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The Snake Plissken Chronicles
"Snake on a Train"
Escape from New York #6 (BOOM Studios)
Writer: Christopher Sebela
Artist: Diego Barreto
Colorist: Marissa Louise
Letterer: Ed Dukeshire
Cover B: Robert Sammelin
May 2015 |
Snake and the 81st Battalion commandeer the
Trans-Siberian Railway.
Story Summary
As the issue opens, two members of the
81st Battalion attempt to ambush Snake and kill him; he makes
short work of them.
Later, the 81st arrives in
Krasnoyarsk and commandeers the train at the Trans-Siberian
Railway station using futuristic death ray guns invented by
Nikola Tesla. Arriving at their destination farther east in
Siberia, Major King blows up the train to keep the Russians from
recovering it.
The armored man approaches Snake, who has
already figured out he is actually Commissioner Hauk. Hauk
reveals that the former president wasn't happy with him
about allowing Snake to pull the switch with the Hartford Summit
tape and his men tortured him, "Tore me apart." Snake is on
notice that Hauk is out for blood.
CONTINUED IN ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
#7
Notes from the Snake Plissken chronology
This issue opens in the wee hours of
Sunday, November 2, 1997. Page 19 is captioned with "3 days
later, 1400 hours," making it Wednesday, November 5 at the end
of the issue.
Didja Know?
The issues of this series do not have published individual
titles assigned to them. I assigned the title
"Snake on a Train" as a play on the title of the 2006
action film Snakes on a Plane.
Characters appearing in this
issue
Getchell
Beaton
Snake Plissken
Snake's mom (mentioned only)
Murfree
Major King
Sheffer
Addams
Wimberly
Allie (mentioned only)
Jones
(mentioned only)
Renner
(mentioned only)
General Scott (mentioned only)
Bob Hauk
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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Snake Plissken Chronicles Episode Studies