Isn’t There Anything More You Can Do?
This week was extraordinarily hectic for me, for no very good reason. It wasn’t so much that I had something big to do, but rather that I had a large number of small things to do instead. And then Saturday rolled around and I ended up spending most of it in a mass transit hellhole because the trains all got fouled up because of construction work, and then the people I was going to meet up with totally flaked out on me, so most of the day was shot for like practically no reason at all, and I got home only to face an almost blank page. But in one of those bizarre situations I can sometimes find myself in, I sat down to draw, and it all just happened right there on the page, in remarkable order and in an amount of time that surprised even me. For an artist like me, these are rare and precious moments, and I actually took enormous pleasure in drawing this page. It all turned out just so, and I could hardly believe it. And as of this week, Colonel Talinina is definitely now in the top ranking of my favorite characters. You have to admit she looks pretty great. She just came out perfectly. She’s ranking up as my alternate-universe girlfriend, here. What I find sexy in comics is just different from the mainstream, I guess.
Anyway, many many HUGE thanks to Hilvon on this one – he is responsible for interpreting the Russian on this page, which, when I sent him my scripts, he managed to work into a really elegant phrasing which I, in my limited capacities, would never have been able to do. This week, I was very tempted to give everyone subtitles. But I’m sticking to my original concept, of a sci-f “A Bridge Too Far,” and leaving the languages as they are. In the print version, I may add an appendix with translations, so as to avoid spoilers for those who don’t want them. But anyway.
Another week, folks. And next week is Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s a holiday that has a strange mythology attached to it now, but actually, if you read up on it, it was started as a celebration to commemorate the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. [I’ve been corrected about this, by the way – the Constitution was ratified in June, 1788, and its connection to the U.S. observation of Thanksgiving is a myth. I’ve also been made aware (amply and by several people) that it is a holiday celebrated throughout the Americas, and not just in the U.S. This I DID know, but I was remiss in mentioning it when I worded my weekly address, here. Ed.] But not being one to buck tradition, I’ll be taking a little time off. I will try to have a page next week, but if not, I’ll have something fun for you anyway, I promise. Either way, have a good holiday (Americans), and to all others, be well and have a great week!
Great page as always. Been reading 6 commando since it first appeared, but the fact that I don’t even remotely know russian makes me sit with character map and google translate for 2 hours getting what’s in the text
I’m hugely thrilled that you like it enough to go to the trouble! 😀
–M
Another page that illustrates the two great myths of nuclear war:
#1. That a nuclear war is winnable
#2. The survivors are the lucky ones
Frankly, I’d say the opposite. The myths are that they’re UNwinnable and therefore unthinkable, and that the survivors would rather lay down and commit suicide. I think that the fact that someone might explode the “unthinkable” theory is the most potent modern nuclear threat; but on the other hand, the resilience of the human survival instinct is what would give hope for a post-nuclear recovery. Just ask Star Trek.
–M
I’m guessing the reason why nuclear wars seem unwinnable is because generally both sides (and if they are big ones like the US / USSR in our universe, the whole world) suffer grave losses by the sheer amount of nukes launched all over the place
and there will most likely be some places which didn’t get hit too bad, but a part of the population of those places will give up, whilst the other part simply tries to live on
Actually there are quite some debatable questions, if humanity will survive a nucklear war.
My opinion is: yes. Humanity as a biological species will survive. But as a civilization – it will be drawn back to Iron age, or even further.
That is because on one hand – none of the militaryes are likely to target purely civilian targets. No matter how desperate they are. (I may be wrong on this point, but I have my faith)
But at the same time Industrial and infrastructure sites are goint go be targeted, so basically only ones surviving are – rural areas.
And if you end up with almost entirely rural population – what are the chances they will posess any knowlage to reproduce some industry at once? Not the long “re-invent_from_scratch” way?
What are the chances they will be able to produce Gasoline? Alloys? Electronics? Medicines?
All they will be able to produce is basic metal and maybe gunpowder. If they have some natural electricity generators (like windtraps, or watermills) they will have electricity as long as they can maintain those generators – several years. Maybe a decade.
On the other hand – If there are some industrial cuontries that remained out of conflict – the drawback for humanity as a whole will not be that dramatic as well…
Lets assume for a secound mankind could survive the nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. One thing will be for sure: The civilizations of the Western world have ceased to exist as a whole. Continental Europe would be a dead wasteland with little to no survivors left – even those who’d make it through the initial exchange would perish in the next one to three winters. Our lifestyle just doesn’t prepare us for such hardship. There’d be nothing left to re-populate and the necessary numbers of man and women to keep a civilization alive would just be too thin to make it a realistic option. The need for genetic diversity AND the effects of radiation on human DNA set would add to this as well.
Northern America would be pretty much the same. In some outback regions in the US and Canada some people might survive to populate a handful of city states, but they’d all struggle to stay alive and probably would degenerate into pre-carbon or even pre-industry civilizations hardly worth noticing.
The civilizations in Southern America and Africa could go on in some extend. They’d take hits, they’d suffer from the fallout and climate change, but they could go on. For Africa only little would change, maybe even for the better since they’d now be free of Western abuse and dominance and would need to take care of themselves. Latin America would probably be cast back 50 to 100 years since a lot of their industries would have to change to provide the essentials for life and civilization. They do have the natural ressources to maintain most modern necessities. Not too worse actually.
Asia. Well… China would be gone as would be Japan. China would probably break down to local nation states and small city states. The eastern part of the Chinese republic would be gone (housing all it’s industry), but the rural west would just go on like nothing happened.
The Pacific nations would be set back just like Latin America and roll back to their once ancient way of life – which is probably the only way of life their islands and natural ressources could sustain.
Life would go on. But the future of mankind would lay in the hands of the “black and bown” man since the “white man” has nuked himself into the stygian hades and would soon be forgotten as the civilizing nightmare he was for most parts of the world.
As powerful as nuclear weapons are, I think that the prevailing fiction of nuclear warfare fails to take into account just how enormous countries are. Laying waste an entire nation the size of the United States or Russia is a vast undertaking, and there’s no reason that the event would necessarily cause the end of machine culture. It would be an extreme catastrophe, don’t get me wrong, and one which would take a VERY long time to recover from, in all countries. But I think the concept of “bombed back to the stone age” is far too simplistic to be true. But the Black Death killed of something approaching a third of the population of Europe, and they were having the Renaissance within fifty years. Very different catastrophes, to be sure, but still of comparable social impact, I’d argue. On the other hand, the Mongols laid waste much of Russia and nearly brought down the eastern Islamic civilizations. That is probably a much more appropriate analogue, that age’s equivalent of a nuclear war in slow motion. And as a result these regions did not really completely recover until the early to mid-17th Century or later.
As to how I think it would turn out, well, that’s kind of a big part of the story, so I don’t want to wreck it for you.
–M
One thing that needs to be remembered is that “nuclear winter” was, in fact, a piece of scientific fraud.
The results that Carl Sagan et. al. – who developed the theory originally – got with their models for nuclear winter proved unreproducable until the models were given
-a perfectly flat, round Earth
-that had no oceans
…and only /then/ did you get a nuclear winter result. All other runs that actually used the real Earth had, at worst, a “nuclear autumn”.
The reasons /why/ the ‘books were cooked’, I leave up to the readers to draw their own personal conclusions.
As for what the real-world results of a nuclear exchange might be? I’d strongly reccomend reading “The Nuclear Game” by Stuart Slade. It’s a three-part essay, written by someone who was In The Know, that explores the whys and reasons of nuclear warfare. The relevant part for “when the balloon goes up”, Part Three, I’ve linked in the “Website URL” frame of the comment box here.
Apologies, but your link code to a forum post was sticking in my spam filter. This does seem like an interesting opposing viewpoint on the subject, though, so I put it through manually. Sorry the link isn’t parsed, though.
–M
Huh, that’s odd. Thanks for parsing it through. 🙂
Let’s see if this works.
www(dot)tboverse(dot)us(slash)HPCAFORUM(slash)phpBB3(slash)viewtopic.php?f=5&t=117
Is the link I was trying to provide.
I think that works okay!
You can’t be too careful these days, you know – all kinds of mishegoyim in the world.
–M
I contest the “no nuclear winter theory”.
In the late 1990ties we witnessed how great the effects of such mundane things as a vulcanic eruption can affect the climate already. The events dsuring those years lowered the global temperature by 2 degrees for several years.
The amount of dust and toxic/radioactive vapors a full scale nuclear war would create are several hundred times worse. It’s probably even saver to assume the nuclear winter will last for severa years, maybe even a decade and only a few months would be enough to terminate all plant live and seriously affect the ecosphere.
As for the size of countries: Yes, it can be taken into consideration. Maybe for the US (which has habitable areas to spare), but Europe is densly populated and the empty regions of Russia are inhabitable already or could not sustain a larger population.
Of course all those discussions are theory and there are many more factors to include. Like:
The effect of EMP on the global economy.
The breakdown of our global economy, infrastructure and communication.
Unattended nuclear plants melting.
Pollution caused by 1st and 2ndary war effects (chemical and biological).
Psychological effects on mankind as a whole.
No big fan of the chaos theory myself, but there are just too many factors included which can’t be evaluated even by a small degree.
Nuclear war is unwinnable (in the sense of reaching tactical and strategic goals) – no.
Nuclear war is survivable – yes.
Should we find out – HELL NO!
Oh, 100% agree on the fact I hope to the heavens we never, ever find out one way or the other!
I did notice you mentioned EMP, though. This is a threat that has been wildly overblown – “Hollywood EMP” is one of those things that Does Not Work That Way.
I refer you again to Stuart Slade’s excellent work; his “Electronic Effects of Nuclear Initiations” demystifies the EMP boogieman. A Google for that title turns up the relevant data as the first result. 🙂
I just viewed your last three posts Mathieu and all I can say is WOW! You’ve really kicked it up a notch. Absolute eye candy!
Thanks, Denny. It’s been a rough few days so it does me good to know people are digging this comic, anyway!
–M
And for those of us that don’t read Russian, is there an English translation of the scripts?
Not at the moment, but maybe I’ll do one later. My original intention was not to translate any languages, one way or the other, as part of the story concept.
–M
>>> And as of this week, Colonel Talinina is definitely now in the top ranking of my favorite characters. You have to admit she looks pretty great. She just came out perfectly. She’s ranking up as my alternate-universe girlfriend, here. What I find sexy in comics is just different from the mainstream, I guess.
Agreed. She’s pretty. And natural. I take it the brunette is the soldier who tried to calm down Sgt. Vassarionov in one of the revamped strips (right after they captured Bronniford)?
Mimiks and facial expressions are excellent >again<. I really like the posture for the wounded soldier on the left. Also those little details, like the ripped strap on his sleeves or the used medical gloves on the ground.
And yes, the whole scene is disturbing and sickening. Mostly because we're uncertain what they are talking about (the "Bridge To Far" approach agrees with me), but also if you consider the situation they're in:
Trapped in their underground shelter, the smoldering atomic badlands above them and no hope of escape or rescue… and maybe even knowing that everyone back home might be dead or in a similar situaton. And since their kill-bots ran away they might have their own AI revolt on their hands?
And to top it off: Imagine the smell down there. Burn victims. Blood soaked bandages. Infected wounds. Puss. Blood. Sweat. Piss. And all that recycled into "fresh" air. Hmmmm… Xp
I'm happy to see the Doctor made it. I kinda expected him not making it, probably gunned down by Mike when the whacko robot liberated Sarah from the FSR's clutches or perished in the attack on the FSR outpost. Since he stood up and pulled rank on that political officer in order to protect Sarah he did deserve to survive. 🙂
Thanks, Ulrich! I wanted to give the FSR bunker a much more limited, desperate kind of look, much more claustrophobic, like they’ve been in there much monger than it was designed for. It adds to the desperation – the UNA has an underground city (practically), while the FSR has no choice but to rub elbows with people who are badly contaminated and wounded. God, the stench in there, just from body odor, must be awful. Originally I put a chemical toilet in the corner behind Col. Talinina, but the perspective didn’t work out so I scratched it in the sketch phase. Just as well.
–M
Just a random observation: People don’t smoke in the 6-Commando universe.
Funny you mention it – in the original draft of the story, Sarah’s co-pilot was a Russian exile, Lieutenant Vissarionov (ha!) who was a chain-smoker. But as I developed the characters, Vissarionov became a more compelling villain in his own right so I separated his character and made his “good side” into Lieutenant Placeman.
But yeah, it’s funny, isn’t it? In other modern Sci Fi like Battlestar Galactica, they’re all practically chimneys, the way they smoke. I always wondered if those greenhouse ships they had were growing tobacco. I guess they kind of HAD to be, the way they smoked. But 6-Commando? Just never seems to come up, somehow.
–M
BSG not so much, but Caprica… and all that drinking!
I was watching a documentary about Helmut Schmidt earlier, who is a notorious and infamous lover of all things tobacco. That’s how I noticed the lack of smoking in 6-Commando.
At least Rucker did some moping and self-pity over a bottle of Jack, so we’re all good on the alcohol-abuse front. ^^
Something slightly off subject about modern fiction and smoking, Tom Hanks recently commented after filming Cloud Atlas that he thought it was funny ‘we are not even allow to smoke anymore (on screen) but there we are (in the movie) smoking pot.’
Nicely done but in movies at least in most cases we get a translation. Where do we get one for this page?
Lack of smoking was so prominent for me in that latest version of “Pearl Harbor” a few years ago. So strange, like a parallel earth with the only thing missing is smoking of any kind. Like tobacco never existed or was illegal.
It’s weird, it’s the little things that get you, sometimes. As I’ve said, it just never really occurred to me.
–M
I take it you don’t smoke?
No, never smoked. Good thing too or I’d be dead by now from my other ailments.
I love this page, the detail is amazing and I applaud you for keeping the dialog Russian. I find my self studying the body language and expressions allot more trying to figure out what is going on, it actually pulls me in even more.
Especially in US movies everything has to be PC and reflecting the most recent trends. Smoking is bad so its ereased from the picture. Pot is becoming legalized and so its ok. Same with drinking. In the 50’s and 60’s all men smoked and drank on screen, used mild language and were often very chauvinistic. Women smoked but only to show their rebelious side, showed very little nudity. Now basically every movie has a naked scene, women are parading in underwear, half naked and on screen sexual moments are common. But smoking is a no no. Its just the times. I’m patiently waiting for them to start promoting eCigarettes in the movies, it will be hallarious.
>>> Especially in US movies everything has to be PC […]
After watching Mad Men for about half a season I’d disagree.
It certainly has become a social taboo, and the use in shows like Mad Men seems to me to be to show how off-the-wall overindulgent and unhealthy they all are, rather than as a sign of coolness or even as just a non-issue, as it used to be. In 6-Commando, I literally just never considered it, and I think a major reason is that smoke is hard for me to draw in color – it’s much easier to do as an “icon” in black and white. Everyone has something, and for me, it’s that (no doubt among many other things). Maybe I should study it more closely.
–M
Actually, Thanksgiving as it is observed today was first marked in Canada. The tradition has nothing at all to do with the “US Constitution” and everything to do with American chest-thumping boosterism. But as someone who has been appallingly anti-Canadian throughout the creation of this haphazard comic, you clearly wouldn’t know anything about that.
Quebec is a Canadian province, and not everything has to be a Tea Party affair. Deal with it.
Good heavens. Ladies and gentlemen, looks like we have a heckler!
On the Constitution, well, fair enough. I’ve actually been corrected on the point several times already (via email), so I gladly withdrew it. Though I hardly understand what exactly has led you to think I’m in any way anti-Canadian, and you seem to be meeting me with quite a bit of anti-Americanism, and are relying on a lot of conventional stereotypes to form your opinions. I mean, the Tea Party? What?
I tend to doubt you’ve actually read the comic, because if you had, you’d know that I made Canada a major global industrial and military superpower in the story, and the leader of the “good guys” here is a Canadian as well. I made him Canadian precisely because wanted to turn stereotypes about Americans and Canadians on their heads, and place Colonel Haulley in the position so frequently occupied by strident, militaristic American archetypes in order to knock the conventions loose about leadership positions and American imperialism. I’m not sure how that makes me anti-Canadian. It’s not in any way tongue-in-cheek or a “swipe” at Canada; quite the opposite. So your remark on that is a bit off the wall, from my perspective. Or if you’re referring to Québec being independent in the story, well, all I can say is, good Lord, man, it’s just a comic book, a work of fiction. I’m not some kind of separatist, I’m a science fiction writer. Dial it back a notch.
Of course, nobody says you have to listen to me, or even read this comic ever again, if you don’t want to. I imagine, from the tone of your comment, that it’s what you already intend. I hope you will persevere, however, and continue to read my comic, haphazard though it may be, because I think it will ultimately belie a lot of preconceptions you and many other people may have about what I supposedly believe about a great many things. But even if you don’t want to have anything more to do with it, I do hope you are at least able to leave with a straight understanding of me, my work and my values. If not, well, then there’s nothing else for it, I suppose.
–M