Just a little mini-update here. Some people commented to me that this story’s premise (a monolithic superpower conflict on the Cold War model) was a little bit passé. Interestingly, though, this article came to hand just today, pointing up the fact that New Imperialism isn’t just for Americans anymore. As a North American of some certain Polish ancestry, the prospect of another war in Europe, centered on Poland, kind of makes me sick to my stomach. It calls to mind, however, one of the underlying ideas in this comic, which is that I happen to have grown up in the final years of the Cold War, in which we were most terrified of the Soviet Union and what we believed it might be capable of doing to the West in its death throes. Throughout the 1980’s, in fact, we really did think that the Russians might end up going batshit and just nuking the crap out of Europe and North America, if for no other reason than for the hell of it, to prove that they still could, even as the Soviet Empire collapsed around them. And modern Russia seems to be coming perilously close to the same thing these days. Or at least, it looks like that on this side of the world.
So an East-West conflict really isn’t so far off the mark as it might seem.
