Red star (Patreon)

Hey team - 

Well, the Covid finally got me! It was pretty mild, thank god, but I have been struggling with exhaustion for the last two weeks: I feel like I've been hit by a truck. It's so tedious.  

Anyway, enough of that - I still got a new comic done for ya!

And this is new for me - a story based on true events! Less room to wheedle out of a cul de sac by just making stuff up! 😂

I actually only came across this version of the Komarov story relatively recently on this podcast. It's a good quick listen, if you’re interested. 

I consequently read Starman, and then also explored what other historians had to say. There was much debate!

I found some of their opinions charmingly hopeful! Some waved around Soviet transcripts of the flight, as if they were worth the paper they were written on (the Soviets doctored everything). 

And one of the primary sources for this version of events comes from the mouth of a man who used to work for the KGB. Another version comes from a CIA man. Both men were trained liars and possibly blowhards. Frankly I was astonished by how much variation there was, and how tricky it was verifying basic facts. 

But this is part of what makes investigating Soviet history so much fun! There’s so much more room for a writer to wedge their stories into!

Having said that, beyond employing some dubious sources, I only inserted a couple of liberties into the story myself: creating an imaginary narrator, who at best, only partially existed (but who helped hang the story together). And putting Komarov’s wife in mission control with Yuri and the narrator at the end. Unlike at NASA, there’s no chance she would have been there, although some sources claim she was phoned up towards the end of the mission. This from old CIA records:

“The guy's wife got on [the phone]. It was pretty awful. Towards the last few minutes, he began falling apart, saying, "I don't want to die, you've got to do something." Then there was just a scream as he died. I guess he was incinerated. The strange thing was that we were all pretty bummed out by the whole thing. In a lot of ways, having the sort of job we did humanises the Russians. You study them so much and listen to them for so many hours that pretty soon you come to feel that you know more about them than about your own people.”

One more horrifying fact - from a 1967 Guardian news story: the mission was so secret that his wife and kids didn’t even know about it… until he was already in space. 

PS the name for this story is taken from a piece of music, which is sometimes inserted into the asteroid sequence of Holst’s The Planets.  

Best

SB