The Count received a picture of Rasputin at APE last Sunday, so I proceeded to work a certain song repeatedly into my nattering.

It is really too bad we spent so much time in Russia recently. Things seem to be pointing to the early twentieth century for Frederick, but we'll have to catch up with Russia's greatest love machine at another time.

--Geoff

I have been spending the snatches of free time not involving catching up on the free sketches requested at APE or teaching students about perfectly inelastic collisions in devouring the first volume of Dylan Meconis's Family Man. If you think of Kate Beaton as the Voltaire of historical webcomics - the master of the vignette that explores and exposes all of the absurdities of an era in a few devastating salvos of genius, then Dylan Meconis is the Stendhal. She lingers over her constructions of the past with beautiful attention to detail, to the nooks of life as it was lived, and people as they related to each other. I love the eye for humanity that enlivens every detail, and makes her worlds graspable yet at the same time tantalizingly elusive - like she knows the secret and is only showing us these glimpses to draw us further into understanding it better. It is funny, it is gorgeous, it rings humanly true, and it shows us things that we are better for having seen and considered. I adore it.

Of course, that leaves the question of what French literary figure of historical webcomics are we?

Well, while puzzling over that, here is another sampling from the APE sketch request queue... this is from a gentleman who wanted to see General Sherman fighting an army of squidmen!

- Count Dolby von Luckner