DC Showcase Presents The Great Disaster featuring the Atomic Knights

This book represents something of an oddity. It contains stories from horror titles Weird War Tales and House of Secrets as well as Superman, DC Comics Presents and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth and reprints all the Atomic Knights stories (a series which debuted in the early 1960s) and the 1970s short-lived series Hercules Unbound. Jack Kirby's one-shot Atlas is inserted gratuitously - Atlas is a Robert E. Howard-style fantasy character who has nothing to do with the theme of this volume, which is post-apocalypse Earth. We see a lot of disparity here - disparity between stories which have no real connection to one another.

An essay by Paul Levitz appears right at the end, which attempts to bundle all the story threads into the one DC continuity, and the Atomic Knights and Hercules are retconned out of existence in a Superman story from 1983. The loose ends of the DC post-apocalyptic arcs evidently bothered DC, who felt that they had to do something to tie them up.

The Atomic Knights stories stand out. Oddly enough, despite being set in a post-nuclear war America, the world of the Atomic Knights seems utopian, and the Atomic Knights and the survivors of the apocalypse resemble pioneers in the Old West and are imbued with an optimism, a can-do attitude and a faith in positivism and science. I imagine that the values of the Knights reflected those of the book's readers - boys who lead a healthy, outdoorsy existence and read Scientific American.

One could write at great length on the ideology of the Atomic Knights book, but I'll leave that to other hands. Suffice to say, values had changed by the 1970s and 1980s, and the remaining stories (written in that era) in the volume strike me as dark and dystopian.

For Hercules Unbound, Wally Wood does the pencils for most of the run, José Luis García-López the inks - two great artists. Walt Simonson comes on board later and does some pencils, doing as good a job with the Greek gods as with the Norse. The series reminds me of a Marvel title - it's very Marvel-esque, which is a good thing - and the high-quality art work makes it a joy.

In the last story, Superman and Atomic Knights team-up in DC Comics Presents, in a tale which is an anti-nuke polemic. As we know (from Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows, Judge Dredd and other books), the threat of nuclear war loomed large in the comics books of the 1980s. A kid growing up in that time, consuming all that Cold War nuclear-hysteric literature, would have found it all rather frightening. I know I did.

Mark Hootsen, signing off.