Beam Us Up!

I’m nearly done the next episode, so hang in there — in the meantime something else I’ve been working on is a wallpaper for Tor.com– it’s called “Beam Us Up”, and you can pick it up now at their Steampunk Fortnight celebration! Teaser:

That’s Darwin with the jar (I like his dorky looks of youth, without the beard), and you can’t see it properly but Wheatstone (reformed) is wearing a miniskirt. I’ve promoted Eleanor Cressy (born on-board ship, rumour had it) from navigator to Captain, and OF COURSE there’s only one possible Chief Engineer!

This was inspired by an amazing thing I saw a while back on the BBC– Airship Around The Globe!!!

It made me think of an adventure-and-intrigue packed voyage of a crew of cool geeks boldly going forth to seek out new colonies and subsume old civilizations in that Victorian way, on a giant airship kitted out with cutting edge technology… wouldn’t that be fun?

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12 Comments

  1. Lawyer San Antonio on October 24, 2013 at 7:58 am

    I enjoyed reading your strip. Great post as usual.



  2. JPf Goodman on February 12, 2011 at 12:21 am

    Only just come across your work, via a link from another Ada Lovelace comic, and hers and yours are both lovely, but I’m mailing to plea that you don’t do a “Vampire Poets” comic, as the vampire trend must surely be becoming a bore, and, now that books populating Jane Austen stories with brain eating zombies are available this novelty must surely have reached its sell by date. that aside, please accept this message as positive praise for your artistry and endeavour.



  3. DG Lewis on November 9, 2010 at 2:21 pm

    I would so go and see Star Trek rebooted as steampunk with the Enterprise as a dirigible.



  4. Octane on October 30, 2010 at 7:15 am

    A miniskirt?

    wat



  5. Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey on October 28, 2010 at 5:58 pm

    “It made me think of an adventure-and-intrigue packed voyage of a crew of cool geeks boldly going forth to seek out new colonies and subsume old civilizations in that Victorian way, on a giant airship kitted out with cutting edge technology… wouldn’t that be fun?”

    Funny you should put it that way…

    Joel Engel writes in his book Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek that in the summer of 1963 Gene Roddenberry attended a baseball game with Christopher Knopf, another TV writer.

    Quoting Mr. Engel:

    ============
    Roddenberry chose that moment to ask, “You want to hear an idea for another series?” “No,” Knopf said, eyes on the game. Undaunted, Roddenberry continued: “I’ve got another series idea. I’m going to place it at the end of the nineteenth century. There’s a dirigible, see? And on this dirigible are all these people of mixed races, and they go from place to place each week, places no one has discovered yet.”
    ============

    Roddenberry pitched this idea to a producer without success. Later he changed the dirigible to a spaceship, and found a bit more success.

    Had history been different, we might have seen a steampunk TV series on US TV in the 1960s.* The world was not yet ready for Roddenberry’s bold idea.

    *In addition the The Wild, Wild West, I mean.



  6. DavidG on October 28, 2010 at 11:49 am

    Ooh! New wallpaper!

    Damn, that Ada is hot! As fond as I am of Elastigirl, Ada is definitely in a league of her own. Shiny boots and a strident pose with a telescope – she really is a tasty bit of nerd-crumpet! And when she starts flaunting her pipe…

    Wait, did I say that out loud? No…? No, no, I couldn’t have. That really wouldn’t be good – I’ve got enough of a reputation as it is!

    Anyway, where was I? Oh yes… a pair of goggles just like Babbage’s…



  7. mark v thomas on October 28, 2010 at 1:10 am

    Re: Kaptain Kobold’s comment
    Games Designer’s Workshop had such a role playing game, (before they went bust) which was set in the Victorian Era called Space:1889, which had as it’s background, Thomas Edison inventing a Aether drive, and making the first (unintentional) landing on Mars…
    As a result, The British Empire in the game, now occupies a large part of a inhabited Mars, with the result that “The Great Game” that global powers played on Earth, is now being played over the entire Solar System …



  8. Tempus Vernum on October 28, 2010 at 12:53 am

    Brilliant wallpaper, I love it!

    But hang on… if The Captain, Engineer, Communication and Medical officers are up on the peanut gallery, and Ada clearly has the Spock role then where does that leave Babbage?

    *Gasp* Is he the Red Shirt? (or would it be the Red Vest?)



  9. Kaptain Kobold on October 28, 2010 at 12:43 am

    The wallpaper is excellent, and the cartoon above is a great bonus.

    And this: “It made me think of an adventure-and-intrigue packed voyage of a crew of cool geeks boldly going forth to seek out new colonies and subsume old civilizations in that Victorian way, on a giant airship kitted out with cutting edge technology… wouldn’t that be fun?”

    If that isn’t a great hook for a role-playing game campaign, then I don’t know what is. I wish I had a regular gaming group that could do justice to something like that; I want to be a steampunk Science Officer Darwin on the Airship Enterprise.



  10. Brian on October 28, 2010 at 12:23 am

    I had heard of Lady Hay’s travel once before, but I didn’t know that there was so much newsreel footage of the trip. I have to think that this event must have been the inspiration for the sequence in Little Nemo in Slumberland where Nemo and the princess visit all the major cities of the world in a dirigible — but that was years before this, wasn’t it?



  11. Dori on October 28, 2010 at 12:13 am

    Thank you for the lovely wallpaper! I hope you’ll write a book about just such an adventure. Somehow i imagined the crew running into Professor Challenger and getting yelled at. oO



  12. Kate Smith on October 27, 2010 at 8:15 pm

    Thank you (and Tor) for the wallpaper. It’s just awesome. And thank you for your hard work on 2D Goggles. Marvelous!