Later than I’d hoped, but here we are once again. Couldn’t be helped this week, honestly, but I’ll spare everyone the boring excuses and just limit myself to “Thanks, everyone, once again for being so patient!”
And thanks also for the comments last week. Two in particular I wanted to draw attention to. First, a comment that the sensibility of this story is sort of like that of the 1950’s; my response: exactly so! These people really have no idea what they’re getting themselves into, mostly. Except Major Rucker and Major Bronniford, perhaps. There was a time in the 1950’s when people considered atom bombs just another kind of conventional weapon, but with a bigger bang. In the 6-Commando world, they are just as recent an invention, and the level of naiveté about them is the same. That’s something I have been trying to get across and I’m glad it’s coming through.
And second, from the comic’s sometime Russian interpreter Hilvon, noting that, in this case, the UN is really acting as the aggressor, even though the FSR is, perhaps, the instigator. That, too, was dead on. And it encouraged me to push that farther, turning what was originally a squadron of bombers into a huge air flotilla on this page, increasing the sense that this is all a major overreaction, and amplifying how out of control things have gotten: the South Africans, and most of the other atomic powers, one can imagine, are throwing everything they’ve got at their enemies, in hopes of decapitating them, catching their forces on the ground, or any of the other rationalizations one might use to launch this kind of major counteroffensive. But Captain Dacosta, cutting through the crap, pretty much has it right: that’s it. It’s too late to stop it now. So what comes next is anybody’s guess.
I really like this page’s emotional tone – I think it strikes the right balance for me, with Major Rucker, being the seasoned but soft-hearted type, kind of having his momentary freak-out, and his second-in-command having to get him together. It’s not typically what I would have expected in this kind of story (the officers in war movies always take charge and harden up under stress, but not so Major Rucker). It followed from his character and worked out pretty well.
So at any rate, there’s the next one. Moving forward, I’m making a major effort to get back on a clear track this week. So until then, be well everyone!
The first three panels are good. 🙂 Also I saw a good work of characters in “cold-blooded” sic, taking the idea of inevitable looses better than “romantic” Major. 🙂
The last panel thoug… Just like the first vesrion of the “Yankee- Hotel-Bravo” page. It makes me wounder what the power-armored guys are doing? If they see enemies closing in, why do they not cover the officers, or at lest do not warn them? If it is anything else – why all the point-ant-run?
Maybe so. For now I think it serves my purposes though. After all the recent rigmarole on the subject, I hate to say “I’ll come back to it,” but, well, nothing’s ever really “DONE,” just at a convenient stopping point.
I appreciate the critique, though!
–M
I half expected someone to exchange money in a bet in the background in the second panel. XD
Any whoo, I’m sensing a view change to either our Damsel in Distress, or Mike the radioactive Knight in Shining Armor…
Ha! I wonder what the money’d be worth after the air force is done with its work here?
–M
So, it’s a conventional counterstrike, then?
I envisioned it as kind of both, actually – some are conventionally armed, to hit anti-aircraft sites and such, and some are carrying atomic payloads to do the real job once they get through. But really that’s a justification for showing a huge air flotilla, which was more dramatic than just one or two planes going over.
–M
Lets just hope that a world that never went through WW2 never accepted the idea of bombardment of population centers as an acceptable target.
Well, unfortunately, if you look at how World War I was fought, it was pretty well accepted that if your town was in the way, it’d get bulldozed with artillery. World War II just put the artillery in the air. And as the Tokyo Firebombing and the Dresden Attack showed, conventional bombs can do as much, if not more damage than nuclear arms – it’s just that nuclear weapons do it much more efficiently, and all at once. And linger, afterwards.
–M
@asdfsdf: Please catch up. This is possibly the start of their WW2 It is 40 or so years later than ours. No Pearl Harbor. This is touched off with a nuke in Africa instead of ended by two in Japan. Despite all of the political problems here they managed to get the UN started which didn’t here happen until well after WW2.
I think he’s caught up – he seems to me just to be saying that, since this world hasn’t yet had their world war two, they haven’t had to face the reality of an atomic war yet, and might still consider using atom bombs on civilian centers an acceptable form of a first strike, in a way most civilized nations in our world (after Hiroshima) would not. Now, granted, we still bombard and carpet-bomb civilian populations with non-nuclear weapons all the time, but that’s another debate.
–M
I…I really don’t understand where that came from, actually. Did I give the impression that I didn’t know the backstory or something?
Misunderstanding, I think. Let’s leave it at that.
–M
It seems to me, that since this world has seen neither the devastation of a conventional bomber strike nor of a nuclear strike on cities, that they will be MORE likely to nuke cities, especially those that are production centers for war materiel. I think in this world it’s going to REALLY suck to live in such cities, ’cause over the course of the now-upcoming war many of them are going to be turned into radioactive craters. Kiss Tokyo, Dresden, Cologne, Paris, Philadelphia, Detriot, etc., goodbye.
And then there’ll be having to deal with millions of irradiated survivor/refugees. This could get VERY bad.
This webcomic should be renamed “6 shits are going down and it’s just the beggining” xD