This entry posed an artistic conundrum.

You see, it’s basically two stories. One of Lyudmila’s time in the war, and one of her time in the US, and later reconnection with Eleanor Roosevelt. When I first put the two back-to-back, they didn’t mesh well at all. In one, you had Lyudmila as bloodthirsty killer, in the other, you had a middle-aged woman tearfully reuniting with her old friend. They didn’t even seem to be the same person – the shift was too abrupt. There was information missing on how she went from hellbent on killing Nazis to crying in her bedroom. From an artistic standpoint, to make it a cohesive story, there needed to be a throughline tying it together.

The throughline I chose was loss and recovery. Seeing mentions here and there that she struggled with shell shock, I made that a bigger deal than she ever would have, and played up her relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt larger than the historical documentation supports. That’s not something I did lightly – I am uncomfortable whittling the edges off of strong women, and Lyudmila was a very difficult, hard-edged human being. I tried to preserve that, especially in showing her defying Eleanor Roosevelt’s handler in her apartment. But there is no doubt that this is a softer Lyudmila than likely existed. I wanted to be very upfront about that. The historical Lyudmila Pavlichenko trained snipers instead of convalescing in bed. She forcefully talked of the Nazis raping women and children, and burning her comrades alive. She was no joke. But I hope you’ll allow some artistic interpretation here.

Otherwise, as regards the art, there’s a lot going on with color:

Red here symbolizes the violent death of the body. Note on the last page of her in the war, the blood splatter is placed to make it look like her heart gave out on her.

Dark green represents the slower death of the soul. I tried to make it seem that she was putting on a reaper’s cloak every time she got into her camo gear. (notably, Kitsenko is removing it from her head)

White represents numbness and the passage of time.

Saturated yellows represent hope. This color first shows up on her wedding ring with Kitsenko, and is quite prevalent with Eleanor Roosevelt (although I don’t think Roosevelt historically wore much yellow). I did goof on this slightly though — I was unaware that in Ukrainian (and, I think, broader eastern European?) culture, wedding rings are generally worn on the right hand instead of the left. My bad!



And lastly, to those screaming, why doesn’t she have a movie? Well, she does.

It came out in 2015. The English title is Battle For Sevastopol, and you can find a Russian-language trailer right here . And it’s on Amazon Prime in the US right now!