When talking about this comic with people, the conversation often swings around to "Have you had [historical figure] in the comic yet?" and there are two names who come up more often than any other - Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx. Marx was an interesting fellow - a chronic procrastinator who wasted the better part of two decades writing one 300 page book after another railing against really really minor fellow communists (Karl Vogt, anyone?) by way of putting off writing Capital. He had a blast doing it, but with a gaggle of daughters and an almost absurdly devoted wife to support, it was perhaps not the best use of his time. As a prophet and economist, the jury is still out - so-called Communist revolutions have broken out, but everywhere where he said they oughtn't and nowhere where he said they ought. But he totally called the globalized outsourcing of the industrial workforce a century and a half before it happened, so we'll call it a wash.

More compelling for people interested in history, I think, is his role as the demythologizer of Hegel. Hegel deserves credit for trying to move the study of history beyond a Plutarchian cataloguing of Good and Bad traits of various men in power (to which category this comic readily and shamelessly belongs) and looking at what circumstances allowed those men to wax and wane in the first place. As it happened, Hegel's answer was ridiculously metaphysical - go ahead and grab your Hegel off the shelf and flip open to any page of the Philosophy of History and try and answer what the hell he means by half of the spirits he conjures to explain the course of history - but represented enough of a break for somebody like Marx to come along and craft from it a brand new approach to the study of history. His curiosity about what humans make, and how they make them, and how they perceive themselves in relation to those products, is infectious still. It can be abused, and taken dogmatically can obscure more than it illuminates, but it put a whole separate bucket of issues on the table to be considered when wondering How Humans Got Here, and I'm thankful for that.

- Count Dolby von Luckner