Giant Monsters

Written by on July 16, 2009 · 5 Comments

Posting something, so that it is understood that this has not been the haughty silence of one who is Too Famous to Respond to Comments, but rather the awkward, paralyzed muteness of one opening a door to a broom closet and finding a large expectant audience in there waiting for her to say something funny.

The Client Pt 2 is proceeding apace, or as apacey as it can get whilst I battle giant monsters by day, Twitter draw comics by night.  The Giant Monsters care not for my fame, they want to be made to appear to be biting people’s legs, and they want it YESTERDAY.

Just so there’s a footnotey point to this post: the BBC Techlab comic, as a Sunday colour supplement, I did as an homage to Milton Caniff and Terry and the Pirates, the greatest comic in the history of the universe:

terry

I know what you all come here for:  timewasting links.  You can read all of Caniff’s racy Terry spin-off Male Call strips online– they were done for military magazines, and although obviously more Prurient than his regular comic, show the same 1940s flair for female characters who could be sexy, strong, funny, and flawed.

By the way, OMG, I’ve been shouted out by Forbidden Planet!! Ahaha, you guys have so much of my money…

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Categories: Meanwhile..

Babbage and Lovelace in Glorious Technicolor

Written by on July 9, 2009 · 21 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 11 in the series Meanwhile..

OH FAME THOU GAUDY BAUBLE! Charles Babbage Foresees the Future on BBC’s Techlab! When they asked me to do this I read their little intro where it says it’s a forum for “The World’s Leading Thinkers” to speculate about the future, and I thought, if that’s me, boy are we in trouble.

techlabsmall

There’s footnotes (of course!!) on the comic but of NOT ENOUGH FOOTNOTES FOR ME!! So–

The expression on the front page comes from this drawing (scroll down). The pose on page 2 is based on my least favorite portrait of Babbage, where he conspires with Samuel Laurence to make himself look like a pompous ass. Not that he couldn’t be a pompous ass, but when I saw the ‘Laurence’ I momentarily thought it was Thomas Lawrence, and was like, “Geez, way to phone that one in, Lawrence!”.

For the record, my favorite image of Babbage is this one. He looks downright hot there. Well, kind of. As a rule, Babbage looks way happier in photographs than he does in portraits, I guess because there’s a gadget in the room.

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Categories: Meanwhile..

Babbage and Lovelace Vs The Client

Written by on July 5, 2009 · 35 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series The Client

Took me a while but.. prepare for A TALE OF TERROR! DRAWN FROM LIFE!!!

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On to The Client Part 2!

Notes! Beautiful notes!

–Footmen were selected for their fine physiques, so that drawing of Minion is of historical, not prurient interest, or course!

–Speaking tubes! Babbage advocates for them in Machines and Manufactures, along with his proto-twitter signal lights and steeple-borne message zip-lines. Prolific letter writer and relentless socializer Babbage was almost as interested in rapid communication as he was with computation, but his unfortunate location in the time-stream was just as against him there. He died the same year Meucci patented the first telephone. *sigh*

–Did Charles Babbage really try a decimal calendar? Of course not.. he was a perfectly sensible supporter of decimal currency (but if you want to see a truly awesome mechanical calendar have a look at this baby!) I’m also needlessly promulgating absent-minded-professor stereotypes here, as I have a feeling Babbage would actually have been a super-organized neat freak. True though is Babbage’s famous and expensive habit of continually improving his inventions halfway through and abandoning the old model.

–That’s Canaletto saving me a heck of a lot of annoying drawing there. Thanks Canaletto!

–Ada’s Byronic Containment Field– I wasn’t making that up in The Origin, about her mother’s experiment in using Mathematics to contain poetry. A glance over Lovelace’s biography shows this to have been a pretty epic fail. Byron himself, though he never saw his daughter, took a great interest in her and writes the following:

“Her temper is said to be extremely violent– is it so? it is not unlikely considering her parentage– my temper is what it is– as you may perhaps divine.”

It’s unfortunate that Lady Byron tried this experiment before the genetics work of Mendel, because then this outcome could easily have been predicted. Byron being obviously a dominant trait, we can make the following chart:

Byron X Mathematics produces:

2 x Mad Scientists
1 x Dangerously Repressed Mathematician
1 x Poet Using Experimental Meters

Can’t argue with Science! In the pocket dimension in which this comic takes place (thanks Justin in the comments for the proper technical term!) the Ada Experiment may react differently to the allohistorical conditions.. time will tell!! Stay tuned!

Speaking of Rational Explanations, I’ve discovered why exactly the Difference Engine is that big:

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The pocket dimension actually operates on a kind of inverse Moore’s law, whereby computers double in size every few years. It is fortunate that the Difference Engine facilitated rapid technological expansion, as when it reached the time parallel to our own they had to colonize the moon just for storage!

In administrative news– By day I’m battling giant monsters (no, really!), so I’m trying to figure out the feasibility of these hijinks. I THINK I can keep a pretty steady pace of an episode every two weeks. I dunno. We’ll see what the giant monsters think.

By the way– I’m painfully aware of the navigational mess that is this semi-comic-ish thing… anyone have any bright ideas for organizing this stuff better?

On to The Client Pt 2!

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Categories: The Client