The art is crude—ink lines wobble like a unicycle on gravel—but the anatomy is surprisingly accurate. The creator, credited only as “K. Tsubame,” was allegedly a former circus physiotherapist who fled Soviet Georgia and drew the series in secret. #16L includes a one-page letters column where a child from Ohio writes: “My mom said I shouldn’t try the Corkscrew Cat at home. I tried it anyway. I got stuck for two hours. 5 stars.”

Secret Junior Acrobat Vol. 4 #16L is not a masterpiece. It’s a beautiful, baffling, slightly sticky artifact—proof that sometimes the most flexible stories are the ones that hide in plain sight, bent into shapes no publisher would approve today.

In the story, Mirai has been tied to a tumbling mat by a jealous rival gymnast named Sasha “The Splits” Volkov. Over 14 panels (panels 9–14 require the reader to physically lift the laminate to see the hidden counter-twist), Mirai dislocates her own shoulder on purpose, loops her foot over her head, and frees herself using a rusty nail she’d secreted in her leotard seam.