I'm a little late to this important book, given that I dipped my mechanical toes into the steampunk genre in 2010 at the same time that Joe Benitez published the first issue in his highly influential 'Lady Mechanika' comic book series. It took me a couple of years to develop my persona of Henry, Count Chaos and it took Benitez five years to wrap up Lady Mechanika's initial story arc, so we're contemporaries of a sort, even if the latter is far more prominent. If any steampunk convention with clout wasn't using Brian Kesinger's art on their program book covers, they were using Benitez's instead.

He's the author of the series and its initial artist and I finally got to meet him last year at Gaslight Steampunk Expo, where I naturally picked up a stack of his graphic novels. This is the first, collating that first story arc, 'The Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse', into a single volume, including a neat prequel chapter, 'The Demon of Satan's Alley', and the usual gallery of cover art, which is stunning. So it's about time I dived into this series, which has done so much to promote the steampunk genre to the wider world, given that Benitez was a name before he ever started it, primarily perhaps at DC Comics but Image and Wildstorm and other independents.

We open with that prequel chapter, which sets up the story well in only a few brief pages. Initially, both Lady Mechanika and the Blackpool Armaments Company hunt the mechanical Demon that's been plaguing Satan's Alley, but their end goals are very different. Lord Blackpool aims to capture the creature to study it and weaponise it. Mechanika wants to end its killing spree and also learn its origins. She finds it first, using humane means to catch it, only to discover that its master was also hers. In fact, she named it Ucky, long ago in a time she's forgotten but is eager to rediscover. Now they can team up to seek out that master and answers to all her questions.

Except that a trigger-happy colonel, working for Lord Blackpool, shoots Ucky dead and that's that. It ought to be over, except that Blackpool quickly decides that Mechanika would be an even better study so they're promptly set up as enemies, presumably until their final battle which is not in this volume. The art is superb, with Mechanika clearly based on Kato, the well-known Welsh steampunk model who I met long before I met Joe Benitez. She's gorgeous but tiny, so Mechanika is reliant on training and the power of her prosthetic limbs to be a no-nonsense kick-ass cyborg adventurer in corsets who makes short work of Blackpool's hired thugs. The only other difference is hair colour.

That was 1878 and the story proper begins a year later. Another cyborg lady is being hunted by the forces of Lord Blackpool, led by an exquisite one-eyed redhead known as the Commander. Seriously injured, she makes it to Mechanika, the city of tomorrow, which gives our heroine its name, on the top of a train, and Dr. Littleton, the one honourable member of Blackpool's team in Satan's Alley, is coincidentally there on the platform when she arrives. However, it's too late to save her and all he can do is declare her dead on the spot. Lady Mechanika visits him to find out the details and we're off and running, especially given both Littleton and Blackpool are in town for Mechani-con, annual industrial exhibition, which is about to start.

After all, Lady Mechanika is supposed to be the only one of her kind. That there's one more woman mechanically enhanced by advanced means could provide clues that might help explain something of her past. All she knows was that she was found in the basement of a madman in the company of partial corpses and mechanical devices. She was taken to the Ministry of Health, repository for the strange and unusual and all she's able to remember stems from that point on. Everything before it is a blank.

Quite frankly, we know very little more on that front when this volume ends than after its opening chapters. I'm sure that information is forthcoming, but not yet. We'll have to read on to find more. However, we do solve the mystery of the mechanical corpse, through the usual amalgam of careful investigation, cunning subterfuge and just plain derring-do. The journey also helps to introduce us to a colourful set of characters, plenty of which I'm sure will reappear throughout the series, even if some complete their contributions to it here.

There's Lord Nathaniel Blackpool, of course, now sporting a prosthetic jaw after Lady Mechanika's boot removed it during their initial encounter, even if he spun the story a different way. The other obvious recurring character is Archibald C. Lewis, inventor and occasional rescuer of our heroine, a need that doesn't manifest itself anywhere near as often as he might hope. She's a highly capable leading lady, appropriately a heroine both in the real life of this series and apparently a string of fictional adventures within it.

If Mr. Lewis is her only friend now, Lady Katherine de Winter, Countess of St. Germains used to be a second, though she's now the Commander gunning for her life. Dr. Charles Littleton III may or may not be a third, potentially a future sidekick but possibly just a useful recurring character. He has a precocious daughter, Allie for Alexandra, who's a big fan of Lady Mechanika's exploits but refuses to believe that the real thing is anything but a fraud. She's precociously annoying but our heroine takes her disbelief in admirable stride. There's also a real wildcard of a character, the mysterious Cain, possibly known as the Engineer, who has impeccable poise even while performing impossible feats. I'm sure he'll be back.

More likely to be guest appearances in this volume alone are Mr. Farthingsworth, Lord Blackpool's robot butler, and a host of characters who elevate Madame Divinité's Cirque du Romani. There's a tough but temperamental strongman named Gitano, with his tiny clown friends, pet monkey and a sleek black panther, Bengalo. I found his delightfully sad daughter Arliquinn a treasure too, who's as strong-willed as he is. A string of other characters at this circus appear in tantalising visuals but are not given names or anything particular to do. I hope to see them all again, even as I expect not to.

The action takes place in, around and above the city of Mechanika, which I'm sure will be fleshed out far more in future volumes. I say above, because one key location is the Helio Arx, a dreadnought of an airship, fiendishly armoured and the size of a small town. It's an iconic location and I'm sure we haven't seen the last of it here. So much of what I'm writing speculates as to what is yet to come, a feeling that pervades the book because Benitez sets up a lot of questions that we know we're not going to be given answers to within these pages. Clearly, he was aiming this to be a long series, as of its very conception, even though it took him five years to knock out these first issues.

Once done, and his ambition matched by the success of the comic books, he could bring on notable talents to help him knock further volumes out quicker. Here, all the writing and artwork is his, the only help he had being Peter Steigerwald as colorist and Michael Heisler as letterer. He remained involved throughout the series, I believe, which is still ongoing, but was happy to pass on swathes of the work to others, all working under his overall guidance.

And so I enjoyed this but wanted to read more. Fortunately I have the next bunch of graphic novels ready to roll, so I can do that. Early readers didn't have that luxury and I feel for them having such a long wait for the next issue to explain where things were going, especially given that the story is inherently the weakest link in the chain. I have no complaints, but the plot of this particular arc is hardly deep and this volume serves best as an introduction to the series. ~~ Hal C F Astell