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Wed March 17, 2010 1:30pm
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Kamandi is a DC Comics comic book character created by acclaimed artist Jack Kirby. The bulk of Kamandi's appearances occurred in the comic series Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which ran from 1972 to 1978.
Kamandi is a young hero in a post-apocalyptic future. After a huge event called "The Great Disaster," humans have been reduced to savagery in a world ruled by intelligent, highly evolved animals.
During Kirby's run on the book, Steve Sherman indicated in the letters column that the series was connected to Kirby's contemporary OMAC series, which was set sometime prior to the Great Disaster. The only explicit connection to the DC Universe occurs in issue #29, where Kamandi discovers a group of apes who worship Superman's costume, and who speak of legends of Superman trying and failing to stop the Great Disaster. The story leaves it ambiguous whether the legends are true (although Kamandi believes Superman was real) and whether the costume is indeed Superman's.
Various non-Kirby stories tie the series more explicitly to the DC Universe. In Brave and the Bold #120 (July 1975), Kamandi meets a time-traveling Batman. Superman #295 (January 1976) establishes that that the costume seen in issue #29 was indeed Superman's, and that Earth A.D. is an alternate future for Earth-One, distinct from that of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Issues #49-#50 of the series establish that Kamandi's grandfather was the elderly Buddy Blank, hero of the OMAC series, and features a brief return of OMAC's satellite ally, Brother Eye.
The 1975-1977 Hercules Unbound series and OMAC backup stories in Kamandi and Warlord tie OMAC to both the storyline of Hercules Unbound and to the Atomic Knights, indicating that the Great Disaster was the atomic war of 1986 that precipitated the events of the latter. DC Comics Presents #57 (May 1983) indicates that the events of the Atomic Knights stories were a fantasy in the mind of Gardner Grayle, but DC Comics Presents #64 and Crisis on Infinite Earths make clear that both OMAC and Kamandi still existed in an alternate future of Earth-One.
In the wake of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Great Disaster did not occur, and the boy who would have become Kamandi instead became Tommy Tomorrow.
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