Webcomic / The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, sometimes shortened to just Lovelace and Babbage, is a Steampunk comedy webcomic created by Sydney Padua, who wrote the first installment in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day. It can be found on her website here.

In Real Life, Charles Babbage was an eccentric genius and mathematician who designed the world's first computers and wrote the first computer programs. His mentee Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the first to speculate upon computers as not mere calculation machines, but material representations of analysis. Sadly, Babbage's computers were never built and Lovelace died when she was 36.

As it turns out, Real Life sucks, so what actually happened was that somewhere in a pocket universe Babbage and Lovelace built a Difference Engine that takes up an entire building and use it to have THRILLING ADVENTURES and FIGHT CRIME!! That is, if you define crime as street music and poetry.

The series is self-described as "highly irregular" and is updated in sporadic, non-uniform-length installments. While there are a number of doodles and short one-off comics, the completed full story arcs are as follows:

• "Ada Lovelace: The Secret Origin!"
• "Lovelace and Babbage vs. The Client"
• "Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Economic Model"
• "Lovelace and Babbage vs. Organised Crime"
• "User Experience" (book only)
• "Imaginary Quantities: Or, Lovelace in Fairy-Land" (book only)

A Graphic Novel collection of the first three Story Arcs and some of the shorter tales with updated artwork, plus two new full-length stories and some additional shorter ones, was released in 2015.

"To the DIFFERENCE ENGINE!"^note This really ought to say "To the Analytical Engine!", but it just doesn't have the same ring.

• Advice Recollection Snark: When Minion the Footman starts becoming frustrated with George Boole's strange speech patterns in "Mr. Boole Comes to Tea", he grumbles "'Be a footman,' they said. 'You have the legs for it!' they said. 'There's no thinking at all!' they said," while preparing the tea.
• Alice Allusion: While initiating a very controlled experiment combining mathematics and poetry, Lady Lovelace accidentally stumbles into the third dimension and invents imaginary numbers, while encountering a direct pastiche of the courtroom scene from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. At the end she transposes herself into our universe's version of Lovelace, who then has a brief encounter with Charles Dodgson, a professor of mathematics at Oxford (whom you probably know better as Lewis Carroll). Worth pointing out is that the whole "blend of mathematics and poetry" thing was part of Carroll's signature writing style, since as mentioned he was a math geek himself.
• Alternate History: The explanation given for all of the various adventures' minor discrepancies (beyond the big one that Babbage and Lovelace never actually managed to build the Analytical Engine in their lifetimes) are explained as the story being contained within a "pocket universe", created when a hapless Time Policeman accidentally helped Babbage and Lovelace complete their project. This universe runs on "Circular Time", essentially meaning that "the more things change, the more things stay the same".
• Art Evolution: The early webcomic art is a lot rougher and lacks the distinctive stylization that later adventures have. Later on, all the early stories would have their art completely redone and improved for the book release, to bring them more in line with the later art.
• Artistic License – History: Though it's rationalized via the use of the "pocket universe" explanation, there are still some minor details here and there that are deliberately changed, such as Jane Austen not dying in 1817 but living to 95 in this universe. These liberties are usually highlighted by footnotes. The biggest one is that Babbage's steam-powered supercomputer is continuously referred to as the "Difference Engine" when it really should be called the "Analytical Engine"^note "Difference Engine" refers exclusively to the much smaller hand-cranked model that Babbage built a working prototype of, not the larger steam-powered version he never completed, and he was particularly irritated throughout his life about people confusing the two—Padua freely admits that "Difference Engine" just sounds way cooler.
• ASCII Art: In a desperate but successful attempt to stop Babbage and Queen Victoria from kicking the crap out of each other, Lovelace gets the Analytical Engine to generate an ASCII picture of a kitten.
• Bad to the Last Drop: While trying to sober Lovelace up from her poetry bender, Brunel is not satisfied with the coffee at all at "what ho old bean", and is no less a Large Ham about it than usual.
  Brunel: I SAID COFFEE, MAN! YOU CALL THIS DISHWATER COFFEE?!
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Babbage and Lovelace's ideas of what is objectionable are unorthodox at best.
• Buffy Speak:
  Brunel: I'd be able to build gigantic iron ships, certainly–but could they FLY?
  Ada: It would indeed be difficult...
  Brunel: Would Darwin be able to mess around with his..uh, barnacles he won't talk about?
  Ada: Um, that one I'm not sure about...
  Brunel: WOULD FARADAY BE ABLE TO DO THAT WHATSIS WITH THE THINGAMAJIG?
  Ada: NO! NO HE WOULD NOT!
• Building of Adventure: Even in our universe, the Analytical Engine would have only taken up a large room. In the Pocket Universe, the Difference Engine is expanded upon to encompass an entire building on the banks of the Thames so large that debugging code requires crawling inside of it. The plot of "User Experience" involves George Eliot getting lost in the labyrinthine maze of whirring cogs and clockwork trying to track down her manuscript of The Sad Fortunes Of The Reverend Amos Barton that gets lost in it.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: When the Organist has Babbage imprisoned, Babbage is subjected to torture in the form of concertina music played by Charles Wheatstone (the instrument's inventor), who is mildly offended by Babbage's screams of agony.
• Creator Cameo: The woman that briefly snatches away George Eliot's manuscript during the writer's meetup is modeled on Sydney Padua herself.
• Curse Cut Short:
  Babbage: I believe I may perceive some sort of mathematical pattern...
  Ada: No sh–
• Cut Short: "Vampire Poets", in which Babbage was to go vampire hunting with the Brontë sisters, only has the prologue and one part released. Considering the interminable hiatus of more than ten years that the already Irregular Series has gone on, and it seems like this arc will never be finished (especially since it was intended to be even longer than the over 100-page "Organised Crime").
• Don't Explain the Joke: An out-of-universe example with 'sterling engine'.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The webcomic versions of some of the earliest adventures use GIS Syndrome for various backgrounds at certain points. This would get dropped around "Organised Crime", and these panels would be redrawn for the book release.
• Extra-Long Episode: "Organised Crime" is by far the longest individual completed story at 11 parts, while the other webcomic-published ones are only 1-3 parts long (though they would get expanded in book form).
• Face Palm: invoked When Babbage starts in on his bizarre "Cheese Story" (lifted from a nonsensical anecdote about a microscopic society of cheese-mites living on a slice of cheese in his autobiography) to Queen Victoria after Lovelace expressly tell him not to while she goes to unjam the Engine, she reacts by slapping her palm to her face.
• The Fantastic Trope of Wonderous Titles: As expected from a Steampunk work.
• Footnote Fever: Each page comes with a detailed set of footnotes breaking down both the insanely and meticulously-researched details from Lovelace and Babbage's real life and the Victorian period worked into the story, but also contain humorous asides, quote sources, and text that reads to the effect of "this didn't really happen, but it would be really funny if it had".
• Fun with Acronyms: In "The Organist", Babbage invents a device to combat crime (read: players of street music) on the streets of London called a Coniform Collector of Tympanic Violations. Or, as you might notice, a "CCTV", normally an acronym used for referring to Closed Circuit Televisions, or security cameras.
• Historical Domain Character: Lovelace and Babbage run into a number of influential Victorian personalities who would be in London during the time period of the Pocket Universe, including obvious familiar faces like Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens, but also much more obscure people like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Boole.
• Historical In-Joke: There are a lot of sillier moments that wont make a lick of sense unless you understand the historical context behind them, which is why so many footnotes are helpfully applied.
• Here We Go Again!: At the end of "Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Economic Model", the duo fix the economy by convincing the public to invest in innovative new technologies, namely rail. The footnotes comment that this merely precipitates the great railway bubble of the 1840s that followed the crash of 1833, which was followed by crises in every one of the following decades.
  The financial crises of the nineteenth century were successfully ended by ending the century; they were succeeded by the crises of the twentieth century.
• I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: Poetry is depicted as some kind of malignant drug that people succumb to because of Rule of Funny, hence why Lady Lovelace was inoculated against it at a young age. At a couple of points, she falls Off the Wagon and starts indulging in it a little bit, which at one point takes her on an Alice Allusion.
• In Which a Trope Is Described: On the website, each story arc has a title card featuring an "in which..." descriptor that describes the plot in flowery Victorian Purple Prose.
• Irregular Series: The comic was never intended to be a "real" webcomic (Padua has said the ending of "Lovelace: the Origin" was intended as a joke, and that she is in denial that she is actually making a webcomic and not elaborately imagining what said webcomic would hypothetically look like), and by the author's own admission is updated whenever she feels like it/has enough time between her main animation gig.
• Literal Metaphor: The entirety of "Lovelace and Babbage vs. the Economic Model!" The duo are contracted by the British government to solve the world financial crisis, which leads to Babbage creating a steam-powered device for the job (the titular "Economic Model") that ends up getting loose and going on a rampage throughout London. In other words, it's a runaway economic model. At one point, four panels are used to represent the four stages of an economic bubble.
• Medium Awareness: The existence of the footnotes is directly remarked upon by characters at several points, to the extreme where it spirals out of control and they become an important full-on character during the Alice Allusion that Lady Lovelace goes on, having to defend the comic's portrayal of her to a court of punch cards.
• Mushroom Samba: While zonked out on poetry in "Organised Crime", Lovelace ends up encountering a number of hallucinatory references to Lewis Carroll, including killing a Jabberwock. Some of this sequence would later be reused in the broader Alice Allusion in the graphic novel.
• Painting the Medium:
  • At several points, the extensive footnotes respond to whatever is going on in the story, such as when Babbage's runaway Economic Model smashes through a particularly large one talking about the American financial crisis of the 1830s.
  • Queen Victoria speaks in a more "regal" font to convey her heavily refined, aristocratic way of speaking.
• Percussive Maintenance: Loads, even quoted verbatim in one introduction splash.
• Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: In "Organised Crime", our heroic duo runs afoul of this. Lovelace loses her patience with Babbage wasting his time combatting street musicians, and so walks out on him to go get wasted in various dens of Sin where poetry (*Gasp!*) is being read. It takes a stern speech from Brunel about how Babbage needs her to get her to go back to him.
• Police Are Useless: For a odd reason, why are Lovelace and Babbage the only ones doing actual crime-fighting? This was even discussed In-Universe by The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel (founder of the modern British police force) in the third part of The Organist!
  Peel: Honourable members, why has the nation's crime-fighting been entrusted to random mathematicians? That doesn't even make sense! My proposal, of a civilian force...
  Wellington: Well you're not prime minister, are you, Peel? We all agreed I am cooler, so I win.
• Rewatch Bonus: If you look closely when Thomas Carlyle takes George Eliot's manuscript away from the lady novelist in "User Experience", he clasps it under his right arm while holding his own under his left. This makes the reveal much later on that Carlyle's manuscript of The History of the French Revolution was the one fed to the Engine, converted into data and scrambled beyond repair, not Eliot's Amos Barton manuscript all the funnier, as Charles Dickens clearly lifts the manuscript that Carlyle's holding in his left arm and gives it back to Eliot.
• Secret Diary: Parodied. In "Interlude: Queen Victoria’s VERY SECRET DIARY!", Babbage somehow comes across the secret diary of Queen Victoria, and the duo decide to scan it in the Engine to see if their names come up. All that appears for Lovelace is her name briefly mentioned on a list of ladies-in-waiting, and all that shows up for Babbage is one reference where she says "Lord M. said 'Babbage has made a great fool of himself, as he does everywhere'." (These are based on the only actual references to the pair that appear in Queen Victoria's real-life journals).
• Serious Business: MATHEMATICS!!! Whenever Lovelace gets into one of her moods, she's seen mulling over the P=NP problem. And firing bullets into the wall while mulling it.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Actually justified in the following passage (just you try putting it any simpler than this):
  Astounding!! In enabling mechanism to combine general symbols in successions of variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science! A new, vast and powerful language is developed for the future of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our investigation have rendered possible!
• Shout-Out:
  • There are a number of references to the works of Lewis Carroll, relevant since he too was a mathematician.
  • George Eliot directly quotes a few of her own passages in "User Experience", as well as a bit of The Metamorphoses (which naturally riles up Lady Lovelace, as it's poetry).
  • In "Organised Crime", The Organist releases a horde of monkeys while shrieking "Fly, my pretties! Fly, fly!" These monkeys cannot actually fly, as it turns out.
• Shown Their Work: Notes after each comic reveal the sources of historical and mathematical in-jokes and too-good-to-be-true-but-actually-are stories of Babbage's and Lovelace's life.
• Stealth Insult: Well, she is the daughter of Lord Byron.
  Ada: I surmise it contains a small difference engine to analyze the acoustic wave patterns...
  Babbage: Exactly! It's operated by a crank!
  Ada: Indeed.
• Steampunk:
  • The Difference Engine is a giant clockwork. Their economy modeler runs on steam. Babbage's Harmonic Disruptor operates on punch cards. And on and on ...
  • The alternate history suggests that with the aid of the Difference Engine England is able to defeat the Martian horde...
  • To an extent, this is subverted. Padua has observed that the whole point of Steampunk is the awesome clothes...but the specific decade in which the comic is set was a decade of hideous fashion, and Lovelace and Babbage were probably two of the worst-dressed people in it. Lovelace and Babbage in the comic are considerably snappier dressers than they were in real life.
• Suckiness Is Painful: The Organist.
• This Is Your Brain on Evil: Ada has diagrams to show Your Brain on Poetry.
• Unsound Effect: Loads. The best is "RE-BOOT!", the first reboot of a computer ever...of course done with a kick.
• Updated Re-release: The book version features completely overhauled artwork that matches the earlier stories with the later ones, and adds several new scenes and panels onto them from the webcomic versions.
• Uranus Is Showing: A footnote to "User Experience" states that "generations of sniggering schoolchildren have probably left Uranus feeling that on the whole it was better off as George."^note William Herschel, discoverer of this planet, originally intended to name it after his patron George III, but non-British astronomers objected.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: In order to understand most of the comic's comedy, you will need to have a capable understanding of history, logic, mathematics, statistics, computer science and even economics, as well as a number of insane details about the personal lives of various Victorian-era personalities. Luckily, plentiful footnotes helping to explain all of this to the viewer are provided.
• World of Ham: The comic is set in Victorian London, it is a given for everyone to have bombastic personalities, but everyone gets a turn being the hammiest of hammy (although Babbage probably is the hammiest one overall).