So there I was: at a local weekend garage sale the other day where I was rifling through some old boxes of comics. We've all seen them, been there and done that: oblong and nondescript cartons which - if you're lucky - will be full of surprises. In this case, all the comics were a quarter each and I walked out the door with a few gems: Jack Kirby's Omac #1, a handful of well-worn Kamandi's and a few 1st Issue Specials including issue number 5 which boasted a revamped version of Kirby's Manhunter!All great stuff and hey - how can you lose when the books are a quarter a piece?

Kamandi was a fun book. In fact, of all the great stuff Jack produced during his stay at DC, Kamandi was the only one that sustained itself. Think about it: despite Jack's ground-breaking work on the New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle, none of them lasted more than 12-18 issues. Same goes for the Demon. And ditto for The Losers. But with Kamandi, Jack kept plugging along. He was on the title for almost for almost 4 years during which time he wrote and drew issues 1-37 and illustrated issues 38-40 with Gerry Conway during the scripts. Which brings me back to the 25 cent copy of Kamandi #38 that I mentioned earlier.

Way back in the day (and on that particular day I was about 14 years old) I knew something was wrong right off the bat: beginning with issue #34, Jack stopped doing the covers for Kamandi. They were subsequently drawn by Joe Kubert. I've since heard different things: by the time Kamandi #34 was published, Jack was either out the door or close to it and the DC brass at the time decided to cut the ties with Kirby. Now you can say all you want, but there are not two drawing styles more diametrically opposed than Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert. And if my memory serves me correctly, Joe did the covers for the last couple of issues of Omac as well. 

At any rate, as a young whipper-snapper at the time, I can tell you that Kamandi without a Jack Kirby cover made for a decidedly less-exciting book!

But I digress. Kamandi #38, written by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Jack Kirby was not a typical Kirby comic. For one thing there was a lot more comic to read. I kid you not. The average comic book at the time was only 17 pages long. I'm not going to say Jack wrote down to his audience but his stories certainly were not word-heavy either. Gerry, on the other hand, tried to cram in a bit more dialogue and got rid of Jack's famous use of chapter-splash pages. Opting instead to place a chapter-heading on a larger panel. And to be honest, as I'm thumbing through this already thumbed-through issue, Conway could have got rid of those chapter headings altogether.

I'm not going to recap the story of this particular issue. You can find it online. What I will say is that Gerry, to his credit, tried to build on Jack's foundation. And Jack, to his credit, worked solely as an artist, illustrating someone else's script. Something he rarely did during the later stages of his career.

Kamandi soldiered on until  1978 until it fell victim to the infamous DC implosion. And Jack Kirby soldiered on as well, creating a host of other characters and titles of which we'll talk about in the blogs to come!