KAMANDI took place after "The Great Disaster", year unspecified, that was supposedly a great natural disaster that destroyed the world, rather than a nuclear war. Without a specified year, Kamandi's post-disaster world is "a few hundred years" in the future. Supposedly Kamandi's grandfather (in issue 1) could have been OMAC.
As for when the Great Disaster itself occurred, that was within a few decades of the 1970's, in the near future of that era. And with issue 35's story, "The Soyuz Survivor" it tells the tape-recorded story of two Russian/Soviet consmonauts aboard a Russian orbiting space ship. The Soyuz-X space ship has clear Soviet markings. In the recorded audio message that Kamandi listens to (from centuries earlier, recorded during the Great Disaster), the two Russians see explosions all over the world that appear to be nuclear war. But since Kirby says it was a great natural disaster, one assumes that when the natural disaster occurred, the nuclear-armed nations thought they were under nuclear attack and added a nuclear exchange to the already occurring disaster.
The importance being, if they were
Soviet cosmonauts, KAMANDI's future already became anachronistic and impossible as of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. But read them to be
Russian cosmonauts, it still remains current and possible in our era or the near future.
I always thought it was cool that with Star Trek (original series) that their future was roughly 300 years ahead of the 1960's. And since over 50 years now have passed since the original series, that future is only 250 years away. If medical breakthroughs happen in our lifetime, such as ending and reversing the aging process, it's conceivable that either our generation or the one after us could possibly live to see the years Star Trek is set, "in roughly the 2260's". Or possibly the nearer future of characters like Zefram Cochrane (who in the "Metamorphosis" episode created the space warp engine, and again appeared in the
Star Trek: First Contact movie,
set in 2063 ).
And the Star trek: Enterprise series set about 100 years prior to the original series, in the 2100's, is a part of the Star Trek early future we might have a chance of seeing.
