The Great Disaster!

The Great Disaster is the rather stupendous Showcase volume from DC which attempts to gather together the sundry tales which relate the retro-continuity saga of how the Earth fell victim to a rather surprising atomic war in October of 1986 and how human society dealt with that.

The book is divided into discrete sections. The first titled "Pre-Disaster Warnings" contains stories from the back of Weird War Tales concerning the "Emperor of Weehauken" by Sheldon Mayer and Alfredo Alcala, a man who travels from the future to our present day, and a Superman yarn which lays out the potential future as hinted at in pages of Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth by Jack Kirby.

The next section called "The Day After Doomsday" offers up over a dozen tiny vignettes from the back pages of Weird War Tales, The Unexpected, and The House of Mystery which give glimpses of life after society has crumbled. There's a distinct Twilight Zone tone to these brief yarns by Len Wein, Steve Skeates and others. My favorite is a trilogy of stories about the last man and woman on Earth named "Adam and Gertrude", with delightful artwork by Jack Sparling.

The third section is titled "Tales of the Atomic Knights" and reaches back to the masterfully crafted vintage stories from Strange Adventures by John Broome and Murphy Anderson. To my knowledge, all the Atomic Knight stories are here and that alone is worth the price of admission to this book. You'll believe that a profoundly average man dressed in an atomically-altered Medieval suit of armor can ride a gigantic mutated Dalmation across a surprisingly benign atomic wasteland -- you really will.

The next section titled "The Gods Return" begins with Jack Kirby's Atlas one-shot for the debut of 1st Issue Special and then offers up all twelve issues of Hercules Unbound.  The first six issues by Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Wally Wood are lush and vibrant, then the series takes a turn as writer David Michelinie and later Cary Bates finish up the saga with artwork by Walt Simonson under sundry inkers, his own to great effect in the last two issue. It is with these stories that the Atomic Knights return to DC lore, though in ways very surprising.

The penultimate section is titled "More Tales of the Post-Apocalyptic World" and offers up a quartet of stories from the back pages of Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth written by Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, and David Anthony Kraft with artwork by Pablo Marcos and Mike Nasser. These tales feature a young ape named Urgall who teams up with a scheming rat named Otis and comely ape wench called Myra. And that is followed by "The Day After Doomsday" by Robin Snyder and Vic Catan which shows some poor misguided humans with a wild plot to repopulate the Earth. 

The volume closes out with "Alternate Endings" offering a post-Crisis view of the Atomic Knights from the pages of DC Comics Presents when Superman uncovers the "real secret" of the Gardner Grayle. How this one fits into the overall storyline is anyone's guess these days, but it's a snazzy story on its own as written by Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn and drawn by Alex Saviuk and Frank McLaughlin. 

All in all this is a utterly fabulous book,  a truly sprawling collection of disparate stories by some talented writers and artists from the Silver and Bronze Ages of DC. The story of "The Great Disaster" is not all here, there's more revealed in the pages of Kamandi and OMAC and elsewhere, but the thread is here for those who wish to find out more about one of DC's most clever conceits.

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Atomic Days And Knights!

I've at long last read The Great Disaster, the rather stupendous Showcase volume from DC which attempts to gather together the sundry tales which relate the retro-continuity saga of how the Earth fell victim to a rather surprising atomic war in October of 1986 and how human society dealt with that.

The book is divided into discrete sections. The first titled "Pre-Disaster Warnings" contains stories from the back of Weird War Tales concerning the "Emperor of Weehauken" by Sheldon Mayer and Alfredo Alcala, a man who travels from the future to our present day, and a Superman yarn which lays out the potential future as hinted at in pages of Kamandi by Jack Kirby.

The next section called "The Day After Doomsday"  offers up over a dozen tiny vignettes from the back pages of Weird War Tales, The Unexpected, and The House of Mystery which give glimpses of life after society has crumbled. There's a distinct Twilight Zone tone to these brief yarns by Len Wein, Steve Skeates and others. My favorite is a trilogy of stories about the last man and woman on Earth named "Adam and Gertrude", with delightful artwork by Jack Sparling.

The third section is titled "Tales of the Atomic Knights" and reaches back to the masterfully crafted vintage stories from Strange Adventures by John Broome and Murphy Anderson. To my knowledge, all the Atomic Knight stories are here and that alone is worth the price of admission to this book. You'll believe that an profoundly avereage man dressed in an atomically-altered Medieval suit of armor can ride a gigantic mutated Dalamation across a surprisingly benign atomic wasteland -- you really will.

The next section titled "The Gods Return" begins with Jack Kirby's Atlas one-shot and then offers up all twelve issues (not just ten despite the solicitation details) of Hercules Unbound.  The first six issues by Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Wally Wood are lush and vibrant, then the series takes a turn as writer David Michelinie and later Cary Bates finish up the saga with artwork by Walt Simonson under sundry inkers, his own to great effect in the last two issue. It is with these stories that the Atomic Knights return to DC lore, though in ways very surprising.

The penultimate section is titled "More Tales of the Post-Apocalyptic World" and offers up a quartet of stories from the back pages of Kamandi written by Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, and David Anthony Kraft with artwork by Pablo Marcos and Mike Nasser.

The volume closes out with "Alternate Endings", a post-Crisis view of the Atomic Knights from the pages of DC Comics Presents when Superman uncovers the "real secret" of the Gardner Grayle. How this one fits into the overall storyline is anyone's guess these days, but it's a snazzy story on its own.

All in all this is a utterly fabulous book,  a truly sprawling collection of disparate stories by some talented writers and artists from the Silver and Bronze Ages of DC. The story of "The Great Disaster" is not all here, there's more revealed in the pages of Kamandi and OMAC and elsewhere, but the thread is here for those who wish to find out more about one of DC's most clever conceits.

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The Great Disaster Is Almost Upon Us!

Almost as long as I can remember this collection has been discussed on the internets. I found posts from 2007 anticipating its arrival and I personally remember hoping to get a copy of this sprawling volume which features the Atomic Knight stories and the Hercules Unbound stories from DC's Silver and Bronze Ages respectively. Also there seems to be some Kirby in the form of his one-off character Atlas. Now it seems it's almost here, scheduled to drop next month. Here's the full solictiation from DC's own site:

"In these stories, heroes including the Atomic Knights, Kamandi and Hercules must face a post-apocalyptic future brought about by the mysterious “Great Disaster” in the run of Atomic Knights tales from STRANGE ADVENTURES, plus 1ST ISSUE SPECIAL #1, HERCULES UNBOUND #1-10, KAMANDI #43-46, WEIRD WAR TALES #22, 23, 30, 32, 40, 42-44, 46-49, 51-53, 64, 68, 69 and 123, HOUSE OF MYSTERY #318, SUPERMAN #295, HOUSE OF SECRETS #86, 95 and 97, THE UNEXPECTED #215 and 221 and AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS #12."

Much of the material is derived from back up stories in various volumes including Kamandi. The Amazing World of DC Comics material is apparently an article discussing the Great Disaster.

Sadly this arrival might be the harbinger of sad things to come. I've absolutely adored the Essential volumes from Marvel and the Showcase volumes from DC, but with the recent demise of the Essential line (replaced by handsome but more expensive Epic Collections), the fact that DC is pushing this long-delayed collection out might suggest they going to close out their bargain reprint line as well. I hope not, but I fear for the worst.

The "Great Disaster" might well be upon us in more ways than one.

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The Atomic Knights!

October 29, 1986 is the date it all began. The world as we know it ended on that day when World War III erupted suddenly and for twenty days the Earth was wracked by nuclear war. When the war subsided a few human survivors found themselves on a world bereft of vegetable and animal life. Only a few humans remained, and they relied upon caches of preserved food to survive.

You don't remember all that?


Well then you didn't read the Atomic Knights from DC Comics. The world described above is the world of Gardner Grayle, the most average soldier in the U.S. military. Grayle wanders the wasteland of the former United States until chance causes him to meet Douglas Herald a schoolteacher. Soon other survivors were found including Herald's sister Marene. Add in a scientist named Bryndon and twin former soldiers Wayne and Hollis Hobard and you have the six people who would become the Atomic Knights.

By chance Grayle and Herald learn that six suits of medieval armor have been affected by the abundant radiation after the war and are largely impervious to harm. Using this armor the six become the Atomic Knights, and dedicate themselves to protecting the struggling humans who still live in the small town of Durvale.


It's a lush science fiction environment filled with vivid and memorable characters. It was the co-creation of John Broome and Murphy Anderson, both veterans of the DC staff. Buried in the back pages of the comic book Strange Adventures, these two talents created a most memorable series of adventures for the Knights as they explored the world which had changed so completely around them.


The Knights got little hooplah from DC, running just fifteen installments in Strange Adventures and rating only a single cover, they nonetheless are fondly remembered by the fans who discovered them. I personally came across the Kights when their adventures were reprinted in Strange Adventures in the last days of that venerable title's run. I only got hold of a few stories, but they left a mark on me, impressed by the relatively sophisticated story and the elegant and clean Murphy Anderson artwork, I always wanted to read more.

I hoped DC would reprint them in a trade collection. I'd have bought it in a heartbeat. But DC didn't do that. Instead the Atomic Knights were at long last reprinted in DC's slightly upscale hardback series for which they demanded double trade paper prices. I balked for some months, but at long last I yielded to temptation and bought the book.

I don't regret it in the least. The adventures were fun and while light-hearted in character thanks to Anderson's pristine vision of the future world, also offer a quasi-serious glimpse into the nature of society and how it might deal with such an all-consuming calamity.

The Atomic Knight adventures break up into four distinct groups as far as I can see. The story begins with establishing the Knights themselves and the bleak world they inhabit, leading them to explore as far as Los Angeles and New York City where they find men regressed to the state of Neanderthals.

Then the team locates a lush island in the Pacific which they speculate might be Atlantis and that begins four stories dealing with the inhabitants of this island, a group of hostiles displaced in time who want to take over the planet.

After that come a couple of tales featuring non-human antagonists. Aliens from space arrive to harvest special metals which are produced in atomic conflicts, and metal which as it turns out is what the Knights' armor is made of. Then they learn the secret of the war itself when subterranean invaders come to the surface and seek to make the Earth dark so they can overwhelm the human population.

After these more outlandish adventures, the Knights take on more local and exclusively human threats in the shape of a rogue para-military gang called the "Blue Belts" and other things like threat of a witch-craze and roving bands of wild teenagers. These final stories are the most mature and deal with rebuilding the world more than really fighting off exotic threats, though there are some of those too. The giant dalmatians give way to a mere car as far as transportation goes for instance.

Through all of these adventures the Knights have an unyielding loyalty to one another and to the most noble traits of mankind. The story of the Knights is attractive because rare for the era, the stories have memory. What happens in early installments of the series resonate in later chapters. This makes us care more about the Knights themselves, and it makes their struggle seem to occupy real time. Years do pass in the world other Knights as they struggle to rebuild society.

Though it lasted a mere fifteen episodes, after reading the whole series, I can truthfully say the wait was well worth it. The Atomic Knights is a beautiful comic series, filled with just the right blend of hope, wisdom, and entertainment. I highly recommend this volume, even if it does cost too much.

At this link you will find a wonderfully detailed index of the Atomic Knight appearances, including some in Bronze Age DC after their original run.

This link takes you to a message board thread that offers up a bunch of rich entries on the original run of the series, with lots of behind-the-scenes info with ads and letters pages. There are all the original covers too, which as already noted mostly don't feature the Knights.

Here's a gallery of the Atomic Knight splash pages along with their single cover appearance in their original run.
















Here are three covers by Joe Kubert and Anderson for reprints of the Knights in later issues of Strange Adventures.




This gem is a splash page produced for the second part of the origin story which was broken up and ran in two issues. Though credited to Murphy Anderson, I'm certain this is the pencil work of Gil Kane.


Some beautiful art.

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