I picked up a couple of books from Alejandro Lee at Gaslight Steampunk Expo this year. The substantial one of the pair is 'Sally Sprocket & Piston Pete: The First Adventure', which is a traditional graphic novel that I'll review soon enough, but I read this one first because it's short and an obvious taster of what he can do. It's not a graphic novel, per se, more of a short story in prose on the left hand pages with his art on the right to illustrate it.

As you might imagine from that title, he writes in the steampunk genre but with a heavy focus on robot characters. Piston Pete is a robot with memory issues. Sally Sprocket was a human girl, but she was hurt badly in an airship crash, enough so that Pete had to fix her up with a robot body in his workshop to live on and take part in the rest of the story. Here, the title character is a robot who works as a detective in a very 1920s urban setting that grew out of a Noirtober art challenge. This is the jazz age, with speakeasies and jewels and art deco highrises, and Luckyloo is exquisitely dapper.

Given that the page count here is pretty skimpy and the font size not small, there's not much of a story. I'm assuming that the majority of the art came first, then the story, then whatever extra artwork might have been needed to complete the book. To my thinking, that makes the art the most important aspect and what we should focus on. It's all gorgeous, in shades of black and white like an old film noir. Most of it is dynamic, even though every example is a static image with no panels or progression, sound effects or speech bubbles.

The most striking are the most simple, often highly prominent robot characters set against a backdrop that's doing everything to avoid stealing our eyes from their focal point in the foreground. Luckyloo is that focal point on a few pages and he looks great, but I'm fonder of the Nightingale set against stage lighting, Monsieur Cat on his barstool and the birdlike jewel thief on the next double spread.

However, I'm an even bigger fan of the more detailed images, like a long shot of the city of Kapitol with the leading lady dwarfed by a bridge behind which droops the deactivated giant construction robot. In fact, most of my favourite images have something going on in both foreground and background, giving an illusion of action even in a single picture. There's a great one of that jewel thief in the back seat of a car, looking out the back window at the flurry of activity in his wake as his getaway driver focuses firmly on the road. There's another of Luckyloo leaning stylishly against the doorway of the dressing room of Dominicus Liang, seen in a mirror, with the famous crooner looking through us at him.

Looking back, I really ought to have read this book entirely through these right-hand page images, just to see if they're enough to tell a story all on their own. I have a feeling that they are, but I'm biased now because I read the text alongside them. It follows the quest of a girl named An-Jing to find justice for a friend of hers, a robot newsboy called Zach, who was murdered—more properly, according to the terms this world uses, deactivated—during the commission of a crime. She cares, even if the authorities don't because he's a robot, and she seeks out Luckyloo in his office above a speakeasy to ask him to take the case.

Well, technically she orders him, because Lee makes the interesting choice of telling this story against the foundation (ha!) of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. You know the ones and the second one is that "a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings", just so long as they don't conflict with the first law, which prohibits robots from injuring human beings or, crucially, through inaction, allowing them to come to harm. In other words, Luckyloo can't be a traditional hardboiled dick because that way tends to lead to death and destruction everywhere he goes, something firmly against his programming. He can't even carry a piece, so has to rely on his brain and his connections to solve each case.

And, because he can't deny an order, it only takes An-Jing, who's a polite and well-behaved little thing, to order him to do the job to set him in motion. I wonder how viable a business can be when it's run by a robot who can't say no to anyone. Well, any human being, to be fair, but that would seem to be rather a showstopper of a problem. What's to stop any prospective client from simply ordering him to solve the cases they bring to his desk and to not take any pay for his trouble? But such thoughts are deeper than this story wants to go or has room to explore.

And so Lee keeps things simple, at least as simple as anything related to film noir can be. The mystery's certainly complex enough to keep us engaged, even if it isn't for a heck of a long time. I enjoyed this as an illustrated short story and I'm even more keen on diving into the far more substantial 'Sally Sprocket & Piston Pete: The First Adventure'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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