Stalin’s Russia was a hell of a place to be, particularly if you fell foul of the dictator; probably the nicest thing that could happen to you would be to have your image erased from various photos, so this:

became this:

There’s an interesting article about it over at Wikipedia and I’ve read some other stuff about it over the years.

Why bring this up? Well, I’m mid-way through preparing a mash-up and realised I was doing something similar. While most of the recent ones I’ve done have taken characters from covers and merged them into new scenes, every now and then it’s easier for me to add someone into an existing cover, much like I did at the start.

This is one that won’t get show for months to come, but Stalin came to mind as I was erasing a couple of characters so this:

becomes this:

Now I just have to add a couple of characters into that scene.