What The Hell Did They Do To Her?!
Well, here we are then. Another week, another page, another paycheck… oh, right. But still, I have to say this is pretty all right, pagewise. One thing I realized in drawing this is that, unless you have a heavily stylized way of showing it, like the Japanese and some European comic art styles do, people who are undergoing complex emotional strains are just positively terrible to look at. This is why it makes people uncomfortable to see other people cry – their faces contort in a really horrifying way, when you examine it from an artistic standpoint. Men, in particular, look awful. I struggled with this when drawing Major Rucker in panel 2. But in the end I had to just dive in and do the best I could. A more complicated perspective might have been better, but I think I captured the basic element I was going for. The typical response that one expects from a military strongman like Tom (based largely on the movies and other such cultural stereotypes) is anger and violent resolution. But that’s not what he’s giving us. This is more akin to a nervous breakdown.
So anyway, Joost Haakman repeats his appearance this week (in my badly-estimated cartoonized form). I needed someone to drag Rucker back from the brink, so to speak, so his cameo got extended. Again, apologies for whatever ways in which I may have failed to properly render your noble visage – it’s just a cartoon though. And of course, I might remind everyone that Semmie the Forest Gnome is in print and available for sale for a very modest sum – Joost’s website (here) will direct you to a place of purchase. I urge everyone to pick up a copy – not only does it help support an independent artist like myself, the book is simply first rate.
Anyway, another week down! Crawling, crawling forward! A friend of mine told me this week how he wished I could update more frequently, and I said, as soon as I can draw a paycheck at this, I’ll do it! But until then, be well, and I’ll just see you next week!
Could swear he was a LTC by the rank on the collar, but then again, im not so good on judging rank on an alternate reality future officer though. Don’t think i got enough experience. Yet……
Boy is he gona be ticked when the rad results show up as well. Not bad on the Joost figure btw. Personally, i think he has more life in him than some of the other characters. Just out of curiosity though, what ya gona make his rank be?
Think it’s the hair really.
He’s a major – he’s wearing low-visibility rank pins. It would be gold, if it were his dress uniform, but here it’s black. UNA ranks can get very complicated, by the way – every nation uses its own rank system. The German exiles are the hardest to keep track of, especially those in the Bundesmarine (as they call it in this universe), since they have about three or four different grades of captain. Often they use equivalent titles for uniformity. Major Bronniford, for example, is technically a Commandant (strictly speaking, a Commandant d’Escadrille) in the Quebec National Militia. But everyone calls her a Major.
–M
Medic Haakman, by the way, is a Sergant-Majoor (Chief Petty Officer) in the Koninklijke Marine (The Royal Netherlands Navy). I do not think the real Joost Haakman is a member of his nation’s armed forces, though.
The medical detatchment for 6-Commando is operated jointly by the Royal South African Navy and the the Koninklijke Marine. A large portion of the force was originally drawn from the Royal Canadian Marine Corps, and so a naval medical detatchment was seen as appropriate. Those troops were replaced by Rucker’s armored forces from the United States Cavalry and Santelli’s Armored Infantry from the U.S. Continental Army, but the original medical unit remained in place.
–M
Those handguns have two triggers. How quirky.
Is it just a faithful rendition of the Blade Runner prop gun, or is there an in-universe explanation?
I have a complicated justification for it but really I just think that the design of that prop is really cool so I used the two-trigger design. I think of this as the service version of the Blade Runner gun.
–M
Double barrel pistols anyone?
Seems like a good idea to me =D
You know I was going to try to explain it, but really, I just liked the two trigger design, which comes, as you suggest, from the stock of a double-barreled Steyr-Mannlicher shotgun. It’s hard to say if that’s a legitimate reason, but, there it is.
–M
On the second panel I noticed that everyone’s left eye is shaded slightly red, especially Major Rucker and Joost
It’s a result of the shadow colors I used. I rarely use pure white, because it does not catch color easily in Photoshop schemes. Next time you look in the mirror, look at your eyes in various kinds of light and you’ll notice that they are not actually white but somewhere between pale orange and pink. The way you perceive them varies according to the light you’re in. Here I might have made the shadow just a little too harsh, which is why you are noticing it more than usual.
–M
Yeah, it was too much. Upon further examination, I dialed the reds back a notch. And also de-contorted Rucker’s expression just slightly. Made him a little bit less pathetic. But still pretty pathetic. It’s the little things…
I do appreciate the feedback – these little touchups are sometimes necessary.
–M
Wooooow man, this is so cool! He actually does look like me! It was a bit hard to tell from the previous page, but now there is no denying it. And so big in two panels, I am really honored.
And thanks for recommending Semmie the Forest Gnome.
Oh, think nothing if it! In fact it turned out to be quite useful to have a character ready made, as it were, for this scene. I had always imagined your cameo being in the infirmary – you strike me as a rather more merciful type than the majority of these people in the story.
–M
What did they do to her? You do remember that a nuclear apocalypse just happened, right!?
Dude’s having a breakdown. He’s not thinking clearly at the moment…
Mr. Average, I must applaud your After The End depiction of how things are running here-I don’t think the only other place I’ve seen such a depiction of a mostly functioning military after the nukes flew was in the most recent Terminator movie. Most of us generally expect society to have completely collapsed, and most of humanity to be dead, if not by nuclear explosion then by fallout or starvation or disease or…the fact the humanity in the 6-commando universe not only survived a total nuking, but also have many of their organization intact is remarkable. The main casualties here seem to be those who were too close when the warheads fell.
I hesitate to go into a full explication of my thoughts and feelings on nuclear weapons, and warfare generally, but in brief I think that paradoxically, it is the myth of total instantaneous global destruction that has insulated the world from having to come to grips with the real need for international customs regarding arms control. If something will inevitably shatter civilization, you can relegate it to science fiction and not take sensible precautions for dealing with it on a local, regional, or even international scale, since the myth builds up that nothing can be done, or that the threat is so titanic that the only answer is to take steps no sensible person would think desirable (like a global dictatorship – don’t laugh, people do suggest this kind of thing, quite seriously, for dealing with Climate Change, another issue which gets similarly breathless and overblown treatment). In actual fact, the balance of evidence shows that an atomic or thermonuclear war could leave society and industrial culture substantially intact. But saying this does not diminish the horror that would still be inflicted upon tens and hundreds of millions of war victims and the responsibilities that the survivors would ahve to care for these victims. Whatever the size or scope of a nuclear war, there would be an enormous humanitarian crisis to be dealt with that no country has made any arrangements to alleviate, with the possible exceptions of places like Russia, Britain and the United States, and there only in the barest sense. I have based a lot of 6-Commando on the works of Hermann Kahn. He and other such sober-minded war planners made some very sensible predictions and prescriptions about this problem, and how to deal with it, which I have read extensively, and the result is, I hope, more realistic. Realistic, albeit rather more terrible in the long run, I admit.
–M
I strongly suspect the mentality of the majority of reasonably healthy survivors of a global nuclear war would either be “every man for himself” (if they made their own plans for survival like a bunker and food stocks, etc) or “please god someone help us” if they made no such plans or those plans failed. I also suspect the second group would vastly outnumber the first by orders of magnitude. Could any government deal with possibly millions of survivors, of refugees essentially, who would need the bare essentials to survive? What if there weren’t enough of those essentials to go around?
I’d like to see your comic answer those questions.
At this point it remains to be seen if there -was- a complete nuclear holocaust or only a “limited” Twilight 2000esque (Twilight 2000 was a popular RPG dealing with a post-WWIII scenario in central Europe) nuclear exchange which “only” hit major industrial and military targets.
Only time can tell.
Oh, by the way? You get LARGE points for knowing about Twilight 2000! Here’s one for the U.S.S. City Of Corpus Christi!
–M
I haven’t touched a RPG for at least 12 years, maybe even more. I actually never played Twilight 2000 (safe for the DOS game), but I loved the background at the time.
BTW, on the topic of nuclear WWIII scenarios I recommend checking YouTube for two movie-documentaries (they are available there):
> “THREADS” and “THE WAR GAME” <
Be warned, they are not for the light-hearted and can leave you feeling sort of sick and a little scared for quite some time (at least that's how I felt after watching them both in one day).
Those are both very gripping depictions of total nuclear war, and are very difficult to watch. However, I think that they both contributed to the sense of “It’s all over people, we don’t have a prayer” which was the prevailing attitude throughout the Cold War which has left us so vulnerable to nuclear weapons now that the conflict is over, and I think that the hysteria they prey upon and feed is counterproductive.
One point The War Game DOES make, however, which I have never seen before or since, was to point out the question that, given the enormous suffering a nuclear attack would cause, is it right that the aggrieved party (in this case, Britain) should strike back and cause the same suffering in Russia, simply out of retaliation? Although that is both a political, strategic and military question as well as a moral and ethical one (The War Game sidesteps the more dispassionate military questions in favor of the more personal ones), it does at least present the question from a state of essential human ethics and morality, in that human life is involved, irrespective of political or social ideology. That’s a very had question to grapple with and though I think the film’s implied answer is far too simplistic, and is based on a kind of hysterical approach to nuclear war as being thrust upon Britain by Russians and Americans who don’t care who gets caught in the middle, its essential tendency is one that I support, that war is essentially immoral, and that the extreme human cost makes using nuclear weapons in any way a great moral evil.
Now, whether or not that can sometimes be justified in the face of greater evils is an even deeper question that nobody seems to be interested in pondering; likewise the question of whether something immoral can also be correct, under certain extenuating circumstances. War gets very complicated, morally and ethically, and tendentious movies are very unlikely to provide nuanced approaches to the matter.
–M
“Who gets caught in the middle”.
Since I live in a nation flattened by both sides in a nuclear war scenario without even the chance or option to retaliate I beg to differ. In the earliy 80ties the school I was living next to was equipped with a underground fallout shelter and auxiliary hospital (the school rooms would serve as a ad-hoc medical facility using equipment from the bunker below).
It was a scary thought at the time.
Especially if you considered that any town with a larger medical facility was considered a legitimate target by any side involved in a WWIII nuclear scenario. The town I lived in has a population of about 15000, so even a low-yield warhead would anihilate it totally and probably everyone living there.
It’s not that easy to disimiss most WWIII nuclear scenarios as “hysterical” and “aggrevated” if your own home is on the target list and you can do nothing about it since those people who aim at you are far out of your reach and even your own government can do zip about it…
I think that’s what makes a nuclear war so horrible – people outside your own influence cast decisions over your life and death at random and one can do so little about it to evade the possibility and alomost nothing to survive.
Now here’s a little more food for thought: No nation in the 80ties was equipped or organized to deal with a post-WWIII nuclear scenario. Now consider who linked todays economies and supply infrastructures are and how sensible our modern day technology will react to EMP and nuclear fallouts.
I think todays society would be unable to deal with most major national or global emergencies since we are already to dependet on our infrastructures and our comforts.
The 1980ties Cold War generation was a little different. The grew up with their parents and grandparents being survivors of the destruction of WWII (at least those living in Europe) who had a different mindset and possibly the skills to make it on their own for quite some time (my grandparents had their own “victory garden” till the day they died and always had a generous supply of pickles and preserves in their [locked and fiercly guarded] basement).
I don’t know about you guys, but my fridge and galley holds food for maybe a week (but I’m well prepeared to go looting once the Zombie Apocalypse comes, plus some of my neighbours are kinda fat… lol).
That is a very good point, actually, that the view of nuclear war on Europe is informed by the war experience in a way it isn’t in the United States. That likely accounts for the force, as well as the emotional appeal and impact, of films like Threads. But the thing is that trying to take a rational approach is not the same thing as advocating it, that’s my point. I come down strongly in favor of nuclear disarmament, to the extent that is possible. And whatever you think of the rest of their policies I do support the moves made by Obama and Medvedev in that direction. But to view a nuclear war as simply a force of nature is not supported by the facts. Rather I think it has become like that because of popular belief that nothing could be done about it, a kind of despair about the aftermath of such a conflict being unlivable and hopeless. That may well be a byproduct of Cold War superpower politics, with so many nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Germanies, and Japan getting caught in the middle. But the leftovers of that are a continuous mentality that the world is destined to succumb to some kind of manmade but generally unavoidable calamity, and I do not think that’s so, nor, specifically, would or should it be the case in a nuclear war scenario. Again, that is not the same thing as supporting nuclear war or nuclear arms. In a way it’s worse, because it means that there would be a society left afterwards, one with a heavy burden of responsibility, not only for pure survival, but for alleviating the effects of the war and preventing yet another one. That is what nobody really confronts; in a perverse way, thinking of it in terms of an unavoidable consequence is reassuring, since it lifts the responsibility for behaving in a civilized way from the shoulders of the survivors. It is always left at an “escalation-spasmodic conflict-despair-stone age” scenario. Actually the most realistic (in my view) postnuclear scenario is that presented in Ghost In The Shell, and that could hardly be called utopian. It’s one in which the industrial countries have to cope with threats to the very foundations of their humanity, and individuals have to make difficult decisions about how and on what terms they are going to retain their human ethics and morals. Scenarios in which survival alone is of paramount importance really reduce humans to a kind of animal, and ignore the fact that we incur on ourselves the responsibility to be better than that, and to overcome difficult, even horrifying situations by force of intellect and will. In that sense, it is not so much a sense of whether mankind could retain social order, but whether he would. The former requires no action, the latter does. See the difference? This is getting dangerously close to revealing things about the plot of 6-Commando, but I do want to make clear my thoughts on this.
–M
I see the difference and now I’m even more thrilled on how the story will evolve. 😀
You might also like Arthur C Clarke’s “The Last Command.”
What did ”they” do to her? ”They” only tried to save her life! That’s what ”they” did!