Before I get to anything else I wanted to post a lovely piece of art by Sonja Larson that she was good enough to send over to us last week, and which has been sitting as my desktop image as long. I think it is entirely way rad, almost intimidatingly so, and that you all will enjoy it too!
It will also be up on the Fan Art Page in perpetuity, so come visit it from time to time!
In other comic news not dealing with totally awesome fan art – did you just SEE that? Poor Karl – his time of employment somewhere in between Maul and Dooku, pushed aside so that a more powerful apprentice might take his place. In real life, Euler switched from Frederick, who never liked him over much, to Catherine the Great as his main patron, and was well served by the move, so who is to say what he will decide?
– Count Dolby von Luckner
While up in Washington for my grandfather’s funeral, I was tasked with entertaining relatives, and so, going into default mode, searched out the local board game store, and it turned out that it was way rad. If you are in the Marysville area, a trip to Wandering Havoc Games is an experience. I came in looking for a copy of Pandemic, because I wanted the family to bond rather than seethe in mutual distrust (as the other von Luckner standard go-tos tend to do). They had sold out, but immediately I was taken in hand by two or three different shop employees and minions and taken through the intricacies of a good dozen other games that might suit the night’s needs. They were so incredibly and infectiously enthusiastic about the products and the culture of social tabletop gaming in general that it was easily my best board game shop experience to date. I left with copies of Nuns on the Run and Bang!, and one good memory glimmering from the funereal gloom of those days.
– Count Dolby von Luckner
First of all, I have to apologize for the Chatter Silence last week. My grandfather died, and between traveling to the funeral, wrangling with relatives, and general existential shock, I wasn’t good for much beyond Hyjal quests in Warcraft and pacing about aimlessly. Growing up, my grandfather was my hero, and it wouldn’t be too far off to say that he was the single most important influence on my life through elementary school. I spent a month every summer up in the colonial house that he built with his bare hands in Washington. He kept ducks and goats, built model airplanes, and devoured European and American history books at night. Over lunch and dinner, he would tell me about his time in the Army Air Corps during World War II, what he had read the night before, and his interests in aeronautical engineering. That month was always the high point of my year – wandering around the forest, coming back to the house, hanging out with grandpa, feeding the ducks and listening to the forest birds. He was my model for how to be passionate about the Stuff of the world, and thankfully I got to tell him that before he passed, but I just wanted to acknowledge that here publicly as well.
Moving on, if you’ve only come to us recently, that funky sword that Leonhard Euler is wielding might seem like an odd cod, so here is your lightning review of the episodes in which it figures! Warning! Spoilers of the Past be present!
As far as I can recall, its first appearance was in the hands of Franz von Sickingen back in episode 56. After a bit of wily time-travel exploitation, Euler obtained the sword, which we learned is a Factotum, a weapon that allows one to permanently remove a figure from history. The Power of Time was by no means happy about this development, for reasons still not entirely revealed. Euler laid low for about a hundred episodes, only to return, Factotum in hand, at Frederick’s unleashing of Calvin Coolidge. His swings succeeded in crucially wounding Ethan Allen entirely by mistake, which launched the Far Future Arc. When next Euler caught up with Coolidge, he challenged Silent Cal in hand to hand combat, foresaking the Factotum. With Cal’s mysterious self-destruction, Euler disappeared again, called to the fore again only to deal with Marx’s threat to Emily’s flock. And there you are!
– Count Dolby von Luckner