Oh, look, I did a sketchcard of Cherry as Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, rockstar poet. She was really good at maths, the opposite of poetry, & worked with Charles Babbage, who was trying to build what he called a Difference Engine, which was going to be a mechanical analog computer. Ada figured out to program such a thing with punchcards, like were being used on Jacquard looms. So she invented computer programming before there were computers. Then she did a lot of drugs, gambled away all her money, & died of ovarian cancer in her early 30s.

This is part of a series I’m working on of Cherry as significant women throughout history; real, fictional & mythical.

Mr. C. Isengard talked me into doing this one. It’s like a retro-repro-outro-newtro artifact. It’s not a real freak show banner. That would be like 8 or 10 feet tall & at least half as wide; this is a piece of canvas from Mo’s old patio furniture, it’s like 14″ x 34″. There’s nothing human or human-relatable scalewise (you know, like a dollar bill or something) in there to give you a sense of scale.

I actually have done some freak show banners, a long time ago. If if doesn’t say it’s “Alive”, then it’s dead; it’ll say “Real”. It’s in a jar. Like the 2-headed baby. They called that a “pickled punk show”.

So this is like an inaccurate historical re-creation, or a faint echo thereof. You know, like Johnnie Rocket’s. Or the Stock Exchange.

This is one reason I haven’t been doing comics. There are several stories here, stories of art & love & effort & cleverness & odd characters & failure & seduction & betrayal & misery at a roadside attraction 200 miles from anywhere in all directions. Maybe I should do some of that autobiographical shit… right. That would be a whole nother project. I’m really working on this one, it’s just… operating in a different time reference frame.