“Lady Mechanika in The Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse, Volume One, Issue Zero: The Demon of Satan’s Alley”
Created, Written, and Drawn by Joe Benitez; Colors by Peter Steigerwald; Colors by Josh Reed; Published by Aspen Comics
Beneath this lengthy title lies a fantastic example of the slow seepage of the steampunk subgenre from genre lit into comics. Creator/ writer/ artist Joe Benitez has come a long way from his work on The Darkness and The Magdalena, both for Top Cow and both nicely illustrated. But Lady Mechanika is a quantum leap forward, art and design wise from those titles. The elegantly designed pages and linework are captivating from cover to cover.
Set in an alternate history England in 1878, the book’s main character was attacked and ravaged by a serial killer. Her lost limbs and other body parts were replaced by mechanical parts, how and by whom she cannot recall. Most of her memory has been expunged, even that of her own real name. Now equipped with the requisite steampunk goggles atop her head, and fortified by mythical Victorian tech to be the proverbial “better faster stronger”, she is Lady Mechanika, a private detective to be reckoned with.
Her outfit has the de riqeur corset, but flesh and cleavage is hidden beneath her costume to drive home the fact her body has been mangled. The shapely curves are still there as in all of Benitez’s women, though. Mechanika’s clothing, indeed, is skin tight with snug trousers (no dress for this adventuring lass).
This premiere adventure deals with a killer on the loose – the “Demon of Satan’s Alley” – which leads our titular character to an underground lair where she scuffles with a curious creature called Ucky – a short battle as the creature is benign and quite affable actually. Ucky is also partially composed of mechanical parts and seems to hold a clue to our heroine’s origin. He knows her from a time before her memory was shorn from her. The real villain, reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’ foe Professor Moriarty, soon appears in the form of Nathaniel Blackpool, whose sideman the Colonel, a psychopathic religious fanatic, dispatches the kind Ucky before Mechanika can learn anything more from him.
Blackpool and the Colonel also know Mechanika, though she can’t recall them either (not that remembering such men is necessarily a good thing). Blackpool also deals in steampunk tech through his Blackpool Armaments, and he soon kills the Colonel for his religiously-motivated bloodlust. Not that Blackpool is any better; far from it. He asks his men to “secure the girl” that he claims to be an admirer of.
Mechanika easily takes down three of the galoots at once and commands a doctor in the party to properly wrap Ucky’s remains. After Mechanika blasts the horrid Blackpool in the leg, she exhorts him to steer clear of her, after he regales her with an unctuous and predictable spiel about how they should work together, and “usher in a new era! The era of the machine!” Her appropriate answer is to smash his jaw with her boot heel. This spells “The End (for now)”.
There are two nice back-up features in the issue. The first is “Through Brass Goggles”, a look at Joe’s designs for Lady Mechanika. As he puts it: “I love drawing strong, sexy, female characters”. Several extrapolations on Mechanika’s look are featured. There are some lovely pencil sketches here. Among my favorites are images of Mechanika with a bowler hat and dress, and of her with her goggles over her eyes for once. The issue ends with a final, most unusual bonus feature: steampunk recipes! “The Steampunkitchen” showcases delicious-looking Mechani-Cookies (shaped liked gears) and steampunk tarts. This was a great and novel capstone to the book.
Benitez has certainly won me over with Lady Mechanika # 0, and I most eagerly await the unfolding of manifold mysteries alongside this captivating mechanical huntress.