Octobriana

Octobriana
Cover of Octobriana and the Russian Underground, published in the UK by Tom Stacey Ltd, 1971
Publication information
Publisher	Tom Stacey Ltd.
First appearance	1971
Created by	Bohumil Konečný, Zdeněk Burian, Petr Sadecký
In-story information
Full name	Unknown, possibly MahariAmazona

Octobriana is a Russian comic superheroine created by Petr Sadecký and based on the artistic works of Bohumil Konečný and Zdeněk Burian. According to the 1971 book Octobriana and the Russian Underground by Petr Sadecký, Octobriana was created in the 1960s by a group of dissident Russian artists calling themselves Progressive Political Pornography (PPP), however, this was a hoax.

As a character embodying Communist ideals, Octobriana was said to be usable by anyone who wanted, rather than being copyrighted by an author or coproration. This made her, in part, the inspiration for the creation of Jenny Everywhere.

In Octobriana and the Russian Underground, Sadecký describes the PPP as a loose group of cells, not only in Russia, but throughout the Soviet Union. This group, Sadecký wrote, started around 1957, after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. At first they called themselves Progressivnaya Politika (Progressive Politics) and tried to go back to the pure principles of the White movement and their Scandinavian roots; the Rus' people. They were descendants of the Vikings.

Later they put together samizdat comics about the superheroine Octobriana, said to embody the principles of the Russian Revolution and battle against both Russian and American oppression. Sadecky provides a history for Octobriana where she is said to be from thousands of years ago, the child of a Viking and a Toltec princes, whose original name was Mahari (which means "divine maiden" in Sanskrit). She was given radiation treatments that made her immortal and reborn as a superhuman in a radioactive volcano. (Her ethnicity has often shifted; the initial Amazona character seems to have been a confused mix of different indigenous backgrounds; Octobriana in Sadecky's book was said to have Mongolian features. Many later portrayals have ignored this and rendered her as white.)