The most successful of all of Jack Kirby’s assorted creations in the decade of the 1970s was undoubtedly KAMANDI, the story of the last human boy on Earth in a future time when animals have become intelligent and walk upright. It was a sort of quasi-spin on the popular Planet of the Apes franchise, but not limited to a single animal species. The series ran for 59 issues, continuing on in other hands even after Kirby had departed it, pretty much the only title he’d created in this period to do so. But when the axe fell in the DC Implosion, KAMANDi was a fatality.
At that point, the entirety of what would have been KAMANDI #60 had been completed and was ready to go, and KAMANDI #61 was well under way. Accordingly, this unpublished material made its way into CANCELLED COMIC CAVALCADE #2. Above we see the unused Rich Buckler cover, with inks by Jack Abel.
Part of the intention of this storyline was to work out and organize the various futures seen across different DC publications into a coherent whole. So the sequence involved Kamandi traveling through a cosmic vortex and becoming aware of teh multiverse, seeing and interacting with characters from elsewhere within it.
At the end of the story, before Kamandi can return to his proper place and time, he’s snatched up by Brute and Glob from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s short-lived SANDMAN series. This was a set-up for teh next issue, which would repurpose material left over from an unpublished issue of SANDMAN as well.
The back-up series in KAMANDI was a revival of Kirby’s other strip, OMAC: ONE MAN ARMY CORPS, a futuristic super hero series. Jim Starlin was given the task of reinventing the series and making it work. Earlier in the run, it had been revealed that OMAC was a direct ancestor of Kamandi, so it made sense to run the strip here. Eventually, this chapter would be dusted off and published in WARLORD #37 a few years later.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Kamandi 60 & 61 would finally get a proper release in the Kamandi Challenge special, while that OMAC story was released in Countdown Special: OMAC.
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I remember really enjoying that Starlin OMAC when it debuted in KAMANDI, and followed it into WARLORD when it continued there.
I was told at the time (though this was very much through the grapevine and may not be true) that one of the reasons KAMANDI lasted all the way to the Implosion was that there was Saturday morning cartoon interest in it, and DC wanted to keep it on the stands in case that came through.
I thought that, by the end, KAMANDI had absolutely the wrong creative team to it. I’m not sure who could have followed up Kirby who was at DC at the time, but while Jack C. Harris was clearly invested in the series, doing his best on it with a lot of love for the material, he was very much a writer who approached the material intellectually, concerned with plot and rationalization more than action and character, and KAMANDI seems built to be an action series about emotion and impact. I’m not sure I’d have liked the result, but I wonder what Kanigher or Haney would have done with it? And Dick Ayers seemed to be on the book because he’d inked a lot of Kirby, and was dependable and a clear storyteller. But he just wasn’t exciting.
Still, if DC collected those last 20+ issues, I’d buy it, if only to have it on the shelf alongside the Kirby volumes. It’s definitely my favorite of the Kirby DC series, and I wish Kirby had been on it longer.
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This is very perceptive (no surprise there, you have always had insightful opinions on the medium).
Haney might have been an interesting choice. Haney (in his B&B scripts) usually showed more respect for the continuity and canon of Kirby characters).
I also wonder (thinking of who worked for DC from 1975-78)
if David Micheline might not have been a good choice (as he and Layton and Giffen were staring to try to “kluge” DC’s “Infinite into a Moorcockian template in Claw and Star Hunters).
I also think Steve Gerber who was working on a Mr. Miricle series in 1977-’78 might have done interesting work.
I thought the major-post Kirby issue is there was a stop to world building based on consistent assumptions. Kirby had reasons why certain types of animals became intelligent and built civilizations and others didn’t (although he ignored those rules occasionally for dramatic effect (Mr. Sacker, the giant snake).
Kirby has quite a knack for what they now call “world building.”
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I don’t think Michelinie was all that great at world building back then, though I liked his writing a whole lot and thought DC should have tried to keep him (but the Implosion, sigh). And I had no interest in any attempt to kludge Kirby’s futures into the Atomic Knights and whatever else, I thought they muddled up his ideas.
But Gerber would have done an excellent KAMANDI, I think. His views on how modern society had mutated into the animal societies of Earth After Disaster would have been more satirical and sarcastic than Kirby’s, but I think that’d have been fun, and I agree that he’d have built societies that felt like they’d bee around a while, as Kirby did.
Gerber’s a really great idea.
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I second the idea of Gerber being a potentially great fit for Kamandi… doesn’t hurt that he and Kirby worked together on an anthropomorphic animal comic.
As for the art….I think at the time that Herb Trimpe or Joe Staton could have brought the right kind of energy to the project
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Plus, Gerber created THUNDARR.
Trimpe was exclusive to Marvel at the time, and Staton was only working as an inker (except at Charlton). But if you gave it to Estrada/Staton, that’d have worked, and Staton could have taken over the pencils later, if he didn’t get hijacked onto other projects — he got pretty valuable to DC once he started penciling.
I think about DC stealing a march on Marvel and nabbing Mike Zeck or Kerry Gammill early, although I don’t think either were quite ready in 1975.
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Estrada and Staton (or Wood) would be pretty cool. If limited to the folks who could have or did work with DC i’d probably prefer Joe Kubert… or Toth? Or what the hell… a young Walt Simonson?
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Kubert was not going to do it, no chance. Even if an editor could talk Toth into it, he’d blow his stack and quit halfway through the second issue (or sooner). Kane was at Marvel (mostly doing covers, which paid better) at that point.
Simonson would be very high on my list and would do a wonderful job if he could be gotten to do it. I’m not sure he and Gerber would be simpatico, though, but it’d be worth giving it a try.
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…GIl Kane too… probably would have done a pretty cooking Kamandi.
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How about Marshall Rogers as the artist? He did a two part ‘Tales of the Great Disaster” that appeared over in Weird War Tales in late 1976-early 1977.
Rogers apparently got the Detective Comics slot from Simonson because someone senior at DC did not like Simonson’s two issues. (off topic, but I liked that work.)
Keith Giffen (who actually worked on the book in 1976 but was mostly at Marvel in late 1976 to 1978 or so) might have been interesting, especially based on his work on other Kirby-created IP (OMAC, Darkseid in the Legion) and the fact some of his work showed a Kirby influence.
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Like you say, we did see what Keith’s KAMANDI looked like. It was…okay. He’d have been much better at it in later years.
I wouldn’t give it to Rogers. He drew very sophisticated-looking pages, and I think KAMANDI had a very young appeal, so clarity and energy were more important than something that would appeal to hardcore comics fans.
If not Simonson or Estrada/Staton, I think Chic Stone did a nice job. Tuska would have been good — and Tuska/Stone might have been terrific.
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Tuska had great energy and every fight scene he did looked like it would send someone to the ED. He would have been a good choice, especially since he had done Planet of the Apes for Marvel.
Chic Stone was a solid inker. I remember his work with Kirby from 1964-’65 fondly from later reprints.
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Some wonderfully loopy visuals in this story. I wonder if the idea to have Pyra’s ship transform into a giant six-legged meatloaf with a face came from Harris or Ayers.
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I was a big fan of the New Gods/Forth World Books, However, I thought they reflected themes Kirby had been wrestling since the 1940s in various stripes at various publishers
Kamandi was also something Kirby had explored before, in one-off stories for Harvey and in Newspaper strip proposals.
Kirby’s last year on so on the book was particularly good; the European (Animal) military forces trying to keep the mutant animals of Canada (the “Domain of the Devils”) , protected from exploitation by the Animal Nations of North America (and North American “non-state actors like “Sacker’s Department Store”).
It was fantasy, it was satire . . . and yet it also made internal sense.
The intelligent animals were generally carnivores and omnivores from the Order Mammilla: Canines; Felines; Primates; Rats and Primates, There were one-offs like the competing cetacean civilizations (who certainly have the potential intelligence but have nothing to manipulate objects with and an environment were they could not harness fire. (As a result, they used humans as “Service Animals Sacker, an intelligent giant snake was treated as a one off.
All of this got dumped on Gerry Conway, who probably was not a particular fan of this book and had a somewhat mixed record on post apocalyptic stories (his brief tenure on Marvel’s War of the Worlds did not raise my hopes a the time) stories in general.
Neither Conway nor David Anthony Kraft added much. The “World Building Kirby had done did not seem to be there.
I thought Jack C. Harris was trying to get back into the World Kirby created, but it might have been too little, too late. I did like how he was tiring to sort of tie this into the Micheline/Giffen/Layton elaboration on DC’s Multiverse from Claw and Star Hunters into this.
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Thanks for printing this. I’ve heard the synopsis but it’s more ambitious than I thought.
Unfortunately Harris misses part of what I think made Kirby’s Kamandi memorable. Kirby had him as a teenager trapped in a world he never made, struggling to survive, rather than a Chosen One around whom the world revolves. And Kirby’s animal civilizations always felt like they’d existed before Kamandi appeared and continued long afterwards and probably didn’t think much about him (“I met this weird creature today, a yellow-haired animal that talks. So, honey, what’s for dinner?”). After Kirby they felt insubstantial.
I did love the Omac reboot.
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I thought for sure that the individual that popped up on the monitor on the page that was after the letters column page was from Thanagar!
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