The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua (review)

Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage offers a fresh perspective on the well-known story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. The result is at once an accessible, vivid, whimsical, smart, and witty take on their collaboration to develop the world’s first computer. Padua’s novel joins the ranks of canonical graphic novels from the same publishing house, including Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning Maus (1986) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2004). Like Maus and Persepolis, Thrilling Adventures offers readers an extraordinary and inventive composite of experiences in the comics medium. This novel stands alone as brilliant testimony to some of the most pertinent and relevant new directions in comics. Padua ignites a cheeky self-awareness of elements that readers might typically associate with the genre—superheroes, science fiction, and fantasy to name a few—and deftly grounds that awareness with traditions of academic writing.

Specialists in the history of computing will note the author’s careful research throughout the book. Several exquisite drawings of Babbage’s mathematical and arithmetic Great Calculating Machine result from Padua’s herculean task of elevating his plans, written but never entirely built in Babbage’s lifetime. Moreover, her skillful representation of Lovelace’s vision for the machine as a general information processing unit speaks well to the current public interest in women’s histories of computing.

Padua capably manages vast information within the mainframe of the story. Thrilling Adventures is laden to the brim with ambitious footnotes, endnotes, and appendices—these components share space with the story and often dominate entire pages. Nevertheless, source marginalia and story elements align delightfully within the grand scale of Padua’s efficient conceptual and figurative design. To this end, the author lends supreme homage to Ada Lovelace’s famous 1843 commentary on Babbage’s work.

Padua clearly sustains an equal affection for Lovelace and Babbage in Thrilling Adventures, yet it is fitting that marginalia effectively takes such precedence in the book: Padua originally created the comic for the first Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, and her ordering of Lovelace first in the title affirms a slight bias. Additionally, the author’s styling of Lovelace is more interesting than that of Babbage. While he consistently appears in standard Victorian dress with steampunk inflections, Lovelace’s attire is more various and representational of her functions in different settings. Where Lovelace is a salonista and, in one instance, a recipient of Queen Victoria’s visit, her traditional Victorian dress seems intentionally lackluster and silly. The styling of Lovelace is unsurprisingly at its best when we see her working. In those moments, Lovelace is an energetic, pants-wearing, pipe smoking, goggles touting, steampunkish misfit about whom readers want to know more and see more. Indeed, Padua’s Lovelace is emblematic for this generation of readers who are now recovering and sharing with increasing frequency the stories of women’s influences in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The collaboration of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace is reinvented by the author in ways that require slow, luxuriant reading and viewing, not to mention a robust sense of humor. What if the Analytical Engine was built with funding by Queen Victoria under the auspices of fighting crime? To address the question, Padua offers speculative ambushes to the pleasure sensors with frequently hilarious effect. Images in Padua’s Pocket Universe are hyper-expressive and whimsical; her creative lettering and lively word balloons are suitable vehicles for those who populate the book. The Difference Engine is animated by big sounds—ZIP CLACK CLACK and CHKA WHIRRRRRRRRR sweep across entire pages. Padua similarly animates humans. Large, expressive eyes and extravagant gestures amplify the vitality of life and thought that existed in Lovelace and Babbage’s orbit.

Impressive representations of known Victorian luminaries also appear throughout Thrilling Adventures. In a notably extended scene at one of Babbage’s famous salon gatherings, we find Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles...