Didja Notice?

 

On page 5, Snake sees a snow leopard in the Siberian forest. Snow leopards do, in fact, exist in parts of Siberia.

 

Snake's portion of the 81st Battalion is assigned to clean-up and provide security on the Trans-Siberian Railway out of Krasnoyarsk. The Trans-Siberian Railway is a real world network of railways that connects Moscow in western Russia to points east, all the way through Siberia to the Sea of Japan, running a length of 5,772 miles; it does pass through Krasnoyarsk.

 

Page 7 reveals that Florida is still fighting against the U.S. even after the separation of the peninsula from the continental U.S. by Snake's rigging of the nuclear bombs across the state's width in "Don't Let a Snake into the House".

 

On pages 10-11, Snake's unit faces Russian exotroops, giant robotic walkers (similar-looking to the power-loaders seen in the 1986 film Aliens) piloted by men cybernetically wired into each cab. The exotroop robots are said to be old U.S. tech from the 1970s that was dropped because it kept crippling the pilots...so they sold the plans to Russia instead. This implies that the history of Snake's Earth is quite a bit different from ours at least as far back as the 1970s.

 

On page 12, Snake's unit approaches the railway station in Krasnoyarsk. The art is based on the actual station in that city.
Railway station in this issue	Krasnoyarsk railway station (photo by E.doroganich on Wikipedia)

 

In panel 3 of page 12, a soldier appears to have a pack of Marlboro cigarettes (based on the design) tucked under the strap of his helmet.

 

On page 12, Wimberly says "holy moley". The slightly different spelling, "Holy Moly" was first used by the super-hero character Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics #2, February 1940.

 

On page 13, Major King tells her people that the futuristic guns they're now armed with were invented by Tesla. This is a reference to Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), a Serbian-American electrical engineer and physicist. Late in his life, he claimed to have invented a particle beam weapon which the press dubbed a "death ray".

 

On page 16, one of the U.S. soldiers says, "Do svidaniya," as he pushes a Russian soldier off the train. Do svidaniya is Russian for "goodbye" or "until we meet again".

 

On page 17, one of the female U.S. soldiers toasts to Snake and says that he must have made his bones in Siberia. He corrects her and says it was Leningrad, "Siberia came after." The phrase "make your bones" is sometimes used to mean "learning to kill"; it originated with the American Mafia.

 

On page 18, the armored man tells Snake that his unit his a Special Forces unit called Texas Thunder. This is the unit Hauk told Snake he was in during their first meeting in Escape from New York.

 

On page 21, Major King tells her battalion their real mission is to free American POWs at a Gulag called Trakhanov. POW is shorthand for Prisoner of War. The Gulag was the Russian government agency that administered the forced labor camps of the Soviet Union from the 1930s through early 1960s; the term "Gulag" is often used for the camps themselves when discussed by the Western world. Trakhanov appears to be a fictitious Gulag.

 

Page 22 reveals that the armored man is actually Hauk, the former police commissioner who sent Snake into New York in Escape from New York. He says that the former president wasn't happy with him about allowing Snake to pull the switch with the tape and his men tortured Hauk, virtually tearing him apart.

 

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