A century before the first electronic computers, there was the Analytical Engine, a giant, coal-powered mechanical brain. Sounds like a steampunk fantasy, but it was the real deal: a general-purpose computer capable not only of number-crunching but also logical operations. Not even its inventor, the brilliant and eccentric Victorian-era mathematician Charles Babbage, grasped its full potential. It was his friend and fellow visionary Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who had that critical insight.

Alas, though worked out in painstaking detail by Babbage, the Analytical Engine was never built. But now it's been drawn – at least parts of it – by the illustrator and animator Sydney Padua. Sydney's new book, "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer," mixes comics, explanatory footnotes, historical documentation and some wonderful cartoon diagrams. It's a funny and absorbing portrait of one of history's great intellectual partnerships – and the magnificent machine that brought them together.