Weekend Reading: Disney, Star Wars, James Bond and MAD

Whoa.

To everyone in the Eastern US affected by Frankenstorm Sandy, my heart goes out to you. Stay safe and I hope normalcy returns as soon as possible. (And don’t forget to vote!)

Show business knew how to take away the game ball from Sandy coverage with the announcement that George Lucas was selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion (with a ‘b’). That’s just mind-boggling.

And with that news came the news that new Star Wars films will be forthcoming with Lucas not involved in their production. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Lucas announced his charitable intentions with the $4 billion. What a week. Marvel and DC will have to stage a double-secret-reboot just to get a little press.

Let’s see what else is going on:

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Kamandi The Last Boy On Earth Omnibus

What do you do if you can't get the comic book license to Planet Of The Apes?

If you're DC publisher Carmine Infantino and the time is the early 1970s, you simply encourage someone to follow an old comic book tradition: create the homage.

Except that Infantino made that request of Jack Kirby and he took – to his credit – only the very basics of that idea (which was a staple of post-apocalyptic sci-fi for decades) and ran wild with it. According to Wikipedia, Kirby took the germ of Infantino's request, mixed it with a couple of pre-POTA projects of his from earlier and the result was Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth.

It debuted in 1972 as part of Kirby's "2nd phase" at DC, after they cancelled all his debut books from the Fourth World series – New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle – and turned Jimmy Olsen back into a red-headed d-bag.

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