Monday, May 19, 2014

Four-Color Mutant Futures

Looking for some for some good inspiration for a Gamma World or Mutant Future game? You can do a lot worse than comic books. Here are my picks for the best, alphabetized for easy reference:

Atomic Knights
Not as many mutants here as some places, but it's got knights in plate armor riding giant dalmatians.  Read more about them in this previous post.

Cobalt 60
Vaughn Bodē's titular character is out for revenge the man who killed his parents. There are mutants and aliens a plenty.

Kamandi
Everybody knows this one, right? If not, start reading it here.

Killraven
Mutant mayhem after Martians invade earth in a second war of the worlds. And its all been collected!

Hercules Unbound
Mashup Thor and Kamandi and you get this short-lived series. In fact, it ties in to both Kamandi and Atomic Knights.

Hunter
A half-human, hunter fights against mutant-kind ("goblins") on an irradiated future earth. Dark Horse has put it out in a nice collection.

Mighty Samson
In a devastated N'Yark (that seems like the inspiration for future of Thundarr) the mighty Samson fights a lot of improbable mutants. Read more about it in this post I wrote a while back.

6 comments:

The Angry Lurker said...

Good choices and good reads too!

Jay Exonauts said...

The original runs of Mighty Samson (no in archive editions from Dark Horse) are great! I wish the reboot from a few years ago had taken off. The story wasn't nearly as full-on Thundarr as it could have been. It was all about tribes and too lean on the mutated beasties. :(

garrisonjames said...

All very good choices. Kamandi is a great place to start; a Jack Kirby post-apocalyptic world full of talking animals and more...it's great fun. The Hunter series from Eerie is pretty good--I missed the collected from Dark Horse. Might have to get that.

Jay is right on the money about the reboot of Mighty Samson...it could have been a real contender, but got distracted. The classic Gold Key/Dell series is still a lot of crazy fun with all sorts of weird mish-mash monsters that seem right out of Gamma World. Very, very gonzo.

I still wonder why no one has optioned a license to produce a comic series inspired by Bakshi's Wizards...

Brutorz Bill said...

Great titles, I have many of them in my collection.

Jim Shelley said...

It's a shame that Killraven collection is in black and white.

Unknown said...

Just picked up issue #3 of "Planet of vampires" by Atlas. from 1975...Mars astronauts return to earth in the future of 2010 after a nuclear was has happened. Very Planet of the Apes meets Kamandi.