Comic Book Mapping: The World of Kamandi

[dewline]

Go have a look:

http://comicbookcartography.posterous.com/the-world-of-kamandi-map-1-jack-kirby

Heck of a piece of work, although I'd be hard-pressed to convert it into something close to Eliot Brown's Marvel Universe Handbook standards!

Comments

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

Nice, although I'd replace the lions and tigers in the northern latitudes of the United States with bears and mountain lions, maybe with some bison in the Great Plains.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I don't pretend to have any clue as to the reasons for Kirby's choice of species for Kamandi's purposes. It would be nice to know.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

I always assumed that the series was just Kirby riffing off of Planet of the Apes, just as Machine Man was a spin-off of his 2001 series and The Eternals was derived from some of the ideas in Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?. Maybe Kirby just didn't want to limit himself to apes.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Probably not, and it certainly helped save the book from being seen as a mere "rip-off" from what little we can see at this point.

To get back to your original point: You're right to wonder at his choice of which species to uplift and which regions he gave them dominance over. Some of those decisions - I don't have the series in full at hand, as I didn't collect DC in those days, so I'm very much ill-informed here - look...how shall I put this? "Stereotyped"?