I think every time I draw the Great Gama he morphs a little bit more into Mr. Belvedere. – Count DvL

Hey guys!  Do you like William Blake?  Do you like comics?  Would you like a comic about William Blake?  If so, then hop on over to our friend Geri E. Gallas’s Kickstarter, where she’s rallying the troops to publish her William Blake graphic novel, The Poet and the Flea!  It’s Keen!  – Count DvL

Leibniz had a tricky philosophical mission – he was caught between Descartes and Spinoza, unhappy with the species-ism of the former, and unable to publicly advocate what he liked about the latter.  The best he could manage was Monadology, a text which has flavors of Spinozist determinism while still making a strong case for the fact that you can not have reason and still have memory, emotions, and a proper existence.  We are third-type monads, and in order to get the universe to work as it apparently does, he had to shove a lot of properties into those guys that don’t necessarily rub well together, in his honest attempt to avoid the pitfalls of Cartesian dualism.  – DvL

Leibniz had a strange relationship with Spinoza.  Because of Spinoza’s almost universally reviled status as an arch-atheist of the worst colors, Leibniz had to publicly take every opportunity to discredit him, but secretly he was fascinated by the Dutch philosopher.  He went out of his way to visit Spinoza, and would never reveal fully the conversation that passed between the two.  Leibniz was essentially a hyper-ambitious courtier, who didn’t have the luxury of radical opinions, but he was also perhaps the most brilliant man in Europe at the time, and couldn’t help but note the soundness of Spinoza’s forbidden thought, if only in private.   – Count DvL

Leibniz was rather famous for having one of the oddest walking gaits on the European intellectual scene, his limbs flapping about all higgeldy piggeldy as he moved.  It most likely wasn’t an issue of footwear, but when you add Paris, where he dallied for months upon months when he should have been attending to his job as a German librarian, the attraction is real.  – Count DvL