The magician is Mandrake, and the spaceman is Flash Gordon. They and the Phantom were all property of the same company, King Features Syndicate, and might have been used as part of a package deal.
It’s a common trope to write “Russian” words using backwards Latin letters. Although only two Latin letters: R and N, have similar looking (but not sounding) Cyrillic letters.
The 1925 Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin (voted the greatest film of all time in 1958) was a dramatization of the 1905 mutiny aboard the ship of the same. The ship’s crew rebelled against their officers during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the event is seen as an influence on the Russian Revolution of 1917.
So I think the inclusion of the Potemkin serves as a visual metaphor for the Yellow Submarine:
a) Both are nautical vessels.
b) Both have a revolutionary crew and inspire other revolutionaries - the Potemkin’s crew, in a broader narrative, against the Tsar-era establishment in Russia and The Beatles against the Blue Meanies that have taken over Pepperland.
c) Both crews have egalitarian ideals - socialism for the Potemkin crew, in the broader context, and LOVE for the Yellow Submarine Beatles.
The plot of the movie Yellow Submarine can be seen as an allegory of the Beatles themselves, who were inspiring the '60s, Summer of Love-era, counterculture movement’s dreams of social and cultural revolution against the old establishment.
Right. Flipping letters makes it look like it might be Cyrillic but it’s still readable as English. The actual Cyrillic for “Potemkin” is Потёмкин.
To clarify, I think you mean only two Latin letters look like Cyrillic letters when flipped. Latin letters with similar looking letters in Cyrillic, some of which also sound similar, include A, B, E, S, J, I, K, H, O, P, T, and Y. Five of the eight letters in Potemkin are similar in Latin and Cyrillic.
