Today we answer the question, "How come everybody in your comic is speaking English?" The answer is that apparently they aren't speaking English at all.

A deeper question is, "If everyone in the world spoke the same united Language, wouldn't history have unfolded quite a bit differently?" The answer to that question is yes. History would in almost all probability be quite a bit different. Of course, the chance exists that a timeline akin to what we present in the comic could have arisen even if Noam Chomsky had the means and motive to travel back to the earliest civilizations and preserve/enforce a common Language.

It is that chance we ruthlessly exploit in our mission to craft the finest jokes about our actual history and dead puppies.

Now go bug Harry Turtledove or something.

Again, script by Geoff, art by Holland Smith. Leaving me to talk about a monastery that won a war...

Preobrazhenskoe has a rather interesting history. The site of a famous monastery, the youthful Peter chose it as the location for his retreat from the tedious duties of court life. Soon, he built an entire community there of young people devoted entirely to him and formed a small army out of them.

It was to Preobrazhenskoe that Peter fled when he feared that Sophia had roused the streltsy to murder him and from which, ultimately, he staged his comeback. His Preobrzhenskoe regiments ultimately went on to become the nucleus of his modernized Western-style army that would go on to win him the Great Northern War.

So, sometimes ditching's not so bad....

- Count Dolby von Luckner