Mtsryry Octobriana 1976

Plot

In 1971, the west learned about Octobriana, the outlaw Russian superhero comic. To show solidarity, underground American cartoonists made their own Octobriana comic book. Robot Stalin's got a new doomsday bomb! Can the Devil-Woman stop him before he destroys us all? Siberian labor camps, PPP secret orgies, motorcycle gunship train chases - this one has it all! Samizdat gone wild, a cross between 70s psychedelia and Soviet constructivism!?! You've never seen a comic book that looks like this!

Octobriana comes from the book Octobriana and the Russian Underground (1971) by Petr Sadecky. It's about a subversive group of artists and writers in Kiev in the 1960s who create a western-style superhero character as an act of dissent. They made outlaw comics called samizdat (publish-it-yourself <-- reminds me of zines in the US or dojinshi in Japan) that starred Octobriana. Sadecky smuggled this material out of the USSR for his book. Since then, Octobriana has appeared in several comic books across many decades and countries. She seemed like a perfect character for American underground comix - a show of solidarity with their Russian countercultural kin.

Of course some of that is not true. It's a great book that reminds me of things like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds and F for Fake, Spinal Tap, or H.P. Lovecraft's mythology (specifically the way other writers are free to use his creations). Here is a Cartoonist Kayfabe video that Ed Piskor and I made about Sadecky's book: