I enjoyed 'Luckyloo', a copiously illustrated short story, last month as my warmup to this, more traditional graphic novel by the same author and artist, Alejandro Lee, that he has been working on solo for a number of years. Having now read both, I believe that they're set in the same universe but have no crossover characters beyond the city of Kapitol.

The era seems different too, but that's mostly because of how we connect to it, because this is a different world and it's post-apocalyptic, set decades after a war between robots and humans. In 'Luckyloo', the setting was urban and the style art deco, reminiscent of a jazz age film noir, while here it's primarily rural and western, set out in the badlands and the frontier towns of the wild west. What links them is the steampunk flavour, which is on quick and frequent display, just in case you hadn't figured that out from the title.

That war between robots and humans ended with the latter the victors and so there are few robots left with functioning memory coils. In fact, there may only be one, who is the hero of our story, Piston Pete. He wanders the west fixing things, because that seems to define who he is. Sure, he has a moral sense of decency, which is a good thing when those around you remember the killer robots of the past, and he has a bubbly personality too, but every fibre of his artificial being seems to revolve around the need to fix things.

Initially, he's a solo lead, though he does work with others when he needs to, such as Doc Governess, who's officially the chief physician in the town of Kratera but something more besides and not only because she takes care of the orphans. Certainly she's involved in a plan with Pete to collect immense amounts of energy from one of the frequent storms in the area, using a capacitor he calls the magna coil. The plan works wonderfully, meaning that Kratera can leap forward technologically.

Well, there's one catch and his name is Morticus Angstrom IV, a mad scientist from a line of mad scientists, who steals the magna coil to use for his own nefarious ends. The thrust of the story involves Pete trying to retrieve it and Angstrom trying to stop him, alongside whatever other villainous schemes he has in mind. As an archetypal bad guy, reasons are not particularly important, though he does want to restore his family to its former glory by being accepted into the Daedalus League in Kapitol.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned Sally Sprocket yet. That's partly due to her playing a supporting role to Piston Pete, meaning that the title is a little backwards—after all, he is the hero here and she's his deputy—and partly because she doesn't speak, so tends to seem a little less involved than she truly is. While there's potential for some serious back story, Lee doesn't go there in this volume. Suffice it to say that she was a human girl, but Pete found her in the wreckage of an airship, near death, and he promptly saves her life the only way he knows, fixing her using whatever spare parts he has to hand. She doesn't know who she is, but that memory gap doesn't seem to be a particular burden to her.

As with 'Luckyloo', I enjoyed this more for the art than I did for the story. Lee is a capable writer but not a particularly original one. I enjoyed this first adventure for Pete and Sally but it's full of pulp tropes and so many of the components you would expect to see in any steampunk work that you could work from a checklist to cross them all off. What's more, while I never felt that the story dragged, there were points where scenes wrapped up far quicker than I expected them to, so missing out on some of the emotional resonance that they could have carried.

However, Lee is a stellar artist and the imagery in this book is clearly a labour of love for him. There are so many images that could easily have been just in between frames, there to link one key frame with another, with the effort given to draw them heavily dependent on their importance. There's nothing wrong with that approach, which is commonplace in comic books and especially in animation, but Lee refuses to go there. Every frame here is a key frame and he puts just as much painstaking effort into the less important ones in a transitional panel as he does the pivotal ones that fill a double page spread.

And every one of these images is gorgeous. While they're clearly western rather than art deco, his style is immediately recognisable to anyone who's read 'Luckyloo'. I couldn't say who his chief influences are but I would bet money that manga and anime are high up on that list. It's obvious in many of the character designs—not just their big eyes, which are a little smaller than the typical manga look, but the use of very young characters and an elegant take on action poses that reminded me of Monkey Punch. There are similarities in abundance between Piston Pete and Lupin III.

The only problem with the art isn't really with the art at all. It's just that this book is in a smaller-sized format than the typical comic book and Lee crams in so much glorious detail that I often wanted to be looking at bigger pages. Occasionally, I needed that because a speech bubble was too small for me to read without my glasses, but I always wanted it. I'd really like to see this book blown up to the large format used for Asterix and Tintin.

Also, every page is completely used all the way to the edge on all four sides, so that there are no inner margins. That meant that I often needed to bend the book further open just to be able to read what was lost over towards the spine. In other words, the art is always gorgeous and I don't have a single complaint about it. I merely wanted to be able to see it better, not only when Doc Governess was on a page. Surely I'm too old to have crushes on fictional drawn characters! At least this one's over fifty, even if she often looks younger. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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