Gail Simone while artists were Dale Eaglesham, Neal Adams, Amanda Conner, Carlos D'Anda, Ivan Reis, Philip Tan, Dan Jurgens, Steve Rude, Kevin Eastman, Joe Prado, Walter Simonson and Ryan Sook. Fictional character biography In the eponymous series, Kamandi is a teenage boy on a post-apocalyptic Earth which the textual narrative describes as "Earth A.D. (After Disaster)". The Earth has been ravaged by a mysterious calamity called the Great Disaster. The precise nature of the Great Disaster is never revealed in the original series, although it "had something to do with radiation" (in the series' letter column, Jack Kirby and his then-assistant Steve Sherman repeatedly asserted that the Great Disaster was not a nuclear war, a fact confirmed in issue #35). The Disaster wiped out human civilization and a substantial portion of the human population. A few isolated pockets of humanity survived in underground bunkers, while others quickly reverted to pre-technological savagery. Shortly before the Great Disaster, a scientist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Dr. Michael Grant, developed a drug called Cortexin, which stimulated the reasoning abilities of animals. During the Great Disaster, Grant released the experimental animals affected by the drug, and dumped the Cortexin itself into the stream created by a broken water main. In the ensuing days, animals escaping from the National Zoo drank from that stream and became affected by the drug. By Kamandi's time, an unspecified period after the Great Disaster, the effects of Cortexin and the radiation unleashed by the Great Disaster itself had caused a wide variety of animals (most of them are descendants of escaped zoo animals following the disaster) including but not limited to barracudas, bats, cheetahs, coyotes, crocodiles, dogs, gophers, gorillas, kangaroos, leopards, lions, lizards, pumas, rats, sloths, tigers, and wolves, to become bipedal, humanoid, and sentient, possessing the power of speech. Others animals ranging from dolphins, killer whales, and snakes developed sentience, but retained more or less their original size and form. The newly intelligent animal species, equipped with weapons and technology salvaged from the ruins of human civilization, began to struggle for territory. Horses were apparently not affected, and serve as a means of transportation in the technologically impoverished world of Earth A.D. By this time, most surviving humans are acting bestial, with very limited reasoning ability. Most have only the most rudimentary ability to speak, although they can be trained. The precise cause of the loss of