Kamandi gets the sad walking-away cover here ala Amazing Spider-Man #50, but doesn't have enough costume to leave in a garbage can. From 1974, Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth #20, "The Electric Chair!" Written, drawn, and edited by Jack Kirby; inks by D. Bruce Berry.
Pursued by gorillas--including the unfortunately named Sgt. Ugash--Kamandi finds refuge in Chicago, which appears to have been spared the ravages of the Great Disaster and still has talking, intelligent humans! That are living a pastiche of 1920's gangster life, but still. Kamandi had managed to convince the gangsters that they needed to fight off the gorillas just like they would any rival gang; but when a gangster gets his face smashed, he's revealed to be a robot, who still legs it out of there when the cops show up. Kamandi and Ugash are taken in--with possibly a smidgen of excessive force on Ugash.
Kamandi and Ugash end up in the pokey, with another mobster-robot; which Ugash promptly smashes before breaking out. The gorilla was both out of his element, and sick of listening to Kamandi; but the pair wander the station, filled with immobile people, until they get to the courtroom and things start up again. Ugash plans on tearing them all apart, while Kamandi realizes the numbers were against him.
Ugash is dragged to the electric chair and strapped in, perhaps not initially realizing its purpose; and Kamandi is too kind-hearted to let the mean ape just fry. He signals Ugash's gorillas, and the ensuing shoot-out seems to bring in everybody in Chicago.
Ducking into a service door, Kamandi finds his way to the inner workings of the city, and massive banks of computers. I do like the Kirby bombast of "Now for the fantastic, hope-destroying TRUTH!" He yells out, for whoever was in charge to show themselves, but the place was only run by computers, who show him the door. He comes out of a theme-park, "Chicago-Land, the Fully Automated Living Museum," but barely notices, as he was alone again. Aw!
The computers in this one are maybe locked into their programming, but at least aren't actively unhelpful. Meanwhile, I just tried searching "Jack Kirby mobsters" and got a bunch of results for Kirby monsters. Admittedly, he's better known for those, but that wasn't the question! He had also done In the Days of the Mob in '71 and the Skrull gangster-planet in Fantastic Four #91 in '69!
3 comments:
Mr. Morbid
said...
I wonder if Kirby didn’t take a little inspiration from various episodes of the Twilight Zone &/or The Outer Limits, where giant computers are revealed to run civilization. This definitely would’ve been an interesting albeit VERY depressing way to end the series if Kirby wanted to.
Very likely- most of Kirby’s non-New Gods books from this time borrowed from some sort of media. The Demon used a lot of Universal monsters and OMAC had concepts from a bunch of Philip K. Dick stories, for example.
I believe the theme park here wasn’t even located close to the real Chicago- Kamandi was in Virginia or somewhere around there an issue or two before, and was in the Atlantic Ocean an issue or two later. Certainly not the first time or the last that he pulled the society of robots bit though.
3 comments:
I wonder if Kirby didn’t take a little inspiration from various episodes of the Twilight Zone &/or The Outer Limits, where giant computers are revealed to run civilization.
This definitely would’ve been an interesting albeit VERY depressing way to end the series if Kirby wanted to.
Very likely- most of Kirby’s non-New Gods books from this time borrowed from some sort of media. The Demon used a lot of Universal monsters and OMAC had concepts from a bunch of Philip K. Dick stories, for example.
I believe the theme park here wasn’t even located close to the real Chicago- Kamandi was in Virginia or somewhere around there an issue or two before, and was in the Atlantic Ocean an issue or two later. Certainly not the first time or the last that he pulled the society of robots bit though.
Certainly, yeah. He definitely had a way of reimagining or putting his own spin on said influences
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