Kamandi Archives, Vol. 2
All the series comics legend Kirby created after he jumped ship from Marvel to DC in the early 1970s were kooky. Without longtime collaborator Stan Lee to restrain him, Kirby indulged his tendency toward the grandiosely goofy. None of Kirby's DC titles was more oddball thanKamandi, whose young hero dwelt in a postapocalyptic world in which an unspecified "Great Disaster" had caused tigers, dogs, and other animals to evolve into intelligent bipeds who hunt down and enslave humans. If the premise seems a shameless rip-off ofPlanet of the Apes, the characterizations minimal, and the dialogue wildly overwrought, the results are still undiluted Kirby: a chain of action-packed clashes in which seafaring leopard-slavers capture Kamandi, he fights gorillas guarding the lost Watergate tapes, and he meets robot gangsters in the ruins of Chicago. Everything is rendered in Kirby's unmistakable, hyperintense visual style.Kamandimay strike contemporary comics fans as puerile and unsubtle, but it was Kirby's longest-running DC title, and many older readers fondly remember "The Last Boy on Earth."Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved