How did the Soviets really get to space first?

[superboyprime]

But the Colonel is killed during a secret meeting with the Americans, by extraterrestrials.

Comments

[chonaku55]

Squick.

[kamino_neko]

Anyone else jerked out of the story by the fact that it portrays Star City with a decidedly un-Soviet aesthetic? The real Star City is a pretty typical Soviet city... Even adding alien technology, I'd expect something more Soviet.

[mrosa]

Everything about this series has been totally devoid of any factual truth or resemblance to history, I'm not surprised. I'd be pretty astonished if Hickman bothered to read anything beyond wikipages on the characters, the events, etc. It's all just so caricatural.

[silverhammerman]

I don't think that's a bad thing though, here history is really just used as a sort of jumping off point to tell a weirder and more fun story. If this was realistic it would probably just be a bunch of more or less reasonable men sitting around at all times, and that would hardly be as a fun as alternate universe Einsteins and robo-samurai powered by "Buddhist death monks".

[mrstatham]

Yes, but if you're actively going to invoke the people that Hickman is using, who are incredibly distinct personalities, they need to be more than disrespectful caricatures, frankly. And that's one of the big reasons I've been turned off by this series beyond the art; None of the treatments of the characters seem all too respectful.

[icon_uk]

Thank you, I was trying to work out how to phrase a very similar opinion.

[glprime]

Yup yup.

[halloweenjack]

I understand the overall trope that Hickman is going for--history being more like classic science fiction than it actually was--and it's not as if plenty of other people haven't been to that well; Warren Ellis has, several times, and Scott McCloud's Zot! was about someone from a continuity like that traveling to ours. But this mostly just seems like various subtropes grabbed and plopped down at random, and as mrstatham has mentioned, the real-life people get treated pretty crappily in the story; Richard Feynman, for example, who in reality was an incredible and engaging character, comes off as a dick in an earlier chapter.

And I may have mentioned this before, but for art that comes off as a cross between Rick Geary and Frank Quitely, it should be better or at least more interesting than it actually is.

[kamino_neko]

This is kind of exactly the opposite of what he did with the characters, though.

Regardless what you think of how well he handled it, he went for recognizable caricatures of the people involved. Here he's zeerusting up what would be more accurately caricatured as a Brutalist nightmare (not that that's terribly accurate, either, but it's at least a standard caricature of Soviet architecture).

[mrosa]

Regardless what you think of how well he handled it, he went for recognizable caricatures of the people involved.

Yes, I really recognize that deranged and murdering Einstein from the humanist moralist who preached pacifism and tried to prevent the dropping of the Atom Bomb by writing a letter to the president.

Also, when I think of Oppenheimer, the first thing I think of is cannibalism.

And the narcissistic dickish Feynman has everything to do with the easy-going and playful man I've read about from those who knew him in person.

[silverhammerman]

I'm very much looking forward to the second trade for this series, the first was crazy,fun and incredibly fast paced, and fortunately the series looks to be keeping that quality up.
I like the sort of all-in quality that this book has, it's not bound by any pretense of going for historical accuracy, it just uses some colorful historical characters to tell a weird ass sci-fi story. That's sort of admirable, and it's really quite different from anything else on the shelves right now.
I hope we see good universe Einstein back at some point though, I kind of love the idea of him and bad Einstein duking it out.

[mrosa]

Weird ass sci-fi stories is pretty much all there is on shelves these days, actually.

Now a sober, mature story about the Manhattan Project, with characters who have gravitas, like the From Hell to all those crappy horror comics, that would be quite interesting and unique.

[silverhammerman]

True now that I think of it. There are probably a few parallels that could be drawn with Nowhere Men, which I've yet to read, and in general weird ass sci-fi stories are definitely getting more popular nowadays. Saga, Prophet, and even Atomic Robo also come to mind as falling under than label, but I think there's a lot more range and diversity in the realm of weird ass sci-fi than there is in say superhero comics. For example I think that Saga and Manhattan Projects, both weird ass sci-fi books are far more different from each other than say, Superman and Spider-Man, though I'm sure better examples could be offered that could demonstrate the opposite. Weird sci-fi is a pretty broad genre is I guess what I'm saying and it'll be a while for me at least be it starts to get stale.

[outlawpoet]

The idea that the Soviets were dependent on Nazi scientists the way we were is persistent, but mostly without basis. Helmut Grottrup was involved in design studies and relaunching captured German rockets, but had no input in any of the several independent design bureaus that produced working missiles and later space boosters.

Korolev, Glushko, and Chelomei didn't even share primary designs and engineering staff with each other, much less a common reliance on Nazi prisoners.

Weirdly though, many of their scientists were Soviet political prisoners, whose only hope of release was working for the state in science installations controlled by the military.