The Kamandi Challenge #5 - "Sub Tropical Thunder"

[laughing_tree]

Reading KAMANDI CHALLENGE 5 makes me wistful for a monthly Bill Willingham series. Nice Ivan Reis art, too! -- Kurt Busiek

Comments

[sarahnewlin]

Wh....what just happened?

[coldfury]

So this is apparently an improvisational challenge... each issue is written and drawn by a different creative team with no coordination between them. Each author tries to dream up a situation that's difficult to get out of and leaves the next team on the hook for figuring a way out.

I wouldn't want every comic written this way... but this is pretty fun for an experimental series like Kamandi.

[penguinzero]

I hadn't heard about that aspect of the series (I've been off DC for a while now), but it's actually not the first time DC has used that concept. Back in the mid-80s, they put out a title called DC Challenge with the same structure -- round-robin creative teams, no coordination, a cliffhanger at the end of each issue. The difference was that they had the whole DC universe to draw on, instead of just the Kamandi mythos, with the exception of whatever characters the current writer and artist were using in their regular books.

I never read it, but apparently it had a lot of fun moments, but didn't hold together very well as a whole. A review of the whole thing cites it as being 'a bit of a crazy mess' but also 'one hell of a fun ride.'

[mastiff]

The art is incredibly beautiful, with dog men and tree ladies and tiger detectives... but what impresses me most is that Kamandi looks like a young teenage boy, not just a small muscular man. The pencils actually reminds me of older Neil Adams work.

[theflames]

I scrolled through this too fast and was pretty shocked at that last panel...