Lady Mechanika 1

I’d never heard of the title, creator or publishers, but when I picked it up for a look, the interior art reminded me a little of Bryan Talbot in its finishing, and the clothes and settings are steampunk, something Bryan has worked with at least a few times. The colouring, by Peter Steigerwald, put me slightly in mind of Bryan’s Grandville too, so all of that was enough to make me give it a go, despite an unenticing cover, nicely drawn (with particularly excellent shading on the bodice) but coloured in stone, as if an old B&W magazine illustration. (Turns out there are other editions with other covers, so you might see something different in your shop.)

The start of the story makes me regret trying this, as the dialogue is appallingly tin-eared: “These @#$%ing lectrods have little effect,” and “h-help I’m-I’m dying…” are bad enough to read, but how do I make sense of someone saying “Use your pistols! A bullet won’t kill that thing!”? The thing in question is the world’s only cyborg, who I thought would be the titular character, who is being hunted – and they use the pistols to fire bullets at her, with the usual effect, i.e. she immediately goes down.

Then we get some more incredibly awkward dialogue acting as the most hamfisted exposition I’ve seen since Secret Wars. By this point I am checking whether there is an editor credited, and there is, and I am mystified as to why he let so many terrible lines through, besides grammatical errors like “It’s on route into the city.”

It’s actually a shame the words on the pages didn’t get a polish, because the story isn’t bad and to the extent that you can ignore the clumsiness of their lines, the characters have potential as well – there’s a very good precocious little girl, the actual title character (not the one in the opening scenes – she was wrong about being the only cyborg) has some strength, and so do one or two others. There’s a huge and potentially intriguing mystery in Lady Mechanika’s background, and there’s a decent cliffhanger at the end.

And while he’s no Bryan Talbot, Benitez is a mostly very good artist – lots of excellent inking, some genuinely striking panels, terrific designs, interiors and outfits. Other than misjudging his distances in a couple of zoom sequences, the storytelling is solid, with nicely varied layouts and good composition. The colouring is rich and warm and pays attention to atmosphere.

This is pretty close to being a good comic – a bit of help from an editor who is not tone deaf in literary terms, a bit of trimming of some tedious and overlong bridging or basic functional dialogue, and I think it would be. Is Benitez new to writing? Maybe he’ll get better – I liked some elements of this enough to hope so.