Another KAMANDI story, issue 35, "The Soyuz Survivor" where Kamandi is taken into orbit around the Earth and comes in contact with a Soviet astronaut (mutated by radiation into something unhuman) who reveals that the Great Disaster (that Kirby always portrayed up to this point as a great natural upheaval, perhaps a globe-wide earthquake) that in this case the Soviets had orbiting missiles in their space station, and an audio recording of two Rusians cosmonauts aboard the orbiting sattellite, observed the Earth being destroyed from their vantage point in space. And observed in the recording what appeared to be nuclear explosions all over the earth.
It could have been nuclear war, or nuclear missile bases or nuclear power plants blown up by earthquakes. In the recording, one cosmonaut wanted to launch their nukes in what he believed would be a retaliatory nuclear attack, the other thought it would just be more pointless destruction. The recording ends with nuclear shockwaves impacting the Russian satellite, killing one Russian, and mutating the other into the creature Kamandi meets aboard the orbiting satellite.
Kirby tells a very engaging story, but skillfully leaving out details of what happened, which just adds to the mystery, leaving certain aspects to heat the imagination. With one of the best double-page spreads of the series, looking down from orbit at Earth, from the spacecraft Kamandi and his friends came into orbit aboard.
KAMANDI 35, complete story online at:
https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Kamandi-The-Last-Boy-On-Earth/Issue-35?id=89225
