t It a Drag?”, which ran in issue no. 9, is (in serial terms) an “economy chapter” or (in TV terms) a “bottle episode,” taking place entirely in one location. It even contains a recap of the story so far, not in flashback but in a short monologue that catches up readers who may have missed the beginning. In film and television, such episodes really do serve a purpose of saving money on production costs which can be applied to the rest of the series; comics have no such budgetary restrictions, and original artwork still has to be drawn, but it is telling that this sprawling, episodic story still had room for a more meditative chapter in a single location. Aside from the recap, such chapters are about the essences of the characters, the kinds of insights that can be gleaned best when the action slows down.

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Indeed, the range of types of stories seen in this series–always containing action, but within the varied context of adventure, horror, comedy, and fable, to name a few examples–is a good example of the breadth of storytelling styles still alive within this industry, and a strong defense of the monthly single issue in the face of trade paperbacks and other competing formats. (I plan to read this series straight through again, so perhaps the seams will show more in that context, but as I’ve stated before I consider seamlessness an overrated virtue in art.)

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So did Kamandi “find his parents and save the world?” Er, kind of. Turning it into a metaphor is probably better in the long run, even it doesn’t follow a completely straight line from the first chapter. Was such a project ever going to be completely satisfying from a narrative perspective? That’s the risk of round-robin stories, of course, but that possibility that the story will refuse to come together is what gives it its edge, its sense of danger. By making the continuous cliffhangers part of the explanation, by making Kamandi’s fall from one peril to another seem like a narrative as well as a formal necessity, the last chapter retroactively imposes a sense of orderly progression on his adventures (this conveniently overlooks that not all of the cliffhangers involved Kamandi falling–most did, but not quite all).

More importantly, the idea that danger and its attendant adrenaline rush was necessary for Kamandi to realize his own power keeps it from being a pointless return to the status quo: yes, the rewriting of his reality is essentially a Wizard of Oz move, but as in that story, the lessons learned along the way–about loyalty to friends, about standing up for yourself, about what you’re capable of–are apt to stick even as the adventure itself recedes into a dream. “Sometimes being scared or going way out of our comfort zones is good for us,” Kirby tells Kamandi, and we recognize that as a truth that applies to both fictional characters and their creators.

The truth is that an ongoing narrative by a single creator takes the same risk as a round-robin: the plot might not add up, events may not be resolved in a satisfactory way, the story may not even reach its conclusion. (And in comics, creative teams are frequently changed from issue to issue for logistical or editorial reasons anyway.) The competitive aspect of the Kamandi Challenge, in which each writer lays a trap for the next, is only an extreme form of the way in which writers try to top themselves, writing their characters into corners without exactly knowing how they’ll find a way out, but having confidence that they’ll figure out something. It’s not that different from the way in which Kirby himself and other prolific comics creators approached their plots. Even at its worst, that approach can get by on energy alone, the Edgar Rice Burroughs rush of incident piled on incident; at its best, there is room for considerable depth and thematic development alongside the thrills and spectacle. Kamandi Challenge‘s most rewarding decision, one seemingly made independently by many of the contributors over its run, has been to turn the formal requirements of the round-robin story into reflections on Kirby: his methods, his themes, his legacy.

“The Answers” is also something of a double tribute: to Kirby, of course, but also to prolific writer and editor Len Wein, who was originally scheduled to conclude the series, but who passed away this year. Wein was a contributor to the original DC Challenge, as is Paul Levitz, who stepped in to replace him. I admit I wasn’t very familiar with the DC Challenge when I started reading Kamandi Challenge. Although I was reading and collecting comics in 1985, the DC Challenge was a direct market-only publication, and I didn’t have regular access to a comics store in those years. I’ve since picked up some copies of back issues, and it is . . . well, interesting, to say the least. Like Kamandi Challenge, it invited writers and artists to write stories and set up impossible cliffhangers for the next writers to get the characters out of. The DC Challenge used the backdrop of the entire DC universe as its playground: any and all characters were at the writers’ disposal (including oddballs like Detective Chimp!), and the whole thing appears to be considerably more tongue-in-cheek (in one issue, Albert Einstein appears, using his mastery of space-time to set things right, much like Kirby does in “The Answers”). In some ways it appears to be a dry run for Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which worlds would collide with much higher stakes than the amusement of continuity nerds.

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Kamandi Challenge benefits from a narrower focus–Earth A.D. is a large place to explore, but unified by a common theme and by a single central character–but it also takes itself more seriously than the DC Challenge did. There is humor, but it is mostly in the form of banter rather than silly situations (I will admit, however, that I measure silliness on a bit of a sliding scale when we’re talking about communist bears and machine-gun-wielding sharks).

Ultimately, exercises like this are useful antidotes to the pervasive notion that narratives are airtight constructions, that creators don’t change their minds in midstream when they come up with better ideas, or that having one’s preconceptions confirmed is the highest pleasure in absorbing a story. Surprise is a crucial element, and while some twists can take things too far (always a matter of taste as to what constitutes “too far”), sometimes the best surprises come from collaborators surprising one another (the “yes and” of improvisation) or of artists surprising themselves (the happy accident, or simply a case of getting into the zone and coming up with better ideas than one thought possible when in the planning stages).

As a fan, it has been gratifying to see so many talented comics creators try their hand at writing and drawing Kamandi. The different perspectives on what makes him tick, or how his past adventures do or don’t deliver for modern readers, have been fascinating to observe. And even the weaker chapters in this series have included the gut-level pleasures of sci-fi action in a unique atmosphere. At its best it’s a jolting reminder of just how much influence Jack Kirby still has on individual artists when they’re invited to dwell on it. Continuity is perhaps the big theme of this series, in the small sense of connecting all the diverse strands of narrative and reconciling them, but also in the big sense of handing down traditions and influence, of telling the story of how we tell the story, and why. Kamandi himself is a character who, since passing out of his creator’s hands for good, is often used as a symbol for alternative paths of history, for how individuals might become different people were they born into different circumstances. Back in his idyllic home at the end of Kamandi Challenge, our young hero knows that things could still change: there are many paths forward that life could take. Likewise, there are many paths forward, for both the characters of Kamandi and the medium of comics, represented by the approaches in Kamandi Challenge. It’s not a question of which one will lead to the future: they all do, one way or another.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 11

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Cover by Nick Bradshaw and Steve Buccellato

“Enter . . . the . . . Misfit!”
Writer: Rob Williams
Artist: Walter Simonson
Colorist: Laura Martin
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

Things are coming to a head: after the Death Worshippers stormed the Tower and shot Kamandi’s mother (who turned out to be the Commander of the Tower and leader of the robot forces who are trying to wipe out all animal life) at the end of last issue, she dies trying to tell Kamandi something about his still-missing father. However, she turns out to be a robot (I knew it!) with a secondary mission. The Tower is not only a building, but an actual rocket, and as the Death Worshippers continue to fight with the robots, the rocket launches into space, taking Kamandi to a final confrontation with the true power behind-the-scenes.

Kamandi continues to fight the robots alongside the Death Worshippers, joined by the shark crew from last issue (now wearing jet-packs: ah, comics!). Although the fight goes against Kamandi and his comrades, he is given a jet-pack by one of the sharks and, after wiping out some more of the robots, makes his way to the control room of the rocket. There, protected from the robots, he sees his friends cut down and realizes that he is once again alone.

Until, that is, one of the screens in the control room comes to life and the true commander of the rocket reveals himself: the Misfit, a genetic freak with a brilliant intellect, who has summoned Kamandi in order to extract the secret that lies in Kamandi’s genetic code. The Misfit, enthroned on his “Tek-Moon,” an armed space station, plans to launch the Anti-Cortexin from space!

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Examining a map, Kamandi sees that the ship is heading over an area marked “UFO activity” and hatches a plan: “Maybe if I press these controls I can somehow uncloak the ship so others below can see it and destroy it,” he says to himself. “A suicidal hope, but what other choice do I have?”

Soon after Kamandi disables the rocket’s cloaking device, a squadron of flying saucers attacks! Not only that, they are being flown by gorillas! (Sharks with jet-packs! Gorillas in flying saucers! Although Kamandi was a Bronze Age creation, there’s more than a little of the free-associative qualities of the Silver Age in this chapter.) The simian saucer pilots, led by the enormous ape Silverbeck, succeed in boarding the rocket with the intention of destroying the Tek-Moon once and for all. An orangutan named Royer (undoubtedly a nod to Jack Kirby’s long-time inker Mike Royer) discovers Kamandi and convinces Silverbeck not to kill him. Kamandi reveals the projected image of the Misfit to Silverbeck and Royer (“By the Severed Paw! What horror!”), who exchange threats.

The Tek-Moon opens fire on the rocket; when the Misfit lets slip that he could reunite Kamandi with his still-living father, Kamandi commandeers the rocket controls and prepares to ram into the Tek-Moon (suicide missions are a theme in both this chapter and the series as a whole), determined to find his father or die trying.

Fighting against the ape warriors who would pull him back, Kamandi flies directly into danger, set on learning the truth about his parents; but the Tek-Moon’s weaponry is too much for the rocket, and the bridge is blasted open and exposed to the vacuum of space just before it reaches the Tek-Moon. Kamandi is flung into space and the last shot we see is him tumbling toward the Earth below. To be continued?? (Yes, two question marks are needed to convey the uncertainty of this cliffhanger!)

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“Enter . . . the . . . Misfit!” has a bit of a Star Wars vibe, at least visually: the command center of the rocket ship resembles the bridge of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, and of course there is the armored space station, poised to rain death on an unsuspecting world below. Such doomsday weapons are a staple of science fiction, but the Death Star is the most obvious example. So, too, the Misfit (a Kirby creation who first appeared in Kamandi no. 9, with a similar germ warfare scheme) reminds me of Emperor Palpatine: a fitting antagonist to introduce at this point, warped physically and mentally, but holding out the tantalizing promise of solving the mystery of Kamandi’s origins and destiny. (Walter Simonson, the artist, worked on a number of science fiction comics over the years, including Marvel’s Star Wars adaptation, but he is best known for his long run on Thor, and the combination of far-out, alien places and weird characters is a good fit for him.)

The map that Kamandi studies aboard the rocket ship is, of course, modeled after the map that Jack Kirby provided during the early days of Kamandi, and which was fleshed out by later writers. Greg Pak, who wrote last month’s chapter, mentions in his afterword in this issue (in which he describes how he would have gotten Kamandi out of the cliffhanger if he had continued writing it) that he was assigned sections of the map to include in his chapter. I hadn’t realized that the challenge included specific territories, but in hindsight it explains the thoroughness with which Earth A.D. has been explored in this series. Some have been returns to places Kirby and his successors already visited in their series; others have been freshly revealed glimpses of places that were only names on the map up until now.

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Over the course of this series, it has been interesting to observe how different writers treat the influence of Jack Kirby. Some have used Kirby’s characters and settings to tell stories more or less within their own style, while others have either emulated Kirby’s dynamic (some might say bombastic) manner or turned their stories into direct tributes (if Royer in this chapter is an homage to Kirby’s collaborator Mike Royer, does that make Silverbeck Kirby himself, I wonder?). In this chapter, writer Rob Williams seems to delight in some old-school comics techniques, most notably the use of play-by-play dialogue that describes things as they happen (“The talking human fights like a three-armed ape! We are wiping out the robot crew!”).

Nobody talks like this except comic book characters, and here it takes the place of verbose caption boxes, which otherwise appear only at the beginning and end of this chapter. It frequently turns toward the goofy (Kamandi says of the Misfit, “Indeed, he is truly a pumpkin-headed toad!”), but Silverbeck and the Misfit are especially prone to the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that Kirby deployed regularly (and which my regular readers know that I am powerless to resist). Whether it is the “Misfit majesty” giving orders to “Open fire with every weapon upon this bountiful and deadly Tek-Moon!” or the gorilla UFO commander calling Kamandi “a fool and not of the Silverbeck wisdom!”, “Enter . . . the . . . Misfit!” is, from its title on down, a story that oozes an affection for the comics medium and its more whimsical expressions.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 10

Cover by Francis Manapul

“Mother, May I?”
Writer: Greg Pak
Penciller: Shane Davis
Inker: Michelle Delecki
Colorist: Hi-Fi
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

After the robot has dragged Kamandi from the waiting room (seen last issue), we see that the facility is a museum, the robots engaged in mounting displays of the humanoid animals that populate the earth. Other displays show the forgotten world of humans, and Kamandi sees a photograph of himself with his mother (remember, Kamandi has been searching for his missing parents since the attack on his home in issue no. 1). The robots, confused and agitated by the presence of a human (who are not supposed to be given the taxidermy treatment), prepare to take him to the Commander. Kamandi breaks free using a gun from the museum’s collection (how many times have we seen something like that happen?) and escapes to the ocean that surrounds the building.

While he jetskis away, he is attacked by a punk-looking gang of sharks with humanoid arms and machine guns. However, when the sharks discover that Kamandi isn’t a robot, they help him fight off his pursuers and escort him to shore. In exchange for sparing his life, they turn Kamandi over to a group of humanoid panthers, “death worshipers” who go by names like “Dead Woman” and “Dead Man” and refer to Kamandi as “Dead Boy.” Their fatalism is only a realistic appraisal of their chances: the area is ruled over by the Commander, controller of the robots, who lives at the top of a tower that overlooks the land. Sooner or later, death comes to all animal hybrids under such a reign. The panthers expect Kamandi to help invade the tower and kill the Commander.

After a graphic demonstration of the tower’s killing power, Kamandi decides to take the mysterious Commander on alone. Gaining entry by stealth, Kamandi spies containers of “Anti-Cortexin” (Cortexin being the chemical that originally gave sentience and upright posture to the animals of Kamandi’s world) and is attacked by more robots.

Kamandi is saved when a woman wearing power armor destroys the robots; Kamandi recognizes her as his long-sought mother. In the course of the reunion, she explains that she had hoped to keep him safe during the Android Wars by hiding him in the simulated small town in which he was raised, but upon returning she had found it destroyed. Now, after conquering the robots, she has but a single purpose in mind: she plans to use the Anti-Cortexin to return the world’s animals to their natural state, and make the world safe again for humans. Of course, it turns out, she is the Commander.

Kamandi barely has time to react to this news when an explosion rips the building apart: the death-worshiping cats have broken into the tower; in the last panel, Kamandi holds the body of his mother, who was injured in the explosion and may or may not be dead.

If the double-page sharks vs. robots spread doesn’t scream “COMICS!” to you, I don’t know what would. After the stark, existential meditation of Tom King and Kevin Eastman’s “Ain’t It a Drag?”, “Mother, May I?” is both a return to the bold four-color mayhem we have come to expect from Kamandi, and more importantly a turn towards a possible conclusion. As part 10 of a projected 12, Greg Pak and the writers who will follow him have their work cut out for them in fashioning an ending to this sprawling, multi-author story.

The reunion with Kamandi’s mother (unless the next installment undoes this by making her a robot or impostor, because comics) answers one of the central mysteries of the series, but leaves many unanswered: what happened to Kamandi’s father, for example? The Commander’s genocidal mission against the sentient animals is another: early on, when Kamandi first escaped the destruction of his home, he might have been expected to think the same way, that the humanoid animals are monstrous and that the natural order of things has been overturned. Yet if there is one consistent arc in this round-robin story, it is Kamandi’s growing understanding that intelligence, compassion, and friendship come in many forms. The varied relationships he has formed with characters such as Dr. Canus, Vila, Mack, and Sadie are testament to this enlarged sense of humanity, and a single panel shows in Kamandi’s facial expression that he is both surprised and aghast at his mother’s plan.

From a metafictional perspective, too, the reader doesn’t really expect such a plan to succeed, if success would undo what makes this fictional world attractive and interesting to begin with. For all its terrors, Earth After Disaster is full of wonders; in contrast to the resource-starved desert of the Mad Max films, it is teeming with life, and while Kamandi has sought others like himself in vain until now, he is long past seeking to wipe the slate clean.

Sometimes authors create tension by awareness of the character’s desire for circumstances that would foreclose narrative possibilities–Superman may wrestle with his desire to live as a normal man on an intact Krypton, even though it is his presence on Earth that gives him power and makes him a superhero–but in this case Kamandi’s journey has been one that brings him in line with the reader’s perspective, and I get the impression that he doesn’t want to erase the effects of the Great Disaster any more than the reader does.

On the other hand, there are only two chapters left in this saga, and unlike most open-ended comic book stories, there’s nothing stopping the last writer from blowing it all up. We shall see: if you’ll pardon the speculation, I suspect that we’ll find that either Kamandi’s mother isn’t actually dead, allowing this conflict to play out and form the climax of the series, or Kamandi’s father will enter the scene, either to continue her plan or as someone with a different set of priorities. We shall see.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 9

Cover by Mark Buckingham & Steve Buccellato

“Ain’t It a Drag?”
Writer: Tom King
Artists: Kevin Eastman & Freddie Williams II
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr & Dan DiDio

I’ve heard Tom King’s name a lot lately, in connection with projects like The Vision and Mister Miracle; according to one acquaintance, King is the best writer currently active in comics. But I hadn’t gotten around to reading much of his work yet. I don’t read everything, so until reading “Ain’t It a Drag?” in Kamandi Challenge no. 9, I knew King mainly by his reputation. On the basis of this one story, I have become a believer.

The plot of “Ain’t It a Drag?” is simple, almost schematically so, and is a departure in style and format from the previous chapters of this ongoing serial. The detailed, monochromatic art by Kevin Eastman (who has plenty of experience with talking animals as co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and Freddie Williams II combines with King’s dialogue to create a story that unfolds elegantly, like a fable. In broad strokes it could take place anywhere or to almost any character, but in its details it shows off what makes Kamandi and his world distinctive.

Kamandi awakens in an enclosed, cave-like room with a number of other people, or rather the anthropomorphized animals who are Earth A.D.’s primary inhabitants. Kamandi has only a vague memory of the sea serpent that menaced him at the end of last issue, but at some point he was captured and taken to this place.

Periodically, over a period of months, a door opens and an alien-looking robot (or something) enters, grabbing one inmate and dragging them away: where or to what fate is unknown, but everyone has varying opinions. Herbert, a friendly elephant, is optimistic and describes everything as “awesome.” Maybe the visitor is taking people away to somewhere awesome, and it’s so great nobody wants to come back? Could that be why no one has returned to describe it?

Other animals react in their own way, in fear or acceptance. A mother kangaroo pleads “Not my baby!” every time the dragging begins, until she is herself taken. A small bird spends time writing a story about the cave and what might lie beyond it. Kamandi, for his part, occupies himself building his strength and making plans to attack the robot, each time failing to even slow it down. Ultimately, after everyone else is gone, he too is taken, and the cave is empty except for the slab-like bench that was the cave’s only furniture, now clearly a symbolic coffin.

The most obvious interpretation of this story is to regard the door as death, the fate to which all of us are eventually dragged and from which no one has returned to describe the experience. No amount of strength, preparation, or pleading can put it off when it’s your time, but it is ultimately part of the rhythm of life, a fact to be accepted as best one can. Herbert’s faith in something “awesome” beyond the door is a comforting religious belief. Others live in denial, escaping into nostalgia or fantasy, or maintaining a “stiff upper lip.” One inmate, a moss-covered turtle, has seen generations come and go in the cave, and decides that it is his time; he steps forward to meet his fate, only to be ignored (although he is later gone, so I guess he eventually was taken). How much easier it must be to make one’s peace with the end when friends and family are already gone, no works left undone.

Kamandi’s single-minded attempts to defeat the intruder, to escape from the cave, to defend the other inmates, are both one common reaction taken to extremes and a perfectly apt behavior we would expect from an action hero. In his more conventional adventures, Kamandi is perpetually escaping and throwing off impediments to his freedom. He is often described as “pugnacious,” and here we see what that really means in the face of impossible odds: fighting until the last, refusing to submit. “All we know about what they’re going to do is . . . what they’ve done,” Kamandi tells Herbert, explaining why he fights so hard. “And those kinds of people, who do this . . . they don’t take you someplace nice or awesome. They just don’t.”

Of course, this is still part of an ongoing narrative: Kamandi refers to his past, relating all of the crazy stuff the previous authors have put him through, and while the ending is barely a cliffhanger, we can trust that Kamandi didn’t literally die at the end of the story. The metaphor only goes so far. It’s not a coincidence, I am sure, that the characters’ place of imprisonment is a cave, the Platonic symbol of an illusory reality. The various expressions of fear, regret, pride, and acceptance the inmates display are just coping strategies for a situation over which they have no power except in their own attitude. As easy as it may be for prisoners to identify the cell as their entire world, there is clearly something beyond the door in this story, and I have faith that the next authors will give Kamandi a chance to escape.

But that’s the problem with faith, isn’t it? By definition it is an expectation without a concrete foundation. I imagine that readers in 1978 had faith that Kamandi would continue to be published after issue no. 59, but the industry-wide collapse that led to the “DC Implosion” and the book’s cancellation put an end to that, much more quickly than anyone could have expected. I have faith that I’ll be around in October to read Kamandi Challenge no. 10, but an errant nuclear missile, or a careless driver, or a dislodged blood clot in the wrong place could cut off that possibility. If that happens, then Kamandi’s story will have ended here, at least as far as I’m concerned.

That belief that the story, both in the sense of a constructed narrative and in the sense of life itself, will continue is an essential assumption, however. Without it, only despair and inertia are possible. Kamandi, in the dialogue of this story, makes an observation that gets to the essence of storytelling, particularly of the serial variety: “It all just leads to the brink of something horrible. And over that brink, you go over. And you’re back to . . . everything. . . . And that goes on . . . it just keeps going on.” Kamandi says these words in a moment of existential despair, overwhelmed by the flood of oncoming events that is perpetually his life. Herbert the elephant, ever the optimist, replies, “Yes, exactly. I bet that’s exactly right. And isn’t that awesome?”

“Ain’t It a Drag?” is preceded by a quotation from Blaise Pascal (“I know not whence I came. I know not whither I go.”) and ends with one from Jack Kirby, one that contextualizes Herbert’s search for awesomeness and reinforces the notion that this shadow play is concerned primarily with mortality, with one’s place in the universe and the unknowability of it all. Kirby, who would have turned 100 in August, was most at home balancing the intimacy of character with the sprawling canvas of the cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm, and he rarely favored subtlety. Humanity, to Kirby, is no less powerful and dramatic than the greatest forces in the universe, because those same forces are at home in the hearts and souls of men and women. If King, Eastman, and Williams have distilled the essence of serialized storytelling and of the character Kamandi, they have also placed it in a context befitting the master world-builder and “King of Comics” himself, and touched on the power from which Kirby so liberally drew. In placing Kamandi in a narrative as conceptually audacious and formally inventive as those Kirby himself favored, they have created one of the most powerful tributes to him that I have yet seen in this, his centenary year.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 8

Cover by Jim Lee, Scott Williams, and Alex Sinclair

“Not Quite the Odyssey”
Writer: Keith Giffen
Artist: Steve Rude
Color: John Kalisz
Lettering: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

After parting with the Britannek Bulldogs last issue, Kamandi was hang-gliding over the ocean toward his next goal, following the track of his missing parents, when he was bitten by a Polar Parasite that had hitched a ride in his satchel. As Kamandi Challenge no. 8 continues the story, Kamandi is able to bring the glider in for a crash-landing in the surf, and succeeds in crushing the parasite against a rock before it can take control of his mind. While attempting to recover supplies from the wrecked glider, he is surprised by a band of humanoid goats and sheep in ancient Greek dress. Calling him “Odysseus,” they take him to be the returned hero of the Odyssey: he is human, like the illustrations in the “ancient texts” the goats have based their life on, and he can speak. He must be the one!

Nothing is ever quite that simple in Kamandi’s world, however, and the goats’ claim on Kamandi is challenged by a band of wolf people, the eternal enemies of the goats. To the wolves, Kamandi is “Ulysses,” the Roman name for Odysseus, and such hermeneutic differences are the stuff of which holy wars are made. Or perhaps it is simply the external manifestation of the two species’ age-old antagonism. The wolves attack, and the goats fight back, with Kamandi stuck in the middle and with no control over his own fate.

Once safe in the goats’ village, Kamandi learns a little about the feud, and that both sides expect him to be their champion, but he is also given to reflect on the bizarre experiences he has come through. As hinted at in previous chapters, Kamandi has been experiencing dreams of another life, a life which in the hints we are provided can be recognized as the original Kamandi series by Jack Kirby. This isn’t the first time Kamandi has been taken for a god, and his priority is escaping and getting on with his search. At the same time, both sides prepare for a final confrontation, their training marked by grisly reminders of the conflict: the wolves practice shooting arrows into sheep carcasses, and the goats play games with severed wolf heads.

Attempting to slip away in a small boat, Kamandi instead finds himself trapped between the fleets of the two warring factions; he briefly senses something else moving under the surface of the water, but is distracted from it by the outbreak of war. Too slow to escape being caught between the opposing fleets, Kamandi concentrates on simply surviving while staying out of the paws of wolf and sheep alike. Briefly submerged, he sees an ominous dark shape with glowing eyes. Later, adrift on a shield, he passes between the feet of an enormous statue that stands astride the harbor like the Colossus of Rhodes; on the pylon supporting one foot is carved the name “Odysseus,” on the other “Ulysses.” As we have seen through the snapshots of life in both communities, the religious mania of the high priests has no room for ambiguity: they would sooner die than compromise, and the last we see of the wolves and sheep are the flames consuming their ships and their villages. Only too late does Kamandi, alone at last, remember the creature he saw under the water, when he experiences another swell and a menacing sea serpent surfaces right in front of him!

Some chapters of Kamandi Challenge have sought to tweak or update the original series by questioning its assumptions or broadening its representation, but “Not Quite the Odyssey” is a comic book fable in the classic mode. With its literary references and overt indictment of religious mania, this story (written by Keith Giffen, who provided art for the series prologue in issue no. 1) would have fit very smoothly into Jack Kirby’s Kamandi. The artwork by Steve Rude (himself an iconic disciple of the Kirby manner) nicely combines Kirby’s energetic style (Rude’s Kamandi looks very much like Kirby’s, but with slightly more rendering and shading, and the heavily-inked backgrounds frequently look like they were pulled straight from a Bronze Age book) with varied panel layouts that keep scenes from being monotonous. Further, the touches from ancient Greek design in the goats’ city and the wolves’ Roman Legion dress gives them a specificity and deepens the thematic connection to the Iliad, with Kamandi escaping the final sea battle like the wanderer his captors take him to be.

On the other hand, the commitment to parable and the relative lack of distinct characters sometimes leaves this chapter feeling as two-dimensional as the Greek pottery art it references. After the quirky, loquacious characters presented by (especially) Jimmy Palmiotti, Bill Willingham, and Marguerite Bennett, the return to functional (at best) dialogue is a bit of a come-down. Most of it is purely expository, and both the goats and the wolves speak with the monotonous single-mindedness of the zealot: “He has returned! As foretold in the sacred book!” (A humorous exception is Kamandi’s face-to-face encounter with the “Penelope” who was waiting for his return, an appropriate punchline to the mistaken-identity plot and an effective bit of “what now?” escalation.)

To make up for it, Kamandi spends more time than usual talking to himself or adding wry asides to the conversation: this Kamandi is experienced enough to know how crazy this all is, and he even chastises himself for the choice words (rendered in grawlixes) he uses in response. Fables are about types rather than individuals, or perhaps that is the point of this particular fable: the loss of identity when one gives in to cultism. Kamandi, in this reading, is the lone individual, the Last Boy on Earth, just trying to keep his head down and survive as elemental social groupings collide. No wonder he doesn’t have much meaningful interaction with either side: they’ve largely given up listening and speak only to each other, choosing to live in their own echo chamber (heeeeey, maybe this isn’t only about ancient myth.)

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Kamandi Challenge no. 7

Cover by Bill Sienkiewicz

“Salvage”
Writer: Marguerite Bennett
Pencils: Dan Jurgens
Inks: Klaus Janson
Colorist: Hi-Fi
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

Note: This issue came out last week, but I was travelling, and it’s taken me a few days to get caught up. My apologies for the delay.

Kamandi, thrown from the towering heights of Mishkingrad by its former “Alpha” Grosnovo, and about to fall into the bear city’s atomic furnace, remembers that he is still holding the “cortex crown” that controls the city. Putting it on, Kamandi commands the metal around him (all parts of the great living city) to form a protective shell around him (similar to the vegetable shell Vila wove around him in no. 5) and take him to Renzi. There, he is astonished to see Renzi already surrounded by a band of female dog warriors, scavengers who periodically raid the bear city for technology and scrap metal. The dogs decide to take Kamandi along with them and throw him into a bag for transport. (They rescue Renzi as well, leaving the city of bears to collapse without Renzi’s atomic heart to power it.)

Later, Kamandi emerges from the bag to find himself on a huge dirigible, the floating headquarters of the “Bulldog Britanneks,” as the dogs call themselves. Beatrice, the leader of the Britanneks, recalls knowing Kamandi’s mother, a veteran of the “Android Wars” who designed their ship, and points Kamandi toward the last place she had seen her.

In the mean time, the dirigible floats over the forbidden wastelands of the North Pole, home to the “ice wizards.” The ice wizards (the only one we see is a polar bear) control hordes of “polar parasites,” metallic centipedes that latch onto unwilling hosts and control their minds, steering them to recruit more hosts. The ice wizards have been exiled to the wasteland and sense an opportunity to escape; for their part, the parasites are in constant search for new hosts and new territory. Directed by the ice wizard, a flying iceberg pierces the dirigible, bringing it down. One of the dog women, Sadie, rescues Kamandi from falling to his death; earlier she had flirted with him, but in this moment we sense that perhaps the attraction goes both ways.

On the ground, several of the Britanneks are overtaken by parasites, and with their minds controlled by them they begin attacking their fellows or attempting to lure them to be attacked by parasites. With their ship crashed and at the mercy of the parasites, the group retreats, but not before Kamandi finds the cortex crown among the wreckage. Since the dirigible was built from scrap looted from the bear city over the years, he reasons that the metal may still respond to the crown’s power, just as it had saved him earlier. A plan is hatched: the Britanneks lure the polar parasites and their hosts into the open, and then Kamandi, wearing the crown and driving a power-lifter-like exoskeleton made from the scrap, surprises the parasites, crushing them under the vehicle’s enormous “feet” and freeing the mind-controlled Britanneks as well. With the ice wizard captured (and disposed of off-panel?), the operation is a success.

The Britanneks, reunited, rebuild the remains of their dirigible into a hot-air balloon, while Kamandi, with a new lead on his missing parents, takes off separately in a hang-glider (after receiving a “first kiss” from Sadie). Gliding alone above the wasteland, Kamandi doesn’t notice one last polar parasite crawl out of his satchel, and the chapter ends with the creature biting him on the neck. Is this the end of Kamandi, or is he doomed to spend his remaining days as the host of the polar parasite?

As in other Kamandi stories, “Salvage” gets a lot of mileage out of comparing and contrasting human and animal behaviors and personality type. There are plenty of canine puns and references on hand (Kamandi “deworms” the parasite-infected Britanneks; the flying headquarters is referred to as a “doghouse” and later a “kennel,” and so on; it must have taken a lot of self-control to avoid the phrase “puppy love”). Most notably, while only Commander Beatrice is an actual bulldog, the group suggests the kind of plucky, diverse, but oh-so British commando troop one sees in movies about World War II, and Beatrice represents the typical funny animal English bulldog as a Winston Churchill stand-in: gruff, cigar-smoking, and (in this case) maternal. (“A Canterbury Tail/Calamity from the Clyde,” a two-part “Tale of the Great Disaster” printed in Weird War Tales nos. 51 and 52, makes a similar association between nationality, animal type, and character, but as we have seen that is almost de rigueur in funny animal stories, even ones like this that are darker than your average Carl Barks strip.) Naturally, the canine commandos are introduced playing poker when Kamandi is welcomed onto the dirigible.

Also striking in this story is that all the Britanneks are female, a conceit lampshaded by the engineer Mae who says of Kamandi when they meet, “You smell like you’ve met two, hm, three supporting female characters, tops–both of whom died, I’m guessing.” That sounds about right. I mostly know Marguerite Bennett, who wrote this chapter, from her work on DC Comics Bombshells, a series focused on the publisher’s female characters fighting an alternate World War II in a world without male superheroes. Although this chapter’s art (by Dan Jurgens and Klaus Janson, both of whom have been working in comics since I was reading them as a kid in the ’80s) is more old-school and less attuned to the feminine nuances of Bennett’s script than that of Bennett’s Bombshells collaborator Marguerite Sauvage, “Salvage” shows some of the same inventive remixing of wartime iconography and bantering sisterhood as her flagship series. Also, in addition to improving Kamandi’s representation stats the Britanneks have a more functional family dynamic than any group Kamandi has encountered since his abrupt expulsion from the Truman Show-esque small town in which he grew up, back in issue no. 1. Kamandi has made friends and allies, but the tough warrior women of the Britanneks are a family: they not only fight together, they care about each other, and their scenes are reminiscent of the Vuvalini in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Finally, Kamandi has traditionally been a series in which romance took a back seat to action and adventure; not exactly “no girls allowed,” but like many comics, the emphasis is on Kamandi’s status as “The Last Boy on Earth” (emphasis added). Mae commenting on the meager (and deceased) female supporting cast could easily be referring not only to this series but to Jack Kirby’s original book as well. The love of Kamandi’s life, Flower, a girl his age who could speak (in contrast to the mostly mute humans of Earth A.D.), was no sooner introduced than she was killed tragically; later Kirby, sensing a missed opportunity, introduced Flower’s twin, Spirit, but if Kamandi noticed Spirit’s hula-girl near-nakedness, he was too polite to say anything. That was for the pubescent audience. In this case, the flirtatious Sadie and her interest in Kamandi would be unexceptional were it not for the prospect of cross-species love in their relationship. Ultimately, their mutual attraction is turned into a cute joke, with Sadie slurping Kamandi’s face like any family pet. Whether a furry fantasy* or a riff on dogs’ age-old affection for man, the message is clear: even in the wastes of this post-apocalyptic world, it is love, and the possibility of finding it, that makes survival into living.

from Kamandi no. 12

*Not to downplay the degree to which Kamandi can already be seen as a furry fantasy, but as I suggested, its generally chaste approach takes the focus off questions of romance or sexuality.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 6

Main cover by Andy Kubert and Brad Anderson

“The Insides-Out Adventure”
Writer: Steve Orlando
Penciller: Philip Tan
Inker: Norm Rapmund
Colorist: Dean White
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

At the conclusion of last month’s Kamandi Challenge, Kamandi had fallen into the clutches of Dr. Vokolo, a lemur physician in possession of a 3-D “bio-printer.” Vokolo was willing to sacrifice Kamandi for the sake of saving potential lives in the future, a process that entailed removing the still-living Kamandi’s internal organs to be scanned. Alas, there was no plan to put them back when Vokolo was done with them, so things looked bleak for our hero. The tiger man Raja Maccao (“Mack”), whom Kamandi had earlier been traveling with (and who was already searching for Vokolo in hopes of finding a cure for a plague of “weeping pox” elsewhere), burst into Vokolo’s lab and was greeted by a sight out of an EC horror comic.

“What have you done to Kamandi?!” Mack demands as Kamandi Challenge number 6 gets underway. The good doctor explains what is happening, finishing with the ominous promise that “The only thing keeping your friend alive . . . is me.” So to motivate Vokolo, Mack shoots him in the gut, forcing him to use the “bio-printer” to save himself and Kamandi. Well, actually, it takes seven hours to print the regenerative “gene therapy” that they eventually find in the computer’s records, but Vokolo estimates that he has only three hours to live after being gut-shot, so in the end he gets what was coming to him, and only Kamandi lasts long enough to benefit from the gene therapy.

After Kamandi awakens, good as new, Mack chooses to stay behind and look for a cure for weeping pox among the late doctor’s resources. To help Kamandi continue his search for his people, he directs him to an old friend, a superhuman scientist named Renzi. Renzi is a character from Jack Kirby’s original Kamandi series, but his appearance here is largely a cameo. The pair are shown traveling by high-tech hot-air balloon just long enough to establish that Renzi possesses a “cyclo-heart,” an atomic energy source that allows him to change his body to a metallic substance for short durations, before they are shot down over an unknown source of intense heat. Renzi assumes his steel form to protect Kamandi, but both black out in the crash; they awaken in chains, the prisoner of intelligent bears. Renzi is separated from Kamandi: the bears have use of his cyclo-heart.

Kamandi is brought face-to-face with Groznovo, the “Alpha of Alphas”; Mishkingrad, the “God-Commune of the Bears” is a high-tech Soviet collective (because bears, get it?), and Groznovo wears a crown that receives and tallies the collective decisions of the commune’s inhabitants, which he interprets and executes. His status as a channel for the will of the people is quite literal. Kamandi challenges Groznovo’s position, telling him that by being subject to the constantly shifting demands of the people he has merely chosen a different form of slavery, and is free of the burden of ever making his own decisions. Groznovo accepts this idea surprisingly quickly, and in fact lets Kamandi know that he has been tiring of the demands of duty for some time. If ever there was an opportunity for him to break free from the commune’s collective rule, Kamandi has presented Groznovo with it; the bear promises to lead Kamandi to where Renzi is being held.

Throughout their flight through the city, Kamandi notices strangely anatomical references that go beyond the usual discussion of a city’s “bones”: the transit system is referred to as “vascular,” and so on. Near the end of this chapter we see just what Renzi’s atomic-powered heart is being used for: the “God-Commune” is a giant, self-contained city, but it is in the form an enormous, autonomous bear, and with Renzi’s heart as its reactor, it can generate enough power to get up and move about freely. Ultimately, Groznovo has been playing Kamandi: the bear truly wants to be free, but he will not betray the commune’s ideals. He has led Kamandi away from the furnace in which Renzi is being held captive. Kamandi accuses Groznovo of using him, and the pair fight as the bear-shaped city plods along, leaving flames in its wake. Groznovo makes it clear that in a choice between loyalty to Kamandi and his own people, he will always choose his people, and he reluctantly throws Kamandi overboard.

“The Insides-Out Adventure” moves at a quick pace, first resolving the cliffhanger of Kamandi’s vivisection, then getting him into the balloon with Renzi, and finally dropping both of them into the city of the bears. Without the colorful dialogue that tempered the pace of Bill Willingham’s contribution last month, and with four full-page splashes (including an impressive two-page spread of the city coming to life), the effect is an adventure that feels a bit rushed. In particular, Kamandi’s debate with Groznovo on the nature of free will, which seems to be the central theme writer Steve Orlando wants to convey, doesn’t have much tension; Groznovo’s abdication of his crown is a nearly foregone conclusion. (The real twist comes at the end, when he refuses to help rescue Renzi and dispenses with Kamandi.)

Communism (or a high-tech iteration of it) comes off as something of a straw man here, but that is hardly surprising: like most American comic book heroes, and particularly characters who inhabit lands as savage as Earth A. D. (After Disaster), Kamandi’s ideals of freedom and self-determination are particularly American in form: the freedom to go where he pleases, and to bow to no man (or bear) are central. Furthermore, Kamandi has occasional traveling companions, but no tribe: the idea of submitting his own will to a greater good is quite out of place in the lawless kill-or-be-killed wilds of the future. (As in previous installments, comparisons are drawn between the mute, sheep-like humans the bears have penned in captivity and the boy who will not be silenced; as in Planet of the Apes, “This is what happens when a human thinks for himself!”)

Recalling the first chapter, Kamandi was brought up in a sheltered simulation of a typical small town, so one imagines that his schooling included American Government or Civics: like any student who has left school to strike out on his own, part of Kamandi’s story has been his disillusionment upon discovering that the world isn’t what he thought it was, and his subsequent discovery of his own power. His encounter with the communist bears is a test of his beliefs, but one too brief to really challenge them, and in effect the God-Commune is just another cruel domain ruled by an Other, an animal race that has taken one trait of human civilizations (collectivism) to an extreme.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 5

KC5.cover

Variant cover by Ivan Reis and Marcelo Maiolo

“Sub Tropical Thunder”
Writer: Bill Willingham
Penciller: Ivan Reis
Inker: Oclair Albert
Colorist: Marcelo Maiolo
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

As Kamandi Challenge no. 5 begins, Kamandi and Vila are being chased by the Kanga Rat Murder Society, by whom they were captured at the end of the last issue. Self-proclaimed guardians of the “Wondrous Western Wall,” the Kanga Rats have given our heroes their choice of vehicle and weapons to defend themselves–they’re sportsmen, not monsters. Kamandi, in the driver’s seat, switches places with Vila so that he can shoot back at the hunters while she drives, and Vila makes the calculation that she can save them by driving off a convenient cliff and landing in open water (sure, last issue they were in “the heart of the scorched Outback,” and now they’re on the shore of the ocean, but whatever). Despite Kamandi’s protests, Vila does just that, growing and extending her plant body to create a protective shell around Kamandi, Groot-like, and then transforming herself into a raft (previous stories showed Vila regenerating herself, but this is the first indicator that she has this much control over her form; still, it’s inventive and exciting, so I’m willing to roll with it). After days adrift at sea, Vila enters a dormant state, assuring Kamandi that she will awaken and regenerate anew once she is in contact with soil and fresh water.

KC5.Vila

Alas, Kamandi is picked up by a passing boat while asleep, and his rescuers (a literal “sea dog” and his crew) leave Vila behind, taking her for a bundle of twigs. Perhaps Vila, Kamandi’s longest-lasting companion in this series (and an original character, at that), will turn up again, but for now the Last Boy on Earth has a new ally. After working aboard the ship in exchange for passage, Kamandi is introduced to the tiger man Raja Maccao, professional wrestler-turned-detective and fount of stories (mostly about himself and his many successful cases). Kamandi tags along (for weeks, elapsed in montage) in hopes of finding his own people and for lack of anywhere better to go.

Kamandi and Raja are taken by surprise by the airborne “Bintur horde,” a band of rodent people riding giant owls and hawks. After yet another running battle that ends with Kamandi leaping off a cliff into a river, the two are separated and Kamandi is captured by the horde. He blacks out and awakens a captive of a lemur scientist, who explains that his “3-D bio-printer,” which can fabricate replacement organs for 97 species, will soon be able to replicate human organs as well, at the small price of sacrificing Kamandi’s life, since the printer cannot create without first analyzing samples from living specimens. (While this mad doctor differs from the others encountered so far in that his intentions are noble, the end result is the same for Kamandi.)

KC5.doctor

The doctor has begun prepping Kamandi for exploratory surgery (vivisection, really) by his automated operating table when Raja Maccao bursts in to the secluded laboratory (having tracked the aerial raiders by their mounts’ extensive droppings), but it appears that he is too late: the last page, with the doctor holding Kamandi’s heart in his hand and the boy’s chest cavity opened and empty, a look of terror frozen on Kamandi’s face, is the grisliest sight we’ve seen yet. In addition to being far more graphic than usual for this character or his world, it leaves a real challenge for Steve Orlando and Philip Tan when they pick up the story next month!

As the bare plot description suggests, five months into the Kamandi Challenge we’re seeing some recurring plot elements: sudden raids from above; Kamandi escaping by jumping off of or into something; Kamandi losing consciousness and waking up in a strange, new place; and captivity by scientists for whom a talking human is a challenge or opportunity that cannot be denied. But Kamandi can also count on making friends wherever he goes, and proving himself worthy of their faith in him. If I had to name a single quality that defines Kamandi, in his various incarnations, beyond his bravery, intelligence, or strength, I would say it is his resilience.

KC5.horde

Written by Fables‘ Bill Willingham, “Sub Tropical Thunder” provides a real sense of texture through its characters’ dialogue, from the rustic “sea dog” Babal Crow (“Plucked you out of the sea, we did, as you were good as dead. That’s all I ken.”) to the name-dropping, self-mythologizing Raja (“I was a frisky kitty, hungry for game and fame.”), who in a few pages mentors Kamandi in a way we haven’t really seen since Doctor Canus’ departure from the story. Even Vila’s dialogue gives a sense of her as slightly alien, with an unusual perspective. The attention to detail goes a long way toward making familiar character types and situation feel fresh.

I also enjoyed the illustrations by Reis, Albert, and Maiolo, which combine dynamic compositions and panel design with fine (but unfussy) detail. Each artist in this series has brought something of their own personality and style to the ongoing book, and like Dale Eaglesham’s work in issue no. 1, this month’s art resembles the classic comic strips of Hal Foster or Alex Raymond, including some great-looking full-page splashes. The various creatures, including a range of humanoid and giant animals, are nicely realized, with a sense of weight and movement matching their particular anatomies, and subtly-rendered textures like the woody grain of Vila’s skin or the fur on Raja’s muzzle look so real you can almost touch them. The art also emphasizes Kamandi’s boyishness as well, mostly by giving him more childish features (particularly a small nose and full lips), but also by placing him against larger figures or in the corners of panels, highlighting how small and vulnerable he is in this world.

KC5.raja

Finally, there aren’t too many clues dropped in this issue about either the source of the Great Disaster or Kamandi’s importance, but at the same time it’s mercifully free of psychedelic dream sequences, which I’ve mostly begun to think of as red herrings, since the round-robin nature of the series means we won’t really be able to assign meaning to anything until a later writer contributes something that either confirms or denies a particular clue’s significance. That’s okay with me: Jack Kirby was never too concerned himself with seeding mysteries to be resolved in grand arcs, instead concentrating on the pleasures of episodic storytelling, and Kamandi in particular has always been an especially pure example of that impulse: the rhythms of Kamandi are as old as serial narrative–captivity, escape, flight, and rescue–and are represented in spades by “Sub Tropical Thunder.”

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Kamandi Challenge no. 4

Main cover by Paul Pope and Lovern Kindzierski

“The Wild Wondrous West”
Writer: James Tynion IV
Artist: Carlos D’Anda
Colorist: Gabe Eltaeb
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

At the end of Kamandi Challenge no. 3, Kamandi and his plant-girl companion Vila were about to be sacrificed to the jaguars’ deity, a giant-sized jaguar so huge that it wears trucks and a jet on chains around its neck as jewelry. As issue 4 gets underway, the giant grabs Kamandi in its enormous paw; Kamandi struggles to escape, stabbing at the beast. He discovers that rather than blood, his knife draws oil from the wound, just before the creature shoves Kamandi in its mouth and swallows him. Abruptly, the scene changes, and Kamandi finds himself in a high-tech control room, the literal belly of the beast: the jaguar “god” is actually a giant mecha, a robot piloted by a pair of jaguar scientists, Cano and R’lash.

Kamandi’s captors explain that they were outcasts from the superstitious jaguar society, skeptical of the cults’ unscientific reliance on myth and ritual. Discovering a cache of ancient technology, the pair taught themselves to use it and built their robotic version of the sun cult’s god, exploiting the jaguars’ credulity and putting themselves at the head of their society. All of this they explain to Kamandi (and Vila, who is also “eaten”), leading up to their plan to dissect him for study (a talking human continues to be a rarity in this post-cataclysmic world).

Kamandi (who was swallowed unscathed because of a lucky malfunction of the machine’s chewing function) isn’t so easily killed however, and he uses a gun to destroy the machine’s control panel; he and Vila (injured but still alive) climb back out of the god’s mouth and into the cockpit of the ancient fighter jet that the machine wears around its neck. They are able to take off (breaking off the jaguar god’s robotic head and revealing Cano’s deception to the other jaguars), but as they climb in altitude they black out.

After regaining consciousness, Kamandi finds himself in a desert next to the crashed jet (and Vila, dehydrated) at the base of a mysterious wall. Kamandi hears voices calling his name from the other side of the wall; strange vehicles approach, driven by figures he can’t quite make out in the blazing sun, but when he attempts to communicate with them, he is struck down by a boomerang to the head. While unconscious, he seems to experience contact with an unknown entity, but that conversation too is cut short and Kamandi awakens alongside Vila, healed, in another unknown location.

Their reunion is brief, however, as a voice instructs them to choose weapons from an arsenal, and the platform on which they stand rises up and opens into a giant arena. Once more Kamandi must fight before a roaring crowd, this time in the Australian Outback, in the domain of the “Kanga Rat Murder Society,” guardians of the “Wondrous Western Wall.” The last page of this issue has Kamandi and Vila hop aboard a Kirby-esque Big Wheel, preparing to flee or fight for their lives.

It took me a couple of readings of this issue to put my finger on why it seemed a little thin. It’s not for lack of incident or characters, and there’s quite a bit I liked about “The Wild Wondrous West,” but it comes down, I think, to the fact that Kamandi gets knocked out and wakes up in a new location twice: it’s a dynamic that helps our heroes get from one place to another, but makes it a challenge to build up much momentum. (It’s probably a side effect of the tag-team storytelling approach, as well: each pair of writers and artists has only one issue to wrap up the previous issue’s cliffhanger and then make their own contribution.) The settings also feel a little familiar; true, gladiatorial arenas are a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction, but we’ve already seen something similar to this in the first issue.

At least this issue’s reveal makes the jaguar god into something different from the giant gorilla Tiny. A pattern is emerging in which the threats facing our heroes in the cliffhangers turn out to be not quite what they seem, and the Star Trek-like false god is a particularly clever solution to last issue’s trap. The jaguar inventors piloting their robotic creation are interesting and original characters in their own right: writer James Tynion IV gives them strong personalities through their dialogue, even as “Professor” Cano and his hunchbacked assistant R’lash inhabit well-worn “mad scientist” territory. I was sad to see them go.

Above all, this issue benefits from atmospheric art provided by Carlos D’Anda, and particularly Gabe Etlaeb’s moody colors (the ominous red lighting inside the jaguar mecha is going to stick with me long after this series has been put to bed, I think). The transitions between settings are made crystal clear by the use of fade-outs and contrasting palettes: there’s no need for an “Elsewhere . . .” caption when the dark tones of the jaguar island give way to the bright yellows and blues of the desert. You can practically feel Kamandi’s thirst, and the haze through which the Kanga Rats appear gives the scene a cinematic feel; past Kamandi books haven’t always captured the kinetic energy of the Mad Max movies when they turn to vehicular mayhem, but the last few pages promise a spectacle that actually moves. One hopes the next team to take over can meet the expectation this issue sets up.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 3

Cover A by Ben Caldwell

“Bug in Your Ear”
Writer: Jimmy Palmiotti
Artist: Amanda Conner
Colorist: Paul Mounts
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

When last we left Kamandi, he had leapt off a cliff into an unknown abyss rather than be captured by Manhunter robots. As Chapter Three begins, Kamandi’s descent is spotted by a hidden watcher, and a pair of bat people, Kreeg and Saparta, is dispatched to catch him; they sort of succeed, but not before Kamandi hits his head and loses consciousness. Upon awakening in a darkened cell, Kamandi is cautioned to be careful by a flying insect. “Yer in danger. They have eyes everywhere,” the bug says.

Then an organic pod emerges through the floor of Kamandi’s cell, which upon opening reveals a green-skinned half-vegetable girl who introduces herself as Vila. “I am yours,” she says enticingly, although her offer isn’t quite what we’re at first led to believe.

It turns out that Kamandi is aboard a ship in the clutches of the God Watchers, a crew of various animal types who believe Kamandi to be a messenger of the gods they have been waiting for; they possess a torn photo of Kamandi (or someone who looks like him) as a young boy, seated in front of his parents, the “true gods.” (Remember that Kamandi’s search to find his parents has so far been the one unifying thread in this round-robin series.)

Despite being hosted as a god, Kamandi doesn’t trust the God Watchers or their turtle leader, Fritz, and is deeply unsettled by what he sees of their ways: the bat people who saved Kamandi are slaves, captured in combat, and when he encounters them again they are undergoing punishment for failing to rescue him unharmed. At a feast held in his honor, Kamandi discovers that Vila and others like her are raised as food: he’s horrified to watch the animals bite off strips of the plant people’s “flesh,” even as Vila assures him that it will grow back. And everywhere, Kamandi is being watched by the hovering insects that serve as the God Watchers’ spy network. Despite his protests that he is not a god, he comes to realize that he is in great danger if the God Watchers begin to doubt him.

The crisis arrives when Kamandi draws his own blood in front of the God Watchers to prove that he is mortal, but that revelation is overshadowed by an attack from the bat people as the ship passes near their territory. In the confusion of the attack, Vila is grabbed by one of the attacking bats; Kamandi hangs on to her by one of her arms and rescues her by chewing through the other. The two of them free the still-captive Kreeg and Saparta (they cannot return to their own kind, as they are considered “tainted”), and are about to ride to freedom when Fritz corners them. “Arrest this impostor and kill the other three,” he orders. But then Fritz and his minions are slaughtered by the attacking bats, and Kamandi and Vila escape on Kreeg and Saparta’s backs just before the invaders firebomb the entire ship.

Whew! That would be enough for an episode of any adventure book, but true to the source material, the four protagonists have only escaped from one danger to step into another: the island they land on is reputed to be the home of a Sun Cult, and almost immediately they are ambushed by intelligent jaguars. After a struggle, Kamandi is again knocked out and taken captive. When he awakens, he and Vila are tied to posts on a ceremonial altar. Kreeg and Saparta have already been ritually cooked and eaten, and “sun-haired” Kamandi is next in line to be sacrificed. After being paralyzed with a drug and ritually decorated by attendants, Kamandi finds himself (with Vila thrown in for good measure) in Fay Wray’s position as a gift to the King Kong of jaguars. “Mmm . . . dinner!” the giant cat purrs. To be continued . . .

“Bug in Your Ear” is the contribution of husband-and-wife team Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner, who have worked together on many projects and who obviously know each others’ strengths. Conner’s art is always attractive, with a clean and slightly cartoony style, and here she leans into that quality with a big-eyed plant girl who resembles a sexy spin on the Jolly Green Giant, and a host of funny animals reminiscent of mid-century Disney productions like Robin Hood. The Disney comparison extends to the flying insects: the first one we see, who warns Kamandi to be careful, suggests something like Tinkerbell or Jiminy Cricket, a voice of wisdom from a tiny, unseen source. But that doesn’t last long, as the bug falls prey to an anteater who can’t resist snacking on the God Watchers’ spies.

In fact, despite how busy this chapter is, a great deal of the interest is in the characterization of the many different non-humans and their various motives as they’re thrown together in different combinations. The cuteness of the art and the humor of the characters offsets the gruesomeness of the plot, which lest we forget includes copious examples of (sort of) cannibalism, dismemberment, and ritual sacrifice. (The role reversal of having Kamandi wind up a body-painted “damsel in distress” at the end gives the story a touch of equal-opportunity sensuality, as well.)

Both the God Watchers and Jaguar Sun Cult were listed on the map of Kamandi’s world that Jack Kirby left behind before handing Kamandi off to other writers. I’d go so far as to say that “Bug in Your Ear” represents an ideal form of at least one facet of Kirby’s creation: funny animal characters and themes viewed through the lens of science fiction: not hard science fiction, but at least giving weight to the behaviors of real animals and by extension satirizing the human societies that the animals parody. As in previous iterations of Kamandi, and indeed a great many funny animal books (including those aimed at children), the animal societies mirror human cultures associated with the geography they inhabit.

Aztec jaguars are a natural, of course, and whether the use of Mesoamerican cultural signifiers like step-pyramids and human sacrifice is meant to suggest that the jaguars have taken over where humans left off, or rather that there is some sort of geographical essentialism involved in culture, is something left for the individual reader to ponder. And could we read Fritz and his multi-species crew of God Watchers as L. Ron Hubbard tooling about on a yacht for years as the head of Scientology’s Sea Org? Or perhaps his ship is an inverted Noah’s Ark, run by animals and searching for humans to save? Probably not, but it is fun to speculate. More importantly, no matter how far-fetched the settings and characters of fantasies like Kamandi may be, they connect because we recognize in them the passions for freedom, compassion, and meaning, as well as the cruelty, lust for power, and religious fanaticism that have always been with us, and have always been part of our fiction. As in the Planet of the Apes series, the most dangerous animal is man, no matter what skin he wears in his stories.

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