Oh man, were my first impressions of "The Exorcist!" ever wrong!

That's fine.  I'm used to being wrong.  In my muzzy, sleep-deprived state I could have sworn Kamandi runs into a group of talking humans-- the first he's met since losing Flower and ditching Ben Boxer-- but now that I've taken the time to read it all the way through, what he meets are actually some kind of talking monkey and some mute kids.  Now things make a lot more sense.

Anyway, Kamandi #24 (December, 1974) is a breezy little story about a pre-Disaster ESP experiment wreaking havoc in the post-Disaster world just because he's a mean little bastard.  It doesn't involve Satanic possession, though Kirby teases the readers with that possibility early on before settling on the more prosaic explanation of science run amok... again.  Kamandi's shattered world is full of secret bases and laboratories where government-sponsored jerks did jerky things to other jerks it seems.  Not as epic as a Prohibition-era Chicago populated by robots or a war between gorillas and tigers, but it's good to focus on smaller stories every once in a while.  Leave it to Kirby to take something like pop culture's brief fascination with possession and demonic themes and put his own sci-fi spin on the concept while folding it neatly into his Kamandi narrative.

Here's that amazing double-page spread by Kirby and inker D. Bruce Berry.  Enjoy!