There's an irony in the fact that Madeleine Holly-Rosing only expected to work in comics for the six-issue run of 'Boston Metaphysical Society' because, as much as I enjoyed that, I feel that this second volume flows notably better. That might seem odd, because the first volume contained a single coherent story while this collects four standalone stories from their individual issues and adds a short new one for good measure. It shouldn't work as well just because of that but I'd say it works better and I can see a few reasons for that.

For one, the first volume introduced a heck of a lot of characters all at once and not all of them got much to do. There are the folk at Boston Metaphysical Society, of course, all of whom came from Holly-Rosing's imagination. There's Samuel Hunter, a former Pinkerton who has a notable scar down his face. There's Granville Woods, an African American inventor, though the term the time called for is colored. And there's the new fish, Caitlin O'Sullivan, an Irish medium. They're technically our leads, but they find themselves overshadowed by the big dogs in the room.

That's the four co-founders of B.E.T.H., an organisation named for each of them. Given that this is a steampunk title, you shouldn't be too surprised to find that they're respectively Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas A. Edison, Nikola Tesla and Harry Houdini, historical figures who show up all the time in the genre. And they don't have to just be there to steal attention, they do plenty too, most of which involves a protoplasmic trans-dimensional phase shifter that, due to Tesla's ill-advised shenanigans, ends up wrecking a chunk of Boston.

With those seven characters vying for our attention, it was sometimes hard to focus on any of them. Here, that's not a problem. Not only do these four stories pull back to the three leads in the Boston Metaphysical Society, with only Tesla from B.E.T.H. making any appearance and, in his case, only a skimpy one in 'Scourge of the Mechanical Men' as a sort of redemption arc, but they mostly focus on Caitlin, with Samuel, Granville and assorted support showing up when the moment calls for it but otherwise leaving her to the work at hand. That means that we learn a good deal about Caitlin and that doesn't just deepen her character but the whole book.

I liked the artwork of Emily Hu in that volume but I prefer the art of Gwynn Tavares here. It has more of a naturalistic feel, with eyes reduced in size to lose the more cartoonish style that Hu often embraced. As with the first volume, though, there are panels that were clearly given less attention than others, leaving them feeling like they're in lower resolution or perhaps smaller and zoomed into for publication. I'm sure this came down to budget, given that all these stories were financed on Kickstarter, but it's there nonetheless. Anyway, Caitlin felt more real to me in this volume than its predecessor.

Ironically, she's not in the first story, 'Scourge of the Mechanical Men', which focuses on Nikola Tesla and Granville Woods. Tesla has run from the destruction he wrought but only got as far as Granville's place on Liberty Row. His family want him out of there, of course, but as a scientist, he can't help but get drawn into what Granville gets drawn into. That's what's happening at the Morgan Medicinal Laboratory in the Middle District, because the callous and brutal Emily and Travis Morgan are turning men into automata by using a virus they've developed. They want to take on the Great Houses, starting with House Norcross.

Caitlin shows up in the second story, 'Spirit of Rebellion', which shifts her from Boston to Philly, to stay with James Sampson and his niece Irene at their safe place for women. This is where she learns, courtesy of another medium called Frida Altman and her ghost friend Mary, that she's telekinetic and she can start to learn control. She also bumps into organised labour, because a strike has been called at Dobson's Textiles. Samuel Hunter gets involved too, but on the wrong side at the invitation of another Pinkerton, Harry Connelly.

She returns for the third and fourth stories which are standalones but also linked. 'Ghosts and Demons' deepens the childhood she spent with a ghost called Duncan, who got a brief moment in the first volume. Here, she's dreaming about him and a slave girl and a demon, so she heads back to Boston where Samuel is surprised to see her, given that there's now a thousand-dollar bounty on her head for illegal union organisation. To talk with Duncan, she has to go home but her mother finds her there and, as bitter as ever, plans to turn her over to the police, only for the demon to show up and interrupt their reunion.

That leads into 'The Book of Demons', which revolves even more around a strikes, this time the ones plaguing House Lowell. Jacob Lowell doesn't want to send in the Pinkertons to break them up but his wife Alice absolutely does. And her great uncle left her a book by Abraham Ulric that explains how to raise demons. They'd be a surefire way to put down a strike, even better than a battalion of Pinkertons. All she needs is a witch, which the demon in 'Ghosts and Demons' called Caitlin, so one kidnapping later, they're in business.

These are certainly smaller stories that what we read in the first book, but they're delightfully formed, setting up a story and then wrapping it up while deepening the series mythology and the individual members of the Boston Metaphysical Society, especially Caitlin, who has all the heart she had in the first book but grows in power as these stories run on, so becoming a truer version of herself. Her father would be proud. Her mother hates every single aspect of it and is only happy when she's tearing her daughter down with the help of whoever will offer it. She's a real piece of work.

The new story is 'The Ghost Collector' and it's enjoyable too; but it's so short that it's a glimpse of a bigger story rather than a complete story in itself, even if it does resolve what it sets up. I wonder if it'll serve as groundwork for what we'll see in another 'Boston Metaphysical Society' volume. As far as I'm aware, I've now reviewed all I have in comic or graphic novel form, but the series has continued into 'Mystery at Pike's Peak', with at least two of its four issues out. What else I have are a couple of novels and an audio drama, as Holly-Rosing has taken the series into quite a range of directions.

I think I'll dive into those novels next, because I certainly want to read more. Even beyond the first volume, this is quintessential steampunk, not just through the characters and setting, but through the way Holly-Rosing uses the genre to fix history, which is arguably what steampunk does when at its finest. We don't just glorify the Victorian era, we borrow what we like from it and fix what we don't, very deliberately. We don't live in a different time, we rewind ours back to a particular point where we can move forward again as we should have done to begin with.

The Victorian era is rightly known for the spirits of invention, exploration and philanthropy. We like those and want more of them. We want to return to the concept of beauty in creation, not necessarily by creating everything by hand but by using real materials and turning them into a thing of beauty not just function. There's a lot of good in the Victorian era. However, let's also introduce gender equality, civil rights and labour law, to name just three. Holly-Rosing tackles all of those here in these stories and it's notable that the demons are more tolerable than the human characters doing evil.

So, let's see if I can figure out an order for the prose 'Boston Metaphysical Society' work so that I can start those next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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