Octobriana 1976

Robot Stalin’s got a new doomsday bomb. Only the Devil-Woman can stop him before he destroys us all. There are Siberian labor camps, PPP secret orgies, motorcycle gunship train chases—and you’ve never seen a comic book that looks like this one.

Octobriana 1976 is Jim Rugg’s wildly inventive tribute to one of comics’ most bizarre true stories. The character Octobriana was created in the 1960s as an “outlaw Russian superheroine,” allegedly smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West. The story was largely a hoax—but that didn’t stop underground American cartoonists from adopting her as their own. In the real 1970s, artists created their own Octobriana comics as acts of solidarity and countercultural provocation. Rugg’s book imagines what one of those fictional 1976 underground comics might have looked like—and then takes it several steps further into the fluorescent unknown.

Rugg launched the project via a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign in May 2020, promising “the world’s first blacklight comic book” and delivering on every inch of that promise. The 28-page comic is printed with actual fluorescent ink that glows under ultraviolet light, creating a visual experience that Rugg describes as “a cross between ’70s psychedelia and Soviet constructivism.” He also released a “retro color” edition that replicates the look of cheap 1970s newsprint comics—because of course Rugg, the master of vintage pastiche, couldn’t resist giving fans both options.

The story is everything you’d hope for from a comic called Octobriana 1976: Robot Stalin, the Devil-Woman, motorcycle-mounted machine guns, and a visual style that ricochets between Russian propaganda poster art and American underground comix. It’s samizdat gone wild, a Cold War fever dream drawn by a cartoonist who treats every page as a design problem and every genre as a language to be mastered.

Beyond the sheer audacity of printing a comic with glow-in-the-dark ink, Octobriana 1976 represents something deeper in Rugg’s career: his willingness to follow his curiosity down the strangest possible paths. Where most cartoonists settle into a groove, Rugg keeps veering off-road, and this blacklight comic about a fictional Soviet superheroine might be his most deliriously inspired detour yet.

Available in both blacklight and retro color editions from Rugg’s website. Perfect for fans of underground comix, Russian propaganda poster art, David Bowie’s fascination with Octobriana, and anyone who wishes their comic collection glowed in the dark.