If Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace had managed to complete the Analytical Engine and usher in an age of Victorian computing, what would they do next? According to one comic, the obvious answer is: team up and fight crime.
Artist Sydney Padua has been posting The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage on her comics site 2D Googles. The premise holds that proto-programmer (and sole legitimate child of Lord Byron) Ada Lovelace did not die at age 36, but instead helped inventor Charles Babbage develop the first computer — a fully functional Analytical Engine — after which they retired to battle crime using the power of mathematics (and rayguns).
So far, Padua has pitted the pair against the economic Panic of 1837 as well as subterranean salamander people, but the most priceless of the series is ,Ada Lovelace: The Origin, in which we learn the true force of Lovelace's prescience: