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Cartoon: Anticipatory Retaliation [1]

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Date: 2023-02-21  

I was just reading a story this morning in which Russian apologists were scolding President Biden for fomenting war by not sitting on his hands and drooling like he’s supposed to. And yeah, that’s been a recurring refrain for nearly a year now: that Russia was forced — FORCED, I say! — to enter the illegally-held Russian territory of Ukraine in order to protect themselves from the Enemies of Virtue. Did I mention they were FORCED?

Nothing new about this claim, but this morning I realized that not only had I heard it before, I had predicted it! I had used the theory in a comic of mine back in 2014, and called it Anticipatory Retaliation.

Okay, a little backstory. The webcomic is a Pulp-Era adventure series set in the Futuristic World of 1935. In this world, Charles Lindbergh was the First Man on the Moon and rocket travel between Earth and LEO is, if not common, at least not uncommon. My heroine, plucky girl reporter Ginger DuPree, has discovered that a planned expedition to Mars is being sabotaged, and learns that Cat-Men from the Planet Mars are behind it. (My Martian Cat-Men are shout outs to the Martian Tiger Men from the old Buck Rogers comic strip). Ginger is captured by the Cat-Men and taken to Mars.

On the way to Mars, Ginger has a conversation with Admiral Coeurl, the commander of the Martian Invasion fleet, and asks why the Cat-Men want to invade the Earth. “What did we ever do to you?” Ginger asks.

“Nothing, yet!” Coeurl replies. He tells Ginger that they have been observing the Earth for centuries and knows human to be an aggressive war-like breed. He also notes that the Earthlings had invented powered flight only a generation before and had already developed rockets to the Moon. “Our experts didn’t expect you to do that until at least 1969 by your reckoning!” He goes on to explain that as long as Earthlings remained confined to their own planet, they posed no threat; but now that they were about to send rockets to Mars, the Cat-Men had to launch a pre-emptive strike. “Anticipatory Retaliation.”

In the end it turns out that the Cat-Men are being manipulated by an Eldritch Abomination from a previous era who is solely interested in its own survival and is perfectly happy to wipe out the populations of both planets to do so. But that, of course is sheer fiction and could never happen in real life. And Ginger is able to broker a peace with Mars by introducing the Martian Emperor to ice cream, something which, alas, is also unlikely to happen.



Cat-Men From MARS!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/21/2154171/-Cartoon-Anticipatory-Retaliation

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