"Yeah I was kind of a huge nerd, how did you know?"
Sydney Padua comes from Canada, lives in London, is an animator for a living helping make films in which "giant monsters attack people", and in her spare time she draws comics. Very good comics. Some of them are gathered together in The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, a glorious Victorian steampunk extravaganza full of jokes and science lessons set in an alternative universe. For Graphic Content Padua tells us about the Victorian age, computers and the art of the footnote:
Please introduce us to your principal characters in The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.
They would be Ada Lovelace, only (legitimate) child of Lord Byron, raised by mathematicians so she wouldn't become "poetical" like her degenerate father. It's true! Her partner in crime-fighting is Charles Babbage, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and inventor of the computer 100 years too soon. In real life they died miserable and computer-less so I resurrected them in a pocket universe where they can have a giant Difference Engine in exchange for allowing me to make them do silly things.
What are their respective superpowers?
Lovelace's powers are withering looks, crowbar-assisted debugging, and bleeding-edge software development. Babbage has a superhuman ability to talk at great length on any subject and also devise hardware of marvellous complexity.
What is your obsession with the Victorian era? Is the present not good enough for you?
Not at all, the Victorians were terrible! A bunch of materialistic unfettered capitalists who thought technology would solve their problems! I like to look back at them from our own enlightened age and laugh. Lovelace and Babbage by the way were both desperate to get out of their own century and into one with faster processors and larger storage.
Were you good at maths at school?
Well, I'm Canadian so I say "math", but yeah I was kind of a huge nerd, how did you know? I drifted away from it as a teenager and got into theatre and animation instead, I'm incredibly grateful to the comic for making me fall back in love with the maths again, all of them.
Lovelace and Babbage is a book in love with the footnote. Is this an art we have lost in the modern era and which author gives the best footnotes?
I think footnotes are undergoing a renaissance! Footnote fanatics will no doubt already be familiar with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, in my opinion the current apotheosis of the art. Maybe I like it so much because, unusually*, the voice of the footnoter in that one is a model of civilised rationality.
* Pale Fire and The Third Policeman both feature obsessed footnoters who are more than a little unhinged, which I do find worrying.
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua is published by Particular Books, £16.99.
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