Written and Illustrated by Joe Benitez
From the imaginative mind of Joe Benitez with colors by the incomparable Peter Steigerwald, comes this all-new supernatural action-adventure series! The tabloids dubbed her ‘Lady Mechanika’, the sole survivor of a psychotic serial killer’s three-year rampage through London. Found locked in an abandoned laboratory amidst countless corpses and body parts, with her own limbs amputated and replaced with mechanical components, her life began anew. With no memory of her captivity or her former life, Lady Mechanika eventually built a new life for herself as a private detective, using her unique abilities to solve cases the police couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. But, she has never stopped searching for answers… Now, brought into a case unlike any before, Lady Mechanika will have to rely on her advantage in all things occult and paranormal in order to solve the case and possibly unlock the secrets to her past!
Steam punk stories and femme fatales, with recipes in the back? Sign me up! Check out my thoughts of the first issue behind the cut.
Usually when we think of comics, the smaller publisher Aspen doesn’t come to mind. However, if the quality of Lady Mechanika is any sign, this is an independent publisher that we should all be focusing a bit more of our attention on. Throughout the year we’ve had a number of creators taking up the task of both writer and artist of a title, but so rarely does that combination provide such a fine looking combination as Joe Benitez does with this issue.
Lady Mechanika takes place in a steampunk utopia of design and function, as sort of a hybrid adventure/noir tale. We follow the adventures of the eponymous heroine as she investigates the death of a fellow mechanized being who recently arrived in the city only to fall dead at the railroad station. The story of Mechanika already operates with a finally fitted universe and mythos, one that is not neccesarily readily available to the reader. It’s made most aware during a conversation between Mechanika and a small child, as she gives us the established rumors of who Mechanika truly is to the people of the world. It’s through side dialogue sequences like this as well as a few visual clues that Benitez allows us to begin to get wrapped into the world surrounding the tale as well as the story itself.
What’s odd about the comic is that I’ve never really entered into a fictional tale that so heavily relied on the knowledge of a solicit. While not neccesarily a bad thing, the comic does sort of thrust you into the world by yourself. I read the solicit afterwards, which helped a few elements of the “mysterious past” make more sense, but up until that point I had originally assumed that Mechanika simply was, with a backstory to be determined at a later date. While it certainly is not in anyway a hinderance to the enjoyment of the comic, it was a rather different approach to storytelling.
Benitez does do quite a fantastic job on his own here, though. His art style is like that of an earlier Jim Lee (circa 90’s), and he doesn’t slouch on the art whatsoever. The book is full of lush design and scenescapes as well as an ample amount of splash pages taking full use of the room around the book. To be quite honest, the steampunk nature of this comic is worth the purchase alone. Mechanika herself is a rather intricate design of circuitries and gears, and the smooth lines and inking provided here really help to set this book apart from the average independent comic book. This is an entirely professional comic that looks like it has the might and power backing it like something from the Big 2 (which, oddly enough, put out work that don’t look half as good as this).
What Lady Mechanika is at the end of the day is a book full of steampunk femme fatales that sets itself up for a rather big adventure to come. With a title like this that isn’t coming out as steadily as your average superhero book, it’s nice to see that you can still get a quality adventure story from a smaller publisher at the reasonable price of $2.99. On top of all that, you get recipes for food! STEAMPUNK food! If that doesn’t make you want to get the issue, I’m not entirely sure what else would.
Final Verdict: 8.7 – Buy
