Damn, that's a first page image! I want that as a poster! It's of Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec Queen of the underworld, the Lady of the Dead of the title, and it's a gorgeous full page. Then again, there are many gorgeous pages in this book, starting with the cover. Most of them are dark in tone, this being a book about the Day of the Dead, for which this was a special 2017 release, a canonical part of the 'Lady Mechanika' series but not one of its numbered volumes.

The ornate framing traditional to the series is back, as Joe Benítez and Martin Montiel pencilled the whole thing. It's glorious to see such depth of image, as always, but what struck me this time is the colouring; courtesy, I believe, of Peter Steigerwald or Beth Sotelo. Three colorists have credits this time out and I don't know how they broke the responsibility down across the volume, but the first issue of the comic book run collected here lists those two without Mike Garcia; I presume his work comes later in the book. It's not just dark, it's delightfully green and unearthly and there's a two-page image that's utterly immersive.

And then we're back to normal. It's 1869 and Lady Mechanika arrives in Ciudad de México; Mexico City to we English speakers. She's not there for a particular reason; she's just getting away from it all to mourn her friend Dallas. She's feels guilty, that it was her fault. However, an old blind man whose rosary she retrieves from a thief tells her that she'll find what she seeks there, because he sees her soul even if she doesn't. "The mind is not always given to know that which the soul seeks," he tells her. He's Bembé, the local curandero, and he tells her to go to Santa Catrina. She'll find peace at the small inn there.

So she does and discovers that it's Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, hardly a quiet weekend in Mexico. Doña Aniceta is the innkeeper, Lucito is her grandson who helps in every way he can, and they introduce both Lady Mechanika and we the readers to the rich Hispanic culture catered to by this holiday. Lady M looks glorious in Día de Muertos garb, as you can see from the cover art, and the framing only gets more ornate with flowers for the dead, then candles, skulls, bones and even undergrowth to extend these frames to almost become backdrops. This is Benítez and Montiel at their most detail-oriented and it's immersive.

This book is told in three acts. Act I is 'Los Inocentes', or 'The Innocents', which is most characters in the book, especially the denizens of Santa Catrina. I've talked you through that already. Act II is 'Los Difuntos', or 'The Dead', which here refers not only to the spirits of those who have passed on but to the living dead. We see that first in a boy, who appears to be a zombie, but is just tortured and mutilated to the degree that he looks dead but isn't quite. He's a sign to the village that the jinetes del infierno, riders from Hell, are coming: men who sold their souls to Santa Muerte and demand tithes from villages like this one.

Two years earlier, Doña Aniceta's son-in-law Oliverio stood against them and they killed both him and his wife, leaving only Lucito to help at the inn. After that, the villagers have no fight left and will gladly pay the demanded tithe if only the jinites del infierno leave with it. Suddenly, Bembé's suggestion seems clear. Lady Mechanika came here to fight them, without ever knowing it, and it looks like a heck of a battle. They arrive gloriously green like the first few pages, like their Hell is frozen. They're on horseback with heads glowing phosphorescent green, looking unearthly and as scary as the weird western tradition of the masked rider gets.

I don't want to go any further because this doesn't unfold quite the way we expect, even if it does the way it must, and you should experience that for yourselves. What I will say is that Lady M is an exquisite vision of vengeance, gaining a new costume of Santa Muerte, and that the whole book is glorious but it ends far too quickly for its build. I dearly wanted a fourth act or, at least a third act of double the length. The mourning angle is covered perfectly, but the revenge should have been longer and deeper. Given where Benítez, with regular co-writer M. M. Chen, takes us here, it feels like we arrive at the other end too soon and without our thirst for vengeance being quenched.

And, of course, I'll add that this isn't at all what I thought it was going to be. Goodreads lists it as showing up in between books three and four, generally shorter standalone stories, 'The Lost Boys of West Abbey' and 'The Clockwork Assassin'. It has nothing to do with either, at least as far as I'm able to remember. I don't recall Dallas, the trigger for this story, and he doesn't appear in either of my reviews of those books. I presumed, after reading book six, 'Sangre', that it set up some of the characters there, both set in Mexico with Aztec mythology on show. However, there are zero vampires here, no La Madrina and no setup for anything in 'Sangre'.

The Hispanic mythology isn't a tie at all, it's just a continuing theme within the series and one I'm very happy to see. Living in the American southwest, I've bumped into Día de Muertos often, even if it's not particularly celebrated in my predominantly Hispanic neighbourhood. Maybe one day I'll be south of the border at the appropriate time and I'll be able to join in the celebrations. For now, I have books like this to experience it in fiction. When to do so is the question.

For anyone planning to dive into this series, I'd suggest that it probably doesn't matter when you choose to divert from the numbered volumes into this aside, but it would likely fit best in between books five and six. 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is a journey abroad but to France, not to a Hispanic country. 'Sangre' is drenched in Hispanic and Aztec heritage and, while this doesn't offer any sort of backdrop for the story itself, it would work as an introduction to those cultures, as a grounding to what's to come in 'Sangre'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Joe Benítez click here
For more titles by M.M. Chen click here
For more titles by Peter Steigerwald click here
For more titles by Beth Sotelo click here
For more titles by Mike Garcia click here
For more titles by Martin Montiel click here
For more titles by Michael Heisler click here