Welcome to The Multiversity Projections, our monthly column focused on the Image Comics series “The Manhattan Projects” from Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra. Each month, we’ll be taking a look at the most current issue of the series and comparing notes from actual history and the alternate version presented in the book, and trying to use actual historical data to predict where the series is going next. This is a spoiler-heavy column, so if you have not yet read the most current issue of “The Manhattan Projects”, be warned that many major plot points will be discussed.
Also, a note: artist Nick Pitarra has offered up a signed and sketched in copy of “The Manhattan Projects” for one crafty reader who can find his hidden message! Check out the idea in his answer to our question towards the bottom of the post, and if you find an answer, leave it in the comments for us.
The column logo is designed by the incredible Tim Daniel, whose work can be found here.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in either science or World War II history; all of the information I will be using in this column is either easily found on the internet or is purely my opinion.
This month, writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Nick Pitarra join us to talk about their process, as well as the challenges of designing Star City. Plus Pitarra gives us an exclusive piece of concept art!
If you’ve been granted security clearance, read on for your briefing.
Chapter 6: Star City
A sort of companion issue to “Rocket Man,” “Star City” looks at the Soviet corner of the world and, specifically, their space program.
The Golden Key
“Clavis Aurea: the Recorded Feynman” is excerpted three times per issue. The Golden Key (the English translation of the book’s title) deals with those quotes. This month, we only get one quote from Feynman.
“What man can serve two masters? Who would not be torn asunder by titans?”
The roles of master and slave are on full display in this issue, and there is never any doubt who is who.
Star City is an Actual, You Know, City
Star City is an actual place in Moscow, the now home of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. It was sort of a combination Cape Canaveral and Area 51, a science center that was shrouded in secrecy. Pitarra goes into detail about how the real Star City differs from the “Manhattan Projects” version in the “Dispatches From Inside the Projects” section later in the column.
The Players
This issue takes the seed of Soviet activities seen in prior issues and focuses almost exclusively on the comrades in Star City, so we get a few characters that, hopefully, stick around and become part of the tapestry of the series going forward.
Yuri Gagarin
The first man in space, Russia’s favorite son, subject of a pair of Ozma songs, Gagarin is presented as a good soldier – one who can simultaneously achieve great heights and bear bad news. He, and his trusted doing Laika, are both the mascots of the Russians and the team on the field.
The real Ustinov bore a pretty insane likeness to Fringe’s John Noble, but here is presented only as a disembodied brain floating in a containment unit. He comes off looking like a sibling of Daghlian, with his disembodied skull. He is the head of the Russian science program after Korolev was, ahem, eliminated by the aliens in New Mexico last issue. I am sure that Ustinov will be a player going forward, or else the fantastic design work by Pitarra will sadly only be used in this one issue.
Helmutt Gröttrup
Oh, poor Helmutt. I hypothesized back when covering #2 that we’d see our granny glasses-donning scientist again. And we get him here, in a truly tragic tale of escaping one hell to get to another. It is hard to feel sorry for a Nazi, but Helmutt certainly gets our sympathy over, and over again in this issue. In reality, Gröttrup spelled his name with one “t” at the end, and was both a contemporary of von Braun and, eventually, a major piece in the Soviet rocket program.
Continued belowTwo Masters
Helmutt’s masters, first von Braun and then Korolev, and then Ustinov, and then, again, von Braun are one side of the Feynman quote – but the other, the true master, the protagonist of this series is science. And so, it is his devotion to his true master that allows the lesser masters to reign over him. By the end, he is so broken by the human masters, that his devotion to the true master appears to be waning, if still there at all.
Borrowing from All the Right Places
This is, perhaps, Nick Pitarra’s best issue of the series, with some fascinating designs, emotive characters, and some very subtle, fun visual storytelling going on in the background (something Hickman lauded on The Hour Cosmic earlier in the week). But this issue also shows that, when necessary, Pitarra doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to get a visual point across. Exhibit A:
There is clearly a lot of Rocket Red in this design, but why shouldn’t there be? Rocket Red is a classic comics visualization of Soviet Russia, and the design fits like a glove.
One of Pitarra’s many strengths on this book is his ability to incorporate so many well known elements into the visual miasma and wind up with something that still looks and feels like his own work.
Red Turns to Blue
Pitarra is assisted and enhanced by the work of Jordie Bellaire, the third colorist on the series, who has grown into one of the absolute best in the business. In particular, in the two-toned flashback sequences, Bellaire uses red and blue to create visual and metaphoric contrast is breathtaking.
Throughout the series, while not in every usage, blue represents innocence and red evil or, rather red being the more powerful and, usually winning, color. Here, when Helmutt escapes, we see a red Nazi turn into a blue captive in one panel. And without overselling it, the entire tone of Helmutt’s journey has changed.
Where’s Helmutt?
Helmutt’s look, intentional or not, is very similar to the classic children’s character Waldo, or “Where’s Waldo?” fame. Could it be any better that the first line of dialogue we hear about him is: “Where’s Helmutt?” from issue #2?
5 Projections
1. Parallels in #s 2 and 6 – will this be a trend?
In our very first discussion with Hickman, he told us about how the first issue was seen as a prologue in his mind, and how the “real” story begins in issue #2. This issue is a kindred book, flashing back to #2 in two places, as well as having the same basic structure: Nazi scientist is captured and recruited to work for the enemy.
Is this a storytelling technique that will continue into the future? Will #7 focus on the American government the way #3 did? The solicit places next issue in Iceland, at the summit of the Soviets and the Manhattan Projectors – perhaps instead it will be a story of non-geniuses (like Truman in #3) being thrown to the geniuses, and realizing that they have nothing to offer beyond their title and rank?
2. (Jump in the) Timeline
The timeline here is quite interesting to me – on one hand, we should surely be through World War II, but we shouldn’t be anywhere near Sputnik or Gagarin yet. This obviously is a work of fiction, and there isn’t a good reason that I can think of to stick to the timeline set out by reality, but the question I keep coming back to is this: why does everything happen faster?
Is this the result of evil scientists not having the concerns for testing and safety that non-evil scientists do, and therefore, have far less qualms about putting people in danger? This makes sense to me, but let’s really swing for the fences here: what if Oppenheimer is right? What if by digesting all these people, animals and aliens really does make you smarter? What if cannibalism is the best IQ booster there is?
Continued below3.The Oberammergau Passion Play
Oberammergau, where von Braun and Gröttrup were captured, is a city with an interesting past. In the 17th century, the inhabitants of the city made a vow with God, that if they were spared from the Bubonic Plague, they would perform a Passion Play (a play detailing the life of Christ) every ten years. I think being spared from death should, personally, mean you need to be a little more frequent with your thanks than once every two and a half Summer Olympics, but maybe that’s just me.
But what the play represents, more than anything, is that the people there were given a second chance, a new lease on life. And that is what both von Braun and Gröttrup got from their captors.
So this got me thinking – is the secondary theme of this series, besides “Feel Good, Science Bad,” really about getting second chances?
Joseph Oppenheimer was a murdering psychopath who, by assuming the role of his brother, got to be free and participate in some of the most amazing science of all time. FDR kicks the bucket, but gets a second chance as AI. Albrecht Einstein was stuck in a world of poorly functioning science, but was given a second chance to be a genius on a planet where science is more cooperative.
If there are second chances, then the big question becomes this: Can people redeem themselves?
4. The Carrot or the Stick
Korolev mentions to Helmutt the carrot or the stick, meaning proactive and reactive motivation. This is a grossly different situation than what Feynman was offered in issue #5 – the belt or the stick. Is this a comment on Korolev’s (relative) kindness, or Papa Feynman’s (relative) cruelty?
As it turns out, the carrot was Helmutt’s release and the stick, among other things, his Nazi branding. This differs greatly from his conditions under von Braun, which was all von Braun’s stick and no carrot (or, put differently, the carrot was not being killed). Having chosen to embrace the carrot, he was led to the stick by circumstances outside his control.
So, that asks the question – what are the carrots and sticks for the members of the Manhattan Projects? Or, is the lack of such measures what separates the “greatest” minds, which von Braun believes he himself belongs to, and the lesser minds, like our boy Helmutt. Is it the inability to require motivation that makes these men great?
5. The Japanese
The biggest global powers unseen so far are the British and the Japanese. While I’m sure the British have lots of skiffle music and meatpies to offer, I’m most interested in what is going on over in Japan. We got a brief glimpse in issue #1 of the Red Toriis and the robot soldiers that came through the portal, as well as the “Death Buddhists,” and mentions of death by papercuts (basically, my nightmares come to life), but there hasn’t been a real look into their society just yet.
They clearly have teleportation technology, and appear to be insistent of winning to the point of unspeakable cruelty (not to say they are alone in this – A-bombs were dropped on civilians just a few issues ago).
Could the meeting in Iceland between the Soviets and the Americans be about stopping the Japanese? Are the Japanese going to be allies soon? Will the world unite against aliens, or will the infighting continue?
Dispatches From Inside the Projects
Brian: You are a writer with a background in both design and illustration, and this is a series with a ton of new species, inventions, and locales. As a writer, how detailed are you in your scripting as to what all of this should look like? Do you let Nick do what he pleases for the most part, or is there a more strict interpretation you’re hoping he keeps?
Jonathan Hickman: Oh, I mostly let Nick go wild (I say this as if anyone ‘let’s’ Nick do anything).
I’ll give him my ideas of how he should, perhaps, frame a panel, but he’s just as likely to go off in another direction. Which is fantastic, it’s what you’re looking for when it comes to creating something — a collaborator who will push back, and in doing so make the thing you’re making together better.
Continued belowI am a little bit more hands on in regards to character design — he seems to want to draw nothing but jelly-bodied, prune-face people — but, even then, he’s got a pretty strong sense of where he wants to take things (see the electric current generating jellyfish robots from this week’s issue, for example).
So, in summary, it doesn’t really matter if I’m overly descriptive, or very terse, the end result is usually not what I envisioned, but something better.
Brian: In “Star City,” you get the first chance to really tackle architecture and city design for the first time in this series, as well as take on the Soviet version of the Projects, in the sense of being able to tweak what we’ve already seen to make it fit with the Soviet aesthetic. When creating Star City, both the cityscape and the laboratories, what were some of your inspirations? What is your favorite little piece of design in the issue?
Nick Pitarra: Great question!
As far as Star City goes Jonathan wanted to keep it pretty big and bold, more fantastic than the actual Star City (which time period wise was a bunch of flat drab facility type buildings, not actually a city at all). He specifically asked that a rocket ship be in the cityscape. I did my usual hand drawn grid and just plugged in cool shapes I liked, I really tried focusing more on scale, with the tiny figures, kind of a wow moment. I don’t know if I achieved that or not. I know the music in TETRIS has a Russian type theme…oddly enough drawing Star City was really close to playing TETRIS…the way I just plugged in shapes on the perspective grid. Aesthetically its just random shapes with some nods to Russian architecture, I could see Jonathan’s design sense going bananas and him ripping out his hair when seeing that page, “Too Random!!!”. Ha! Luckily we have a star colorist in Jordie Bellaire who makes everything uniform and wonderful.
There’s a funny story behind some of the Russian tech. I’ll usually draw random stuff or things for fun in the backgrounds to keep myself entertained. Sometimes I have to delete them because they make absolutely no sense, but often Jonathan makes it work in a clever way. In this issue I started drawing jellyfish powered soviet robots in the background because of a Manhattan Projects fan (and engineer) I met who studied jellyfish locomotion in college. She’s written papers on their efficiency of movement, the co-author of one of her papers even has a grant to develop military designs for the government based on jelly locomotion. Coincidentally, while I was drawing the issue, news hit about a study comparing jelly fish propulsion and heart pulses (or something like that). So when the script said draw robots in the background, it only made sense to draw them powered by jellyfish! Jellies are brainless and both eat and poop out of their mouth, I think some zinger insults are aligning for when Einstein gets grumpy with the Russians. I can see it now…“Zay are brainless, pooping out zere mouths, just like zere Robots.” (Do it Jonathan!)
Also, first person to find said engineer’s name in this issue will (eventually) get a signed and sketched on comic! Hint…it’s a chick’s name and it’s hidden.
(Brian’s note – leave your guess in the comments, and the first to get the right answer will be contacted so we can get you the sketched/signed comic!)
A Note on Jellyfish
I wouldn’t say it is a bullseye, but I did presuppose the importance of sea creatures, and bam! Nailed it!
Some Fun Photos
Before we depart, here are a couple of fun photos that I found serendipitously online over the past month:
First up, we have Oppenheimer being filmed jumping by the late Philippe Halsman, who took a series of pictures of celebrities jumping, including Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dali.
And lastly, NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans, von Braun and President Kennedy at Cape Canaveral:
Continued below
Final Thoughts
Next issue, either titled “Above and Beyond” or “Brave New World,” if you believe the cover or the solicitation, is a summit of world powers in Iceland. It’ll probably be full of reasonable discussion and modest proposals, right?
If you have any questions, thoughts, or observations, please leave them in the comments below, or email brian@multiversitycomics.com.
You can purchase “The Manhattan Projects” at fine comic book stores everywhere, or digitally here.
See you next month!
