Random Happenstance

I wouldn't guess how we got from 'Great Caesar' to 'Prince Tuftan,' but here we are.

I was looking for a Justice League Adventures issue with Flash visiting the dystopian future of Kamandi, because I was racking my skull to remember the name of Kamandi's tiger friend: Prince Tuftan, son of Great Caesar. (You'll know why I wanted it when I get there.) I didn't find that issue, but I did find my few issues of Kamandi: water-damaged quarter-book rescues. This one's from Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #14, edited, written and drawn by Jack Kirby, inks and letters by Mike Royer.

I'm not a huge fan, since I wasn't aware of Kamandi until years after it had come and gone, and to the best of my knowledge, it never got the reprint push that other Kirby books like New Gods or Mr. Miracle or even the Demon got. But then again, those three books can be used in the DC Universe pretty easily, and the animal-ruled apocalypse of Kamandi is a little tougher to work in. And others have pointed out, postulating that Kamandi's future will come to pass makes Superman (and other heroes) failures for letting it happen.

But in the letters page of one of the issues I have (#42) a writer advises against tying together DC's several sci-fi apocalypse books: Hercules, OMAC, even the New Gods in there somewhere. The weird part is, like I mentioned on a post about Hex, is that even that linking left a couple spare apocalypses floating around in the DC Universe, like the one in Warlord. OK, that one was probably never intended to be part of the DCU, but it ended up rolled in there.

In the same vein, Marvel also had a stable of future dystopia comics in the seventies: Deathlok, Killraven, Guardians of the Galaxy; all of which had ties to the regular Marvel Universe and crossovers, but didn't seem to line up with each other. Marvel also had Planet of the Apes comics, which I've barely even seen; and all of these predate all the Days of Futures Past and everything in X-Men. All of them spin off into their own alternate realities, so instead of one crummy future, there's a number of horrors to look forward to.

What I would like would be an all-apocalypse All-Star Squadron: Deathlok, Hex, Thundarr the Barbarian, Kenshiro of Fist of the North Star, and OMAC; all kicking the begeezus out of the Planet of the Apes and killer cockroaches. Throw in a talking dog, gas shortages, and maybe some radioactive dinosaurs and killer robots and we're in business.

Hey, wasn't there a Caesar in one of the Planet of the Apes movies? Doctor K's 100-Page Super Spectacular just finished Apes Week, a staggeringly in-depth look at the movies, the cartoons, the TV show, the whole Ape phenomenon. Little secret: I saw Beneath the Planet of the Apes as a kid's matinee when I was maybe seven or eight, and after the earth blew up (spoiler warning!) I remember sitting there, all furrow-browed and thinking "I hate those apes." (That's why I hated the Tim Burton one: I wanted the humans to finally kick some ape ass...frankly, I'm not sure what happened in that movie, but that wasn't it.)

This was a lot of off-the-cuff work for trying to remember a talking tiger that's not Talky Tawny. Oh, and while I'm not on the subject, there is no goddamn way, Crisis on Infinite Earths or no Crisis on Infinite Earths, that the kid that would become Kamandi, could instead grow up to be Tommy Tomorrow. Kamandi is cool as hell, Tommy T. is the opposite of cool, and the two couldn't even hypothetically be the same character. Couldn't happen. That would be like Jughead going to Vietnam and coming back the Punisher. Only in reverse, I guess...whatever. It's too damn impossible is my point. I guess he could've become Space Cabbie...