In the midst of showreel-editing misery, this brought up some fond memories:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, I know they look exactly like real dogs. Thank you! Yes, we could possibly could have just used real dogs. Next question…

Inspiration was provided by hours and hours of old “Challenge of the Yukon” radio shows….

….which in combination with lengthy rendering times might have made me go a little nutty. I gave all the dogs names. They were.. let’s see.. I think Nanuk was the left-hand dog, Snowball the right-hand one, and of course Yukon Prince in the lead. In my daily dailies drawings I had him starring in an action-packed series of adventure novels circa 1933 (I have a thing for period book covers.. title fonts are some of the great freebies on Blambot):

It’s a good thing I work in the animation industry otherwise people might think drawing imaginary covers for imaginary books was a really strange thing to do.

I also was working on a heron for a while, but his series (more around the mid-1910s I’d say) was less successful:

To spare your bandwith, the rest is at the link below:

All true! Except for some bits. My entire knowledge of this comes from Wikipedia.

Commentor Terrence Eden asks: What is Ada Lovelace’s kryptonite?
The answer is, of course, poetry. And it is actually true that Charles Babbage devoted much of his time to an ill-advised campaign against street musicians, which resulted in him being followed by bands of angry organists playing continually outside his window.

Also, I THINK the RSS feed is fixed… I’m no Ada Lovelace, though, so let me know if it’s not!

EDITED so the post contains the complete comic..

The goal of this worthy enterprise is to celebrate women in technology… corrupted by myself to the goal of fooling around. Ada Lovleace, as I’m sure you all know, came up with the first theoretical program for the first imaginary computer, thus ushering in the Age of Steampunk making her an inspiration for all us girls messing around on computers in later centuries!

Insanely I actually have a few pages of this but to get in under the wire of The Day Itself I’m posting that up for now.

Teaser for the NEXT THRILLING EPISODE:

On the whole I found the films kind of a let down (I’ll never brag about having film in Annecy again.. ) but it was worth it for one film, I think the best short film I’ve ever seen: Skhizein, which won the audience award. Very funny for 10 minutes, then turned suddenly incredibly sad; on a rare subject, and I’m still thinking about it weeks later. Catch in on the festival circuit if you possibly can; I suppose it will come out on the ‘net when it’s done touring. Also excellent was the feature Peurs du Noir. Not normally much of a horror fan but really inventive graphics in this one:

Anyways we all really go to Annecy to drink and socialize and stock up on graphic novels at the fabulous comic shops, all of which activities I thoroughly covered. Having a glass of wine or ten with fellow-Narnian Caroline, I couldn’t help noticing how ideal her features are for fast drawing; and then there was a random guy sitting behind her with classic French-comic-book-hero chiseled cheekbones, so I drew this:

And then I thought, obviously, HOW MUCH COOLER, not to mention more French-comic-booky it would be, if Caroline was a fairy:

and Mr Brooding noir hero could solve crimes featuring ogres and witches, but dark! and French! and brooding! It looked pretty fantastic on a bottle and a half of cheap red and a week’s all-graphic-novel-and-animation diet.

I promised Caroline I’d put it up so here it is… I was kind of fancying mocking a cover up in colour, because that’s the sort of thing I waste my time on, but I’m shockingly paralyzed by the death of my Toshiba tablet. I’m a lot more dependent on Photoshop than I’d really like for polishing stuff. No one seems to make tablet PCs with decent graphics cards anymore so I’m ogling Cintiqs now, which I can’t really justify as I’d mostly use it for doing things like covers for imaginary comic books.