I am coming off a mightily satisfactory winter celebration - The Countess got me a ridiculously awesome kaiser helmet and, strapping on a pair of aviator goggles and waving about a light saber, I've been having a fine time chasing the kids about the house as Darth Kaiser. Now, there is much to be said about Ms. Carrington, but first...

I have finally had time to sit down and work through my pile of unread comics, and on the top, the first two volumes of Cardboard Angel which, surprise of surprises, happens to be our Webcomic of the Week! It is delightful to me for a number of reasons which I imagine you might share as well. It is a story about a fifteen year old girl who must put up with the presence of the ghost of a Japanese rock guitarist. She needs to help him tie up loose ends on this world, while he obtrusively and occasionally effectively meddles in her life. Teaching at a predominantly Asian school as I do, the characters are wonderfully familiar and true - I have had versions of each of them sitting in my classroom at one time or another, and in a way reading the comic is like revisiting old friends and good times past. You, perhaps, are not a high school teacher at a Predominantly Asian Boarding School, and so for you I would say that the comic is worth a check-out as an example of what happens when adolescent wishes go awry and collide with reality, hurtling everybody about and burning them down to their most resilient core.

Now, Carrington. I like Dora Carrington - even after reading Gretchen Gerzina's biography, which is one of those rare examples of a book that, every time it tries to show its central figure in a positive light, ends up making her look just trifling and awful. There is a wonderful person there, but you have to dig down through the book to get there. I will say, though, that, in the unusually self-obsessed circle that was Bloomsbury, few lingered over their relationship issues at the expense of everything in the outside world to the extent of Carrington. The Woolfs engaged with political and social issues, Strachey poured himself into rebellion against Victorianism's conception of itself, but Carrington's life is primarily centered around various love triangles (and, for one period of time, a love square) and the turmoil they caused, preventing her from devoting as much time to her art as she might have had she not continued to stoke the hopes of various antagonistic suitors simultaneously. The time that she spent writing contradictory things to suitors, bemoaning her situation to other Bloomsbury members, and working out her secret assignations is staggering, and the heartbreak of it is that the few works that we have from her are so charming, and the central story of her life - her time with Strachey - is so profoundly moving, that it is hard to focus on what is in the face of what Might Have Been.

- Count Dolby von Luckner