Madeleine Holly-Rosing is certainly one of the hardest working creators in steampunk and I've been following her main work, 'Boston Metaphysical Society', since it first appeared as a comic book, picking up new issues at further conventions as they were released. Somehow I never got hold of issue five of six, which put paid to my plans of diving into the story once I had the set. As I'm now in possession of a hardback special edition of the first comic book series, it's about time that I read the thing.

It's perhaps a little shaky as it starts off but it soon finds its feet and continues to escalate all the way to the suitably epic grand finalé. Everything I learned at panels and from chatting with Madeleine at vendor hall tables is here and it's just as much fun as I expected it to be. In fact, it builds so well that I feel like I'm also living in Boston in 1895 and the alternating collaboration and rivalry between B.E.T.H. and B.M.S. is going to burst through my door in a flurry of electric equipment and good old-fashioned banter.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll rewind to introduce you to those acronyms. We meet B.M.S. first, Boston Metaphysical Society, of course, but not quite in the form that it takes for the bulk of the book. As Holly-Rosing points out in her introduction to this edition, the central characters are a former Pinkerton detective, a spirit photographer and a genius scientist. The ex-Pinkerton is Samuel Hunter, as he'll remain, but, as we start, the spirit photographer is Andrew O'Sullivan and he dies on page three and is buried on page four.

He's replaced, much to Hunter's surprise and against his wishes, by Andrew's daughter, just as talented a medium and spirit photographer. She's Caitlin O'Sullivan and she joins the team just as we meet the third of its members, Granville Woods, who's just as controversial as Caitlin on account of being African American, or coloured, as the vernacular of the time would have it. If you expect the Boston Metaphysical Society to be the dominant force in a book called 'Boston Metaphysical Society', you'd be applying sound logic but they're battling B.E.T.H.

That's not an outrageous acronym, as steampunks like to conjure up; it's merely the initials of its four members: Bell, Edison, Tesla and Houdini. Yes, the ones you think: Alexander Graham of telephone fame; Thomas, the go-to enemy in the steampunk community; Nikola, the equivalent hero; and Harry, the magician, escapologist, actor and debunker of the supernatural. He's the surprise in this group, because we don't expect him to be involved in the sort of thing that he's so publicly against, as a debunker of fake mediums and spiritualists. Then again, what we meet here is very real.

I like the artwork by Emily Hu, but I must admit to taking a while to fully distinguish between all these characters who are introduced so quickly. We meet the four initials behind B.E.T.H. at the graveside when Andrew O'Sullivan is buried and the two teams cross paths so often that they're often more like one team, especially when some of them actually start working together. That's even though Edison despises Granville, partly because he's coloured and partly because he was one of the many scientists whose work he stole and publicised under his own name. There are a lot of reasons why steampunks hate Edison, but that's the primary.

There are a bunch of little mysteries here, some of which wrap up pretty simply when looked at from the right perspective. While Samuel believes that the only thing to do with ghosts is to kill them, Caitlin convinces him at the Park Street Theatre that not all ghosts are evil. After all, the haunting there is just a quartet of dead carnies who want to be part of the show. She brokers a deal between them and the live crew to make that so. Samuel, on the other hand, takes care of another haunting case that really isn't, through good detective work rather than supernatural talents.

However, there's also a core series mystery that won't go away and constitutes the finalé and a good chunk of the book leading up to it. Tesla has grandeurs so he calls a particularly dangerous spirit a "protoplasmic trans-dimensional phase shifter", but everyone else simplifies that down to just "The Shifter". Whatever we call it, it's killing people and the two teams end up conjuring up more than two ways to take it down. I won't spoil any of them, except to say that only one of them actually works, which proves telling to the series and will surely flavour 'Volume 2'.

Without trying to insult Emily Hu's artwork, it was the differences in character that became the way I could distinguish the ensemble cast. Caitlin's easy to recognise because she's the one and only women in the bunch, beyond her mother, who's a nasty piece of work. Similarly, Granville is easy to distinguish because his skin is a different colour to everybody else, but his face is unique so he'd have been easy to distinguish even if he was white. Samuel Hunter appears similar to an array of other characters, but he has a notable scar down his face, which was enough.

The rest are harder to tell apart, Tesla's difference in height not always being obvious, until the realisation that Houdini is charming and inquisitive; Tesla is arrogant and very possibly insane; and Edison is a bigot and a thief, not to mention a general asshole. Bell doesn't ever seem to do much, so he's the other guy. If he has a key character attribute, it's constant stability in the face of none of the others being particularly stable. Also, as much as I expected Tesla to be the hero and Edison the villain, they're not really either. They're technically heroes, I guess, but often so bad at it that they seem like villains.

It's not hard to see why this franchise is called 'Boston Metaphysical Society' rather than 'Bell Edison Tesla Houdini'. Instead of Tesla, my favourite character is easily Caitlin O'Sullivan, just a little Irish girl from the south side who turns out to be a powerful medium and fully fleshed-out character. I'm sure there's more growth to come but she's a grand creation here in 'Volume 1'. Next for me would be a toss-up between Granville and Harry Houdini, because I liked both a lot in very different ways.

Notably a long way down that list is Caitlin and Granville's boss, Samuel Hunter. He's definitely a hero here and there are moments when he's strong and sympathetic, but only moments. He arguably counts as the lead character, though Caitlin steals that title from him by the time the book ends, I think. However, he doesn't come across like a lead character. There are reasons for that and I'm not going to explain them because they constitute spoilers. However, I'm eager to see how he comes across in 'Volume 2', given what happens at the end of 'Volume 1'. Maybe he can steal the lead role back from Caitlin.

After the collation of the six comic books that constituted the first series, there's a bonus short called 'The Ghost of Carlton House', created specifically for this hardback special edition. It's an interlude of a story, set one month after Holly-Rosing's 'Boston Metaphysical Society' novel, 'A Storm of Secrets', and five years before everything else in this book. It's a gap story and it fully knows it, which makes it a worthy addition to this volume but nothing to write home about if we look at it in isolation.

I'll follow up next month with 'Boston Metaphysical Society Volume 2' and I'm eager to see how differently that plays now that everybody's been introduced and I know how to tell them apart. Then I'll dive into the novel. In the meantime, I'll point out that Holly-Rosing is funding another comic book on Kickstarter, not a 'Boston Metaphysical Society' title but an episode in the other steampunk series I dived back into this month, Joe Benítez's 'Lady Mechanika'. It looks like she hit her target, raising $102,573 of her $25,000 goal, so kudos there. Late backers may still have a chance to support, through messaging the creators. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Madeleine Holly-Rosing click here