The Cold War Gets Colder In Image Comics’ New Mystery Series ‘No Man’s Land’

by Tony Thornley

Rising star Szymon Kudrański has created some fascinating and excited new series for Image Comics, and that streak continues with his new murder mystery political thriller No Man’s Land, out in September.

Three months of the year, extreme cold weather creates a land bridge between the United States and Russia. The frigid DImede Islands are one of the most fascinating and geopolitically fraught locations on Earth. It all raises a compelling question: who holds jurisdiction over this frozen passage?

For three months each year, you can walk from the USA to Russia across an ice bridge—a frozen path known as the Ice Curtain. In 1963, when the body of a young woman is discovered on this icy no-man’s land, the already fragile relationship between the superpowers threatens to collapse. With nuclear tensions rising, an FBI agent and a KGB operative must solve the murder—before the ice melts… and war ignites.

Said Kudrański “I contacted multiple Russian and American governmental institutions. None responded. That led to deep research. I read more than a century’s worth of archival newspapers. The Cold War era stood out as the most active period—marked by disappearances, murders, and unsolved cases concentrated around the Diomede Islands and their villages. These events became partly an inspiration for the story.

“What makes this place truly unique is not just its geopolitical significance, but its geographic singularity. It is the only place on Earth where a 21-hour time difference runs directly across an ice bridge—earning the islands the names ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Tomorrow.’

“The ice bridge between the Diomedes is one of those rare zones where legal jurisdiction remains undefined—a real-world Catch-22. This location was screaming for a story. And what could be more mysterious than the discovery of a body lying between the world’s two superpowers and rivals, on an ice bridge that no nation can definitively claim?”