Dangerous experiments in comics

Here’s something I’m sure we’d all like to see– an Ada Lovelace documentary! In order to afford the visual effects necessary for the action-packed Salamander People sequence (addendum: JOKE), the filmmakers are undertaking a spot of the old fund-raising, for which your help is needed– no, they don’t need you to throw cash at them, they need you to get large foundations to throw cash at them!

Rosemarie needs letters of support from people who have been influenced in some way by Ada and who are willing to help publicise the film, be a part of the interactive website, perhaps show the film, or contribute in any other way.

Rosemarie says, “I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American.”

I’m informed that the National Science Foundation also likes letterhead, so if you have letterhead, even better.  Personally the last time I put a letter on actual paper might have been around 5 years ago.. I have designed special 2dgoggles letterhead for this purpose, and possibly will find some sealing wax while I’m at it.

Due to my appalling negligence, you have one week to get this in the mail.. they need the letters for the end of October. Get the details here! Get crackin’!

There’s a lot of great reasons to get this film made; I of course am in it for the VFX action sequences.  Someday when I’m feeling more angst-ridden I’ll share the Tragic Tale of why I didn’t pursue math and science, and thus wound up as a vile cartoonist useless to Society;  a lack of what is termed ‘role models’ was a big part of it.  I think if I’d known there was a such a thing as a mathematician who galloped around on her own freakin’ stallion I may have weathered my difficulties more gracefully.  Anyways, another  reason I’m jonesing for this film is because one of their consultants is Joan Baum, who wrote easily my favorite of all the Lovelace biographies, The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron –sadly out of print, I suppose because there’s less scandal, more math; to it I owe the ENCHANTING information that one of Ada’s tutors, William Frend, once wrote a play ridiculing the concept of imaginary numbers, starring his future son-in-law and also tutor to Ada, Augustus de Morgan.  This little book gets fifty million additional points for having as one of its consultants Martin Gardner, who turns 95 today, WHOO!!!  I’ve suddenly realized that my own literary style of footnoting was probably born from dozens of readings of The Annotated Alice… I’ll prevent myself with difficulty from turning this already lengthy post into an Ode To Martin Gardener..

Speaking of angst… have decided the comic needs more of that, because Lovelace did not have superpowers; rather, she was driven by inner demons, LIKE BATMAN.  So, starting in on doodles from the upcoming “The Organist”:

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Whooo! The Amaaaaazing Steampunk Exhibit at the Museum of the History of Science is now open! Behold (good thing I went for the 600dpi..):

There’s 3, count ‘em, 3! ways to see the comic.

1.The best way to see the comic online is at Tor.com, the Sci Fi Supersite!  which has kindly up it up in a way that you can, like, actually see it clearly.

LOVELACE AND BABBAGE MAKE A GREAT EXHIBITON OF THEMSELVES!  At Tor.com

2. Also, until Saturday, you can download the print resolution here (it’s 600dpi, so seriously, they’re big files).  Get it while it’s hot!  I was going to keep it up there, but that turns out to be expensive..

3. Last but not least!  you can download the PDF of the Broadsheet from the Museum (link at the bottom), which includes the comic in the context for which it was drawn and also comes with beautiful photographs of the exhibits.

With all these viewing options, surely we need a gadget to go with this.  Here at 2D Goggles we like to keep up with the very latest technology, and we hear there is a great deal of excitement over the ’3D experience’. I fail to see the thrill of this, as our mundane existence is already carried out in 3 dimensions. If you really want a Journey Into the Unknown-

KIDS! INSTANT 2D VISION with our exclusive 2D cut-out-and-keep FLATTENING GOGGLES!!* Enter a world you have NEVER SEEN! Requires no steam power!  Click to download the PDF! (hirez tiff available at Drop.io until Saturday)

Merely fold down the Dimensional Occluder for INCREDIBLE 2D EFFECT! You won’t believe your eye!

Cheers to old war-buddy Duncan, who suggested, “how about a pair of cut-out-and-keep 2d goggles?”

A few footnotes on the comic..

– In her early teens Ada had an obsession with flying machines, her ambition at 13 being to produce a ‘book of Flyology, illustrated with Plates’. She always loved machines– the first thing she did when she saw the Difference Engine when she was 17, was ask Babbage if she could borrow the diagrams to study!

- My bouncing-off point for the comic (other than just basically cramming as many steampunk tropes into two pages as I could), was Babbage’s reaction the the not-very-prominent placing of the Difference Engine prototype in the Exhibition of 1862:

This is UNCANNILY similar to the way the same fragments of the Engine are normally displayed in the MHS, and I would like to take this opportunity to suggest how much the Old Ashmolean would be Ennobled by the building of a separate wing for their proper display, along with the 800 square feet of diagrams.

By the way, my exhaustive searches of Punch have failed turn up an undisputed Babbage caricature, but this just might possibly be him! Babbage was pretty mad that the Difference Engine wasn’t displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it does bear some resemblance to this portrait.

- Brunel’s sextant and bits of Babbage’s engine can indeed be seen in MHS’s Steampunk Exhibit, or any old time you happen to be in Oxford.

Anyways, thanks so much to the AWESOME curators at the Museum of the History of Science, hope to meet again soon!

After all this visual, if you’d like a little audio:  BBC coverage of the Exhibit! And, my Better Half interviews super-cool Museum Director Jim Bennett! With cute accents!

*’2D effect’ is illusory; ink and paper contain some microns of depth.E

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Despite the blog silence I have been drawing comics!!   The Museum of the History of Science Steampunk Exhibit opens on the 13th of October– the comic is  a 2-page insert for the Broadsheet . Thoroughly intimidated by the epic lineup of actual artists…

Giant monster conditions:  severe.  Comic output will continue sporadic.

Waiting-for-renders activity:  cataloging the gazillions of bookmarks on Lovelace and Babbage I’ve amassed.  Watching Google Books settlement with anxiety.. just don’t take down my 19th century periodicals!!

Hampered by being unable to choose between “Vampire Poets” (The Vampire Menace combated with STATISTICS! It’s Gothic! It’s Horrible!  It’s Gothic Horrible!) and “The Organist” (which I thought I knew where it was going, until I went to the Museum of Self-Operating Musical Instruments, and now I have a million new ideas for fiendish tortures).

Suddenly, someday, when you are least expecting it, the next Lovelace and Babbage episode will appear, and then you’ll all be, like, “oh that’s so 150 years ago”.

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So here’s a little tale for you.  As it features ME, it is of course a gripping, hair-raising story of FUN and COOL and… okay, it’s a tale of.. LIBRARIES.

So I’ve been tromping all over London in search of a few bits and bobs of books on Babbage, and a public library catalogue search for “The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage” took me down to the fine Upper Norwood Public Library (additional  geek note: I have a map of London in my head that consists of locations of Sherlock Holmes stories).

I couldn’t find the book on the shelves, so I asked the librarians; and one of them went down into the basement to see if it might be there.  The other librarian told me they used to have quite a few Babbage books there because he was born right around the corner, and had I seen the plaque?

I had not seen the plaque, so I ran out and looked at the Blue Plaque (it was blue! and a plaque!) and when I came back the librarian was emerging from the basement looking downcast and apologetic.  “I’m really sorry– I can’t find the books you’re looking for; we must have cleared them out.  This is the only book we have on Charles Babbage.”  And she hands me this:

“Huh!”  I said, “It’s Babbage’s autobiography, Passages From the Life of a Philosopher! I had no idea there was a modern reprint!”  So I start flipping through it and then I say “Waaaaiit a minute.. I don’t think this IS a modern reprint..”

Call me crazy, but I think this is a first edition:

Click for larger, and to read the wildly inappropriate quotation from Byron’s “Don Juan”.

I could be wrong of course, but it certainly feels old, and there’s no other copyright in there.  Hilariously, inside that criminal modern binding it’s got the traditional little library flag with all the stamps.  It was last let out in 1972.

So I grabbed it and fled to Panama!

No no, of course not, I checked it out like a civilized person and THEN I fled to Panama.

Actually, it’s probably not worth THAT much, even if it is the real thing– copies in fair condition still in the original binding go for around 2000 pounds, so this one is… I dunno, a few hundred?  It’s pretty beat up, sadly. Anyways I figure if it IS a first edition, and if the library is cool with it, I might take a little whip-round here on the site and see if I can get it re-bound properly and maybe put on display or something, I don’t know… it seems wrong to just put it back in the basement.

addendum for those burning with anxiety: I did finally track down The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage in another libarary.. so far I haven’t gotten even one good gag out of it, can you believe it!

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Long renders and an itchy Google finger turn up a strange, sudden little window into the past:

So, what DID Babbage talk about when he talked about Ada? WHOA.

I found that little story amazing for a few reasons-

-I’m kind of staggered by the fact that Babbage is telling this stuff to a complete stranger, less than two years, I think it would be, after Ada’s death.

- Mere interrelated symbols in the form of ‘words’ are insufficient to convey how madly I love that Babbage thought Lovelace was the too-logical one. Through the comic I am Channeling the Higher Truths of the Universe!!

- Oh God, the image of Babbage teasing Lovelace with shaggy-dog stories is so overwhelmingly adorable it’s kind of choking me up a little.

I have a policy here of linking only to primary sources, and mainly stuff that’s funny; this automatically means I can link to pretty much nothing about Lovelace. She lived in the realm of private letters and private gossip, lots of which is contradictory and none of which is online. She herself had a personality that I still find, after reading her collected letters and three four! different biographies, incredibly opaque (certainly compared to Babbage!). Frankly Babbage’s view of her- a little over-thinkie, a little gullible, and with a lot of the ‘Byron Devil’- accords the closest to mine!

Ghu. Too much history! This is supposed to be my ‘learning comics’ blog!

So I think my main issue from the last episode was, as usual, panel flow.  I think I’ll have to drop Victoria’s font, or find a more legible substitute, because it’s massively disrupting the pacing is my feeling. The other big difficulty I ran into here was juggling so many characters and keeping a clear sense of space. Probably I should have staged this shot differently:

If I had Babbage on the far side of Wellington to begin with, that cut would work better I think. I’m slowly figuring out that comics are different from storyboards in that you can effectively collapse several actions into one panel- my instinct, coming from film, is to think I need to draw all kinds of stuff that isn’t necessary– you can go from point A to point C without drawing in B, provided you compose A and C correctly.

Still depressed over Ada so to end on a lighter note:

You know you’ve arrived when some random sports mag calls somone “the Babbage of coursing writers”.

OMG BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE STOP STEALING MY GAGS!! I mean, I like my jokes to be extensively safety-tested, but a giant, crashy Difference Engine in 1851?! Now I’m worried about this material being fatigued…

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Did I say two weeks?  Erm… here!  Look at some process art!

Please understand that at present my priories are necessarily:  1. Job 2. Pub 3. Comic 4. Food, laundry, etc.

I tend to do roughs while waiting for renders (that invaluable source of idleness in the visual effects industry).  Something else I do is Scholarship.  Some scholars search for Truth; here at 2dgoggles we search for Entertainment.  Something I was surprised to discover was that Charles Babbage was really, REALLY famous, back in the day, if by famous you mean, useful as a punchline in popular comedy.   A few highlights of my researches:

- Celebrity Chef fears Babbage’s army of steam-automota line-cooks!

- ‘Charles Babbage’ as useful shorthand for ‘really smart person’.  Nowadays you’d use Stephen Hawking for that kind of gag, who oddly enough holds Babbage’s old position of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge.

-Babbage the logarithmetical Frankenstein! :D

- How was Babbage’s autobiography received by his peers?  Yeeeeaahh.. that’s about right.

And I’m not even touching on the street music thing, which was HUGE.

Ada coverage from the period is far fewer and farther between, as a Lady only appears in the papers on her birth, her wedding, and her death, and that time they publish a huge paper on computer programming.  I did find an interesting entry in an 1860 encyclopedia (about 9 years after her death), which gets in the ever-popular horse-racing but also remarks on her as excelling in chess.   She turns up as a footnote in Hereditary Genius (with special section on Oarsmen, which are no insignificant part of the community!) under her father’s footnote of “strange, proud, passionate, and half-mad.”

Babbage AND Lovelace miscellany:

- Great little bunch of anecdotes about both them– she’s too mathematical for one guys taste, but Babbage ‘loved to talk of her’; kids made fun of Babbage at school– you just wait till I get my time machine you little bastards!

Babbage to Michael Faraday: Ada Lovelace is an enchanted math fairy! I can’t cope with the whole Enchantress thing, which is why I needed a stiff drink or twenty to get through much of her correspondence.

- The  motherlode of Babbage anecdotes! with special Lovelace cameo! A ‘Babbage’ search turns up, among plenty else, “Charles Babbage: Hot or Not?”, Babbage taking some ladies up to his place to see his etchings Ada Lovelace’s math, and proof that I’m PSYCHIC as his place is described as “crammed with books, papers, and apparatus in apparent confusion.”  Stereotypes: never wrong!

Man, when I read too much about Lovelace and Babbage’s unhappy ends I get so depressed I can hardly carry on with the comic.  However, I shall RESCUE THEM and keep them safe in a pocket dimension, where they will have a giant difference engine to play with in exchange for being made to do funny things.

Anyways– not too many more days until the Client Pt2, depending on how many gags I can throw overboard to lighten the load..

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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:

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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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.

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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