Episode 75? Yes, seventy-five! And what better way to celebrate than catching up with our old friend, the archetypal Villain In The Shadows With Unstated Motivations?

No blank surface was safe with Archimedes around. Perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time (sorry Isaac), at the age of seventy-five he was pressed into service to device machines for the defense of Syracuse against Roman invasion. He had good fun using huge claws to pick boats up out of the water and drop them but, inevitably, the city was betrayed and the Romans allowed to swarm in.

The story goes that Archimedes was drawing geometric figures in the dirt when a Roman soldier approached him and stepped on his diagram. Archimedes either responded by growling "Don't disturb my circles!" or by refusing to accompany the soldier until he had worked out his geometric problem. Either way, the end result was the Roman soldier killing him where he knelt for daring speak thus to a warrior of Rome. So, panel 4 here is something akin to my tribute to the man as he appears in my imagination, scrawling mathematics into the earth.

- Count Dolby von Luckner

I really wanted to change Mr. Octagon to Dr. Octagon in the final comic, but I decided against it at the last minute.

Earth people, New York and California. Earth people, I was born on Jupiter.

--Geoff