Nuke Pop: Popular Culture Images of Nuclear War • Credits

Postholocaust fantasies

Post-Holocaust Fantasies
Comic book cover with boy in raft on water with Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building sinking in the background. Text: Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! Beasts that act like men! Men who act like beasts! A sensational DC Jack Kirby Blockbuster.
Even by the late sixties most science fiction writers had rejected the mutant superpowers theme as absurd; but it was replaced with the ever-popular mutant monster, which already by the seventies had become a cliché.
The nuclear cautionary film series Planet of the Apes had given a special twist to the theme of nuclear mutation which was imitated by popular comic book artist and writer Jack Kirby in his Kamandi series.
Comic: panels shows missile emerging from silo with people gathered around, excited and text: All hail to the warhead!, etc.
which more than one reader pointed out stole directly from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with its warhead-worshiping simians.
Comic panels showing wrecked Statue of Liberty with destroyed city, woman with pack walking with wolf-like dog.
By the way, the wrecked statue of liberty showed up again in this comic
Book cover depicting woman with gun in front of the fallen Statue of Liberty and text, Deathlands by James Axler - Homeward Bound - Adventure and suspense in the midst of the new reality. Survivors in a world gone hideously wrong.
and on the cover of this macho thriller; note the contrast between old and new models of femininity.
Comic cover, Doomsday +1; Two muscle-bound men in futuristic cavemen clothing, and two women with one saying, We four are the only survivors! There's no one else alive!
In the 1974 series, Doomsday Squad, the superheroes, far from being able to prevent the war, emerge only after the holocaust has taken place, by accident, according to the absurd illogic of modern warfare. This series was reissued in the eighties, when the theme of the hero roaming the ruined earth had become firmly established as a convention as stereotyped in its characteristics as the western.
The Ex-Mutants was a series about highly-attractive heroes and heroines who are bred to normality in a world filled with pathetic and dangerous mutants.
The Ex-Mutants was a series about highly-attractive heroes and heroines who are bred to normality in a world filled with pathetic and dangerous mutants.
Occasionally the series tried to treat the threat of nuclear war seriously, as in this story in which another world, like their Earth, plunges over the nuclear brink.
Occasionally the series tried to treat the threat of nuclear war seriously, as in this story in which another world, like their Earth, plunges over the nuclear brink.
Drawing of nuclear mushroom cloud

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