Don’t tell Mom I’m on Sirius Prime

The seed for this comic was planted almost a year ago when I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and ended up stumbling upon a channel dedicated to Russian military songs. Three videos stood out and inspired the story and imagery of this comic you’re about to read. The first one is Don’t tell Mom I’m in Chechnya, which takes the form of a letter written by a Russian soldier to his sister back home, describing the horrors of the Chechen War. It is actually a reboot of an older song dealing with the Soviet-Afghan war. The second one is Beautiful green eyes by Timur Mutsurayev, which is the type of ballad that one guy with a guitar at every Eastern-European house party would play. The last one is actually a cover of Beautiful green eyes by two Russian army guys recorded on a mobile phone while they were camping in a foggy mountain pass. I highly recommend you play any of these while reading the comic to help set the mood.

The next day, I sat down and hammered out the script. Together with the guys over at Confaya Media, we got to work on some concept art, and soon we got the talented Richard Melics on board to do the inks and colors. We got to see a few promising early sketches before this project got put on the backburner due to everyone got caught up with other projects. And so it lay dormant until a cold sunny day in late February when a certain dictator got high on his own propaganda and decided his people needed some inspiration for the next generation of military ballads. The brave people of Ukraine are certainly giving them what to write home about, becoming the new underdog the whole world roots for. Suddenly, the comic became more relevant than I could have ever imagined.

I gathered the team and we got to work. We are proud to present to you “Don’t tell Mom I’m on Sirius Prime”, which we dedicate to the Ukrainian defenders fighting the good fight and we hope to banish the war to its rightful place, a long time ago in a galaxy far away.

Slava Ukraini!

E.M. Vándor