The Wyrm Has Turned by @Thorvald (El Thorvaldo)

My 54th submission to DYOS X.ii. [link]

Kirill Gedeonin is mentioned in the second set of Toyoda Papers and cameos in a couple of earlier comics, but here we see him in his element for the first time. I can't say if he's old school KGB because I haven't yet determined his service record, but suffice to say he gets the job done as quickly and cleanly as possible.

I had fun putting this together, maybe more than I should have. Coruscantis are, as a general rule, rather poor when it comes to prioritizing in life-and-death situations, and will spend as much time talking as they do fighting—sometimes more, and with predictable results. CG-X's challenge is a direct and deliberate call-back to this comic, only now the tables have turned and he's facing a foe just as unscrupulous.

Within the story's broader context, the Korean War was such a half-assed tack-on I'm somewhat surprised @GenMarshall bothered to follow through: details are cloudy but it was supposed to launch back in the early thread, when the Enclave was still a thing. Instead, it takes place once Coruscant is fully mobilized in the Pacific and Hickten is losing ground in Europe. That CG-X's death is so anticlimactic is in some ways fitting: he'd been discarded as a villain of consequence months earlier, and the campaign was never given the same gravitas as Europe or America. In this sense, Kirill is taking out the garbage.

Digging through some old notes, I found an earlier script for the confrontation (that apart from more bluster on CG-X's part isn't much different than here), as well as an old layout for the war's progression in which the Nazi spearhead barely makes it to Seoul. Expediency/forgetfulness spared CG from the ramifications of occupying a country that was 99% independent at war's end, but the intro blurb hints at the global community's growing awareness of Coruscant's geopolitical behavour: desperate to spare itself from being branded an accomplice (and thereby a target for a follow-up campaign), North Korea turns on the Space Nazis as soon as the war goes south—that it's Moscow that negotiates the final strike north of the border is deliberate, since given New Port's track record re. the Pacific War, P'yongyang would have legitimate worry that a Coruscanti-led expedition might not leave once the job was done, just as it didn't in the South. The Union, at least, might be able to rein in its ally's imperial impulses.

[Originally submitted to DeviantArt February 2017.]