Over at Comic Book Cartography, we find Jack Kirby’s map of the World of Kamandi. Kamandi tells the story of a the last boy on earth, finding his way in a post-apocalyptic earth where animals have evolved and now rule the planet.
The map describes an incredible future for this planet, a place of insane extremes both in terms of ecology and its inhabitants. It is a planet where central Africa is the “Mad-Hole Country of the Screamers” and Alaska a “Strange Fire Area”. Where New York is now the “Undersea New York Rat Network” and the Pacific Islands plays host to the “Orang-utan Surfing Civilisation”.
This is a post-people vision for earth that moves beyond the current fashion for imagining an idyllic world post-people, where greenery envelopes ruined buildings and flocks of birds are silhouetted against the sunset, to a place where the environment is charged with intense energy on the brink of madness and cataclysm.
I have not read much Kamandi (my introduction to the world was through the excellent serial by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook in DC Comic’s broadsheet experiment, Wednesday Comics last year) so I am unsure as to whether the political geography of the stories reflect the extremes of this map, but I am certainly going to do some further investigation.
In any case, our favourite post-apocalyptic vision in the world of Kamandi as shown on this map has to be Australia which is now known as the “Kanga Rat Murder Society”. THE KANGA RAT MURDER SOCIETY. Which is if nothing else a great name for a band. Or an architecture office.
While Australia has generally had a solid running when it comes to the post-apocalyptic, the Kanga Rat Murder Society seems to presciently point to the specific Australia of Mad Max and Wolf Creek. Lawless, dusty places populated by mutant vermin. A place where although situated on an island, the coast is irrelevant, and the interior ascendant. Where kangarats are not only conceivable but have formed a proto-society based around killing.
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