Comics Rainbow - Cavemen

Edited by Robert Beach 

As I write this, the Internet is awash in videos and praise for the most recent installment of the Far Cry franchise: Far Cry Primal.  Eschewing the contemporary setting of the series thus far, Far Cry Primal is a prehistoric adventure game dropping you right in the heart of my favorite under-appreciated genre: caveman fantasy. 

This recent caveman revival has given me cause to look over the role of caveman fiction in the realm of comics. Turns out, cavemen in the main two comic companies are weirdly represented minority spread across major roles, forgotten classics, bizarre experiments, and fondly remembered cult hits. Today, we honor them. 

Strap in because we’re about to get weird. Our story starts in 2002 when Bill Jemas, then editor of Marvel, bet beloved author Peter David he could produce a comic that would outsell David’s struggling Captain Marvel series. The result was Marville, one of the worst comics ever produced by any studio in history. The book started as an unfunny and mean-spirited parody comic before morphing into a meditation on God, evolution, the origin of man, and the nature of our place in the cosmos. It was absolutely terrible.  

However, it also contributed the most beautifully idiotic origin for Wolverine that Marvel has ever thrown out: he was the first human ever. Aside from being false on the basic point that Wolverine is a mutant not a human, the revelation Wolverine is the origin of species speaks to the laughable ineptitude of Marville as a serious work. Honest to God, Wolverine, progenitor of man, was intended as a serious and meaningful discussion of man’s purpose and direction in life and the need for violence. It was terribly executed and thunderingly moronic, but it was meant to be taken seriously.  

The rest of the Marvel universe turned its back on this bit of insanity almost immediately, which is impressive given stuff like Wolverine being an evolved wolf, or the idea of him and Sabertooth as long-lost brothers were at least embraced for a limited time. So whatever else you might say about Cave Wolverine, it’s at least the worst origin yet applied to the character.

Another weird one, but hey, it’s Grant Morrison; weirdness is his stock and trade, and there was no way he wasn’t making it onto this list. Aurakles comes from Morrison’s bizarre and belabored experiment Seven Soldiers, an attempt to tell a massive saga across 7 individual miniseries that would afford the situation the gravitas and scope it was due. Aurakles popped up sporadically during the run as a reworking of a one-off character from the Silver Age known as the Oracle (a DC universe equivalent of the Watcher from Marvel Comics). In Seven Soldiers, Aurakles was a being created by the New Gods, a race of living alien ideas, to be a caveman superhero and stand against an invasion of deadly humans from the distant future. 

It’s a crazy concept to be sure, but I like crazy, especially when it’s inflected with a passion for the weird and abandoned ephemera of DC’s Silver Age like this. Aurakles never really did all that much during the actual Seven Soldiers saga. His basic conception was a great idea and a unique point in DC history that helped add to the mythicness of the New Gods and worked as a reimagining of the Oracle from the original Seven Soldiers of Victory. Additionally, a lot of his dialogue serves as some of the most evocative and memorable Morrison has penned. 

Vandal Savage is one of the most fundamental and reoccurring villains of the DC Universe. Once an ordinary caveman till he was exposed to the radiations of a strange meteor and gained immortality, he’s since gone on to threaten the JLA and the universe on multiple occasions. He also starred as the main villain in one of the first Flash cross-universe team-ups of all time. All that being said, boy is he a non-entity as a villain. 

Savage’s place as an eternal caveman is actually his greatest undoing. The thinking is because he’s been around forever, he’s had all the time in the world to prepare to take over humanity. What it really means is he’s spent ALL of human history failing at his one primary goal. Even times before there was a Superman or a Green Lantern to stop him, Vandal Savage was still failing to take over the world. For a deadly, world-conquering immortal, that’s a big hang-up to get brought down on. It’d be like if the Joker was the deadliest criminal in Gotham, but he never once killed anyone. 

It also doesn’t help that Vandal’s daughter, Scandal Savage, is a much more fun and engaging character, thanks predominately to the work of Gail Simone in Secret Six. None of this is to say Vandal Savage can’t be interesting as we’ve seen on Legends of Tomorrow. With the right personification, he can be a unique and memorable presence, which rarely happens in the comics. 

Tor relates back to one of my favorite periods in comic history: the ‘70s. As part of an effort to diversify their stable of characters in reaction to the aging reader base and increased competition from Marvel, DC spent the ‘70s launching a number of non-superhero titles. Horror comics came back; western comics came back; and, for the first time, they started publishing fantasy books. While some of these fantasy comics were set in mystic lands with sword-wielding heroes, others were grounded in Earth’s ancient past with cavemen, mammoths, dinosaurs, and Neanderthals. This is where Tor comes in.

Tor was a pretty basic caveman hero: a lone warrior armed only with his club and his strength against the various danger of the prehistoric world. He became the vessel for some of the all time best artwork from Joe Kubert, a brilliant artist who stands tall as one of the most talented comic legends of all time. Kubert’s work on Tor was top notch in the ‘70s, yet in 2008, DC brought him back to produce a new 6-issue Tor mini-series that’s absolutely spectacular. 

The 2008 Tor comic is an all-time great from an all-time great, featuring very little writing aside from narrative captions and some of the most dynamic and atmospheric art of Kubert’s career. It’s a completely silent caveman action adventure story. It takes the vision of the Stone Age that’s all at once bright and imaginative as well as moody and deadly. It’s a must read for all true cave fans. 

I don’t know what it is about cave heroes that attract bizarre histories, but Anthro, the first boy on Earth, is another great example of that weird principal. Anthro first appeared in 1968 in Showcase Presents, one of DC’s test kitchen comics for weird ideas and genres apart from the superhero craze that dominated the ‘60s.  He most likely would’ve lived and died in those issue forgotten by history, but then weirdness struck because doesn’t it always? 

In 2008,  Anthro emerged back into our hearts and minds as part of an extensive back-up feature in a Tales of the Unexpected mini-series. The back up, now entitled Doctor Thirteen: Architecture & Mortality, is one of the most surreal stories you’ll ever read. It revolves entirely around what happens to fictional characters when they get excised from continuity. It’s a seriously brilliant existential look at how we perceive reality and face our own mortality as a result of that. Anthro’s presence there is pretty much the only reason comic geeks like me tend to have a soft spot for him now, but it also led to his reintegration into continuity. 

He next appeared as part of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis and has since been more or less re-accepted as canon within the DC universe. I’m not really sure what the future holds for Anthro or if there’s enough to his very limited character (the first Cro-Magnon) to sustain a comic. I’m always very happy when he decides to show up in things. 

It’s probably not a coincidence that there’s a lot of Grant Morrison on this list. I’ve covered this before. In case you missed it: after a particularly nasty invasion from Darkseid, Batman spent nearly a year lost in time which the world assumed he was dead. During this time, Batman stumbled from era to era, usually adopting the garb of the Bat from as he careened through history. The first stop on his temporal tour was prehistoric Earth where he joined with a small band of Anthro’s descendants to stand against a pre-immortality Vandal Savage. It’s a pretty fun story as it does feature Batman wearing the skin of a giant bat creature like a cape and cowl to fight caveman with Stone Age bat gadgets. It’s also kind of lacking in its own way.

Cave Batman is a failing of concept rather than execution. As much as I like the idea of Batman teaming up with cavemen to fight the clan of the blood stone, I’d actually prefer it if we were seeing some kind of permanent cave Batman, like a caveman who had his own full Batman set-up. Batman: Brave and the Bold did something similar to this in one of their episodes, and it was a real stand out seeing Batman realized using only Stone Age technology. That bizarre time swapping was standard practice in the Silver Age, so I’m all for it’s return in modern times. 

I’ve spoken at length about Devil Dinosaur previously, so I won’t make this too long. For the new readers in the audience, here’s the skinny: Devil Dinosaur was a Jack Kirby caveman adventure story that spawned out of Kirby’s departure from DC comics in the late ‘60s and transition back to the universe he forged at Marvel. Kirby’s last days at DC were spent developing a new series called Kamandi about a boy in the apocalypse and loosely modeled on Planet of the Apes. Kamandi proved popular, so once Kirby returned to Marvel, they were keen to one-up DC at their own game. As such, they commissioned a new series from Kirby that was to be “like Kamandi but with a dinosaur,” and thus Devil Dinosaur was born.

Operating in no continuity besides its own, Devil Dinosaur was the story of a red T-rex born of flame that befriends a Cro-Magnon named Moon Boy. Together, the two enjoyed some of the most psychedelic and imaginative caveman stories ever penned fighting dinosaurs, cavemen, and even aliens. This was right when Kirby was getting big into the Ancient Astronauts theory and where it begins entering his work in a tangible way. Since then, Devil Dinosaur has stuck around the margins of the Marvel universe till just last year when he clawed his way back into our hearts with a new contemporary set series Devil Dinosaur & Moon Girl. 

I’m a little hard pressed to explain why I love Kong, the Untamed as much as I do. He’s another product of the DC fantasy boom in the ‘70s like Tor. The only difference is that he came with continuity. That continuity wrinkle is actually a pretty big aspect of why I tend to like Kong as much as I do, aside from the simple fact I love caveman fiction a lot. Like a lot of these caveman heroes, Kong lived in a Stone Age synthesis where humans and dinosaurs co-existed and man harnessed the awesome power of the lizard for his own personal gain. That element puts him ahead of most of these entries as Kong’s world is the only one I can point where humans really were harnessing dinosaurs for labor aside from Devil Dinosaur.

Aside from that wrinkle, Kong was just a fairly clever caveman hero fighting for justice in a savage time. The big twist of his character is that his intelligence is hereditary. What do I mean by that? Well I mean that Kong was actually a direct descendant of Anthro, the first boy on Earth. Like I said, that level of continuity is a big draw for me given how bizarre it is to see that  inter-connectivity in comics of the time. Anthro only really became a known character in the modern age. At the time, he was little more than a one-off hero from Showcase Presents. No different from the Inferior Five, so the fact he’s actually tied to a fellow caveman hero nearly 7 years later is really cool. What’s more, Kong’s adventures in the age of the lizard are pretty fun reading. 

Saved the best for last. Premiering in 1951, King Kull was a transparent rip-off of Vandal Savage (who first appeared in the ‘40s) by then-DC competitor Fawcette Comics. Fawcette was on top of the world because they had the most popular selling superhero of the era: Captain Marvel, an already transparent Superman rip-off. Kull was a prehistoric dictator who uses suspended animation to survive to the modern day and fought Captain Marvel on several occasions. However, DC sued Fawcete over Captain Marvel being too similar to Superman not long after Kull’s inception, and the company gave up publishing superhero books not long after.

Eventually, DC purchased Fawcette and all their characters and, in 1976, they introduced them into the DC universe in Crisis In Eternity. Crisis In Eternity was a three-way crossover with the Justice League, the Justice Society (Justice League's ‘40s progenitors), and Captain Marvel and his fellow Fawcette heroes and the villain: King Kull. The story actually marks a major point in the DC universe as it featured the first clash between Captain Marvel and Superman; the clash came up numerous times since then, and it was all orchestrated by Kull the conqueror caveman.  Today, Kull hasn’t appeared all that often, but he did make it into Batman: The Brave and the Bold where he was played by Star Trek’s Michael Dorn. A fact I included here, so we can end on a very happy note.

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