Showcase Presents: The Great Disaster Featuring The Atomic Knights

If you are a fan of the classic Jack Kirby disaster title known as Kamandi, this is the essential collection to read! Collecting stories from numerous titles including Action Comics, DC Comics Presents, Weird War Tales, and Strange Tales among others, you will learn everything that lead up to the Great Disaster and the coming of The Last Boy on Earth!

I started this book in September. Then I came across the section on the Atomic Knights. And I fell in love. These post-apocalyptic heroes who wear medieval knights armor (due to it's radiation resistant properties) just resonated with me. Maybe it was because I saw a little of myself in a pandemic atmosphere in the post-nuclear war struggle of those Knights. I'm not saying surviving COVID-19 is on par with surviving the fallout from World War III. But sometimes we find solace in our trials by experiencing worse fates in our fiction reads.

Anyways, by mid-September, I was not looking forward to saying good-bye to the Knights. That's when I came across the 'Thanksgiving. 1990' 2-parter. Being a lover of holiday comics and considering how few Turkey Day books there are out there, I got to extend my goodbyes for a couple of months. Then the holidays hit and I delayed things again.

Thankfully, I knew that there was at least 1 more Atomic Knights story based on this books cover. With the close of that main story, we are introduced to the Greek hero Hercules. The atomic wars weakened the prison in which Ares had trapped the half-human son of Zeus. Upon his released, Zeus befriends a number of humans and seeks revenge on his captor. With a friendly puppy in the mix, I found myself cheating ahead to make sure of one of my unforgivable comic book reading rules isn't broken- That doggie better not die!

While the pages of Atomic Knights and Hercules stories give insight as to why is it that animals turn into humanistic creatures, why do the humans turn into savages and what started the bombs falling in the first place, the last couple of stories inside offer alternatives. One ending is a trippy Superman team-up with those Atomic Knights. The other is a lengthy essay by Paul Levitz that blames the meddling of that dastardly New God, Darkseid. While I liked the adventure with the Man of Steel, I think Levitz's recount is the gospel truth. 

These stories are very Pre-Crisis; which I must admit, I love. The Greek gods aren't as evil as what happens to the Amazons at their hands in the midst of the George Perez Wonder Woman era. So if you adhere to cancel culture, you might have so difficulty admiring the heroic exploits of Hercules and his godly family in this book. But since all this occurs nearly a decade prior to the publisher's 1986's history change, it didn't happen! 

So relax and enjoy an engaging read about a future to come that never come to be!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.