Dictators are used to having their manliest poses carved into stone statues, or their most avuncular portrait printed on posters. But one Russian artist is bringing authoritarian iconography into the 21st century by drawing Russia’s boss-for-life Vladimir Putin as an ass-kicking character in an online comic book.

Radio Free Europe reports that Russian writer, Sergei Kalenik has created a web comic that casts the Russian prime minister as a judo-chopping “Superputin.” Often portrayed in the west as a comically over-the-top villain, Putin is instead painted as a superhero fighting the twin evils...

More than seven decades later, the words have the same urgency as when they rolled off Marjorie Courtinay-Latimer’s telegraph machine and into history:

MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS = FISH DESCRIBED.

Courtinay-Latimer was the young curator of a natural history museum on South Africa’s east coast. The message came from J.L.B. Smith, an icthyologist to whom she’d turned when, shortly before Christmas in 1938, local fishermen brought her a fish unlike any they’d ever seen.

Caught at a depth of 240 feet, it was five feet long, covered in bony scales and had fins reminiscent of legs....