In case any neurologists out there are studying the creative process, I thought it might be interesting to post the following enlightening non-episode.

As I mentioned earlier my Accomplice and I went to this steampunk shindig the other day. The theme for this shindig was “Journey To the Center of the Earth”, so of course I had to point out to Mr V, “Did you know that Charles Babbage once went into Mount Vesuvius, where he set his walking stick on fire, and almost lost his barometer?”  (True!  and an AWESOME story –Babbage get out of the Volcano!! Babbage?  Babbage??!).

Of course then I do a doodle:

This is just the sort of contextless tableau I like to draw, so I worked it up when I got home:

Then I think of the caption– “Charles Babbage once went into Mount Vesuvius, where he battled the salamander people offered some guy a drink.”

But surely the amiable Charles Babbage, that most affable of men, wouldn’t battle the Salamander People, unless they were playing street music or refusing to fund the Difference Engine?  For although fearless in defense of their subterranean flame-caverns, they have never been know to instigate hostilities against the human race (fact!).  What he WOULD do of course is offer them a drink, which would make a great (if ancient) gag:

Which would fit really well into an actual plot-line… quick glance at wikipedia turns up a plethora of potential — salamanders are the only vertebrates that can re-grow limbs! they lay their eggs in hidden caches suspended by mucus tendrils!  Many are poisonous or capture prey with sticky tongues!  They can see ultraviolet light!  Also… volcanoes.. sacrifices.. barometer.. Hattifatteners… and this where I’ve stopped myself because I already have enough episodes at this stage of “wouldn’t it be cool if…”  Diagram:

And anyways, are there even salamander-people in this universe?!  That’s not very Educational!!  There’s vampires possibly at some point.. if a universe contains vampires does it follow it also contains salamander-people?  Are there any statistics on this?  Should I take a poll?  That’s all ‘social media’ or something.

Final note:  in doing the original drawing I had to ask myself if Babbage would be wearing a hat.  For most of western history a man would sooner go outside without his trousers as without a hat, so this is pretty important.  This raises the question:  is an underground cavern ‘inside’ or ‘outside’?  You wouldn’t think this would be an easy question to answer except that if you go to the Brunel museum, conveniently located where he built the world’s first underwater tunnel, you see this:

See, opinion is clearly divided even then.  (Note to the 19th century–  That’s TOTALLY ‘inside’, because it’s a man-made structure.  That’s just plain logic.)  Anyways it messes up my composition, plus Babbage goes really off-model with the hat.  Possible solution: sequence where hat catches fire?  Not sure why I put in this digression except I love those guys in the tunnel with their hats.

There is now a ‘Shop’ in the sidebar.  This will take you to zazzle.com, where you can have a gander at some Lovelace and Babbage base mercantilism.  The prototype I ordered came back looking surprisingly good (click for bigger), that’s some impressive printing tech they have:

Closeup:

I made the image a bit bigger on the shirt in the version up in the shop.. you can mess with image sizes and locations and shirt styles yourself, it’s pretty flexible and their software is amusing to play with (use the ‘customize it’ button on the bottom of the item panel).  There’s a few other designs there– a Brunel one and the kind of crime-fighting pose one.  So.. pick up chicks!  Dazzle the blokes!  Raise eyebrows! Mystify your friends! The caveat emptor: the only one I’ve physically printed is the “Difference Tubes” on that off-white shirt; I’m assuming the quality will be the same for the other designs, as they’re just as high rez.

As I can’t let a post go without a Babbage fact: some of the ideas Babbage considered to fund the Difference Engine once the government bailed: writing a novel, and building a tic-tac-toe playing automaton, thus potentially building the first computer game before building the first computer. I shall soon have a report, with charts, for him, on whether he should try selling tshirts.

In other news, I’ve been shifting some stuff around the website and added some more background in a sort of about-pagey thing. Also, seem to have broken the sidebar which now bumps to the bottom on post-pages… I’m no Ada Lovelace, anyone know what’s going on?

So in spite of (not) doing a steampunk comic, I don’t actually know very much about it– I think I’m more of a steam-ironist (steam– iron..ha-HAH!)  So myself and my Associate undertook an important research expedition to White Mischief (?) Saturday night.  I think I’ve started my recovery about now.  Results:

I’m pretty sure it’s not cool to use actual people as Supervillains, even in an imaginary comic, so this might be a dead-end storywise.  Mind you these guys slayed, destroyed, annihilated the crowd on the craziest dance floor ever, which is pretty evil!   Plus it would make an amaaaaaaazing show-stopping musical number, should the theoretical comic become an imaginary movie.  Seriously:  The Correspondents.  If they are playing on the same continent as you, go see them!! The current vids don’t sufficiently convey their mesmeric powers, just… trust me.  You’ll be helpless in their evil clutches.

Other observations: this comic has to date paid nowhere NEAR enough attention to fashion.

Also, there was a Vampire Poet:

AND, Charles Babbage was there!! Or at least this guy who had the perfect waistcoat and build.. must make Babbage cuter:

This concludes this report.

To understand this comic, you need to bear in mind that Charles Babbage invented both the cowcatcher, and the form. The form! Charles Babbage stop being so amazing I can’t fit it all in the comic!!

(more…)

Like all overly-optimistic economic forecasts, the one predicting a 100% growth in comic posting over this week turns out to need rejiggering.  This is because I’m insane, and the projected growth in comic output percolating behind the scenes is around like 550%, and the good (?) news is that when part 3 of Economic Model turns up, it will have stuff like this:

I’ve now meticulously planned the whole 3-year arcing plot-line of Lovelace and Babbage, with season-ending cliffhangers and interludes of pathos, with only the inconvenience necessity delight of starting work again standing in my way. I think this is what happens when, rather than properly misspending your youth riding around on a motorcycle and breaking things, you spend it reading Asterix and X-Men comics while listening to public radio. EDITED TO ADD:  Jeez, I forgot:  the tshirt thing.  Messed around with it– it’s harder than it looks, but I’ve made one up and ordered it.. I’ll see what the quality looks like before I’d be happy with putting my name on something I wasn’t sure was okay.  I did make a mousepad, ’cause they’re cheap, and Ada in the Difference Tubes fits eerily neatly onto one.

Couldn’t do one of Babbage without doing one of Lovelace.  She’s much easier to draw though, being your basic Tintin oval head.

I’ve already done her bio! Let it merely be said that she had me from, “She’s Byron’s daughter and was raised by mathematicians so her volcanic passions wouldn’t SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL!” Raised by mathematicians! Like Mowgli! But that was wolves. But anyways SHE CANNOT UNDERSTAND YOUR HUMAN WAYS!!

Would that be the Byron who was like a cross between Jimmy Hendrix and Che Guevara, had they both been principally famous for lots of really messed-up sex?  Would that be Lord Byron who made his maiden speech at the House of Lords supporting the Luddites and inveighing against new technologies? Why yes. Yes it would. How awesome and crazy is that?  Oh Ada, just take the kohlinar and win my geek heart forever.  But will it be enough to purge your inherited Byronicity? Any good comic needs Angst.

What’s that you say?  This doesn’t actually have much to do with the real Ada Lovelace? LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

Last part of Economic Model should be up in a couple of days. In the meantime, it was driving me nuts that I couldn’t draw Babbage consistently so I drew a model sheet (click for larger if you like):

I don’t know if it’s good or bad to have so much visual reference for this guy, all of it slightly different. And drawing those horrible 1830′s jackets is going to be a constant struggle. But you can bet that is no ordinary walking stick! I have no idea what it does yet but we’re talking about a man who hacked his carriage to include a folding bed and egg-cooking-device. Note to Babbage: if I were going to go around the Crowned Heads of Europe showing off cutting-edge British tech, I would have gone for something other than the stomach-pump.

Babbage! I’m a little bit madly in love with this guy. What a completely bizarre and wonderful brain he had! I may be drawing him a little cuter than he was in life, I dunno. If you notice a resemblance to Bill Murray this is due to me going, “wow, Babbage looks just like Bill Murray!” and then using YouTube clips to get certain head angles right. He can play him in the movie.

I could easily bore you all day with Facts About Charles Babbage. He invented not only the computer but also the actuarial table; he was a man for whom nothing could be more exciting than a large error-free table of numbers, and who in his time was primarily a kind of efficiency expert, advising the Post Office, for instance, to charge a flat fee rather than metering per mile. From this one would imagine a dull automaton of a man who makes someone’s life a misery in a screwball comedy. Nothing could possibly be further from what you get when you read Babbage’s books– full of wonder and excitement at technology, he was warm-hearted, gregarious, and disarmingly naive, following beggars home to see if he could give further assistance, throwing large parties and telling rambling anecdotes with non-sequiteur punch-lines. In his autobiography he wonders why people alway assume he knows everything:

“I have frequently been mortified by having the utterly-undeserved reputation of knowing everything[...] The most frequent symptom was an address of this kind:– “Now Mr. Babbage, will you, who know everything, kindly explain to me —-.” Perhaps the thing whose explanation was required might be the metre of some ancient Chinese poem or whether there were any large rivers on the planet Mercury.”

I don’t know Babbage– maybe if this snippet wasn’t sandwiched between the whole rest of the book, where you explain everything about everything? Like the bit where you talk about telegraphy and thunderstorms with the King Of Sardinia? Remember that bit?

Some of Babbage’s other accomplishments: invented the speedometer (for trains), the cowcatcher (also for trains– he worked on the Great Western Railway, and tells a story about Brunel THAT I COULD NOT HAVE MADE UP); invented the skeleton key as well as an unpickable lock; broke impossible codes as a hobby; invented signal-lights– he used to have one on the top floor of his house where he would send short messages to friends– CHARLES BABBAGE INVENTED TWITTER!!! Oh god, and then there was the time he ran for parliament and devastated his opponent with obscure mathematical put-downs (he lost). What am I supposed to do with all this material people??!

And this was all before he spent the last decades of his life locked in a titanic struggle to the death with the street musicians of England; something for which he became so famous that it’s in the first paragraph of his Times obit (and other places as well!). Obviously Babbage vs The Organist will have to be the epic season finale of this comic, not that there is a comic you understand.

Hello, O totally unexpected large audience,

This is called Dangerous Experiments in Comics not because these are Experimental Comics but because as normally a non-comics artist this is all an experiment.. as such you will have to put up with not only the disastrous chemical explosions, but also the tedious followup paperwork that is The Stuff of Science.

For instance:

On a more serious note, I think the pacing was the main issue in the last.. issue. And some of the lame gags. Hey at least I spared you this:

There seem to be, if not FAQs, a few Qs:

– What medium are you using?

These are pretty much drawn start to finish in Painter on a 12x Cintiq. The 5px detail Sumi-e and 10px coarse bristle Sumi-e, if you care about that kind of thing. Bubbles are drawn with the freehand line tool. Text is done with a lot of swearing because, Painter, I love you, but your text handling is terrible. If I was serious I would probably export the art and then use Illustrator for the dialogue, but then I’d have to plan ahead, wouldn’t I?

– Are you selling any art?

I will not sell my art, you bourgeois pig!! Because as it happens, There Is No Art. There Is Only Data. See above. I do have a print-resolution output of Ada Lovelace: The Origin by request of an educational institution; if you’re a teacher and want to put it up you can contact me and I’ll send you the file.

–Will there be t-shirts?

Um, sure? It hadn’t even crossed my mind, but it seems pretty straightforward to do, and now I want a t-shirt myself. Is there anything in particular people would like a tshirt of?

–Will there be more?

Ghu, I’m not being coy here, I really don’t know. I’m between films at the moment (I’m an animator) but this state of affairs won’t go on for too much longer. On the other hand, these are fun to do and I really want to do Vampire Poets. Ooh, and the one with Brunel. So, it depends on the craziness levels of work and how they intersect with my craziness levels, really.

– Will you marry me/accept my sexual favours?

You’d have to route that through my husband ;).

BTW Terrence Eden in the comments links to this uncanny coincidence– a comic about the software behind the financial collapse! The guy even looks kind of Babbagy…

Warning: this is MASSIVE. It’s not proofread. It may well not make any sense. The pacing is weird because I kept coming up with gags halfway through. I didn’t get around to the model sheets so Babbage looks different in every panel. Also, may contain nuts.

More after the jump INTO HYPERSPACE.. (more…)

I’m working on Part 2 of Lovelace and Babbage vs the economy but I had to draw this for some reason:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was like the Wolverine of the early Victorians.  He was short, ripped, had big sideburns, smoked 50 cigars a day, AND KICKED EVERYONE’S ASS!!

Okay, I don’t know for a fact that he was ripped.  It’s hard to tell:

I’m struggling with the unforgiving black-and-white—- pretty much all the drawing I’ve done, I noodle happily with a soft blue pencil and then leave it that (or some poor sap had to clean it up). I think it reads better on screen than half-tones though; plus it’s good discipline; plus in a weird way you can get away with more stuff.

Some of the serious research us here at L&B enterprises have been doing:

OMG how cool is this– LEGO DIFFERENCE ENGINE!

Or, with some really nice videos of the Awesome Might of the Difference Engine– Mechano Difference Engine!

And, if you can HANDLE THIS:  Babbage’s BRAAAAAAIIIIIINNSSS!! at the Science Museum.