Lady Mechanika: The Mechanical Menagerie #1 // Review
There’s a rather jaunty-looking police vehicle that is passing by. It’s a big and bulbous thing that moves along without any horses to pull it. There are a couple of people in the vehicle. One of them is a policeman. The other is a women with clockwork arms and legs. She’s not in any kind of trouble with the police. She IS about to be in some kind of trouble, however, in Lady Mechanika: The Mechanical Menagerie #1. Joe Benitez’s popular steampunk heroine saunters into a new adventure courtesy of guest writer Madeline Holly-Rosing and the art team of Joe Benitez and Martin Montiel.
Elsewhere Mr. Lewis, Fred and Allie have gone on an adventure of their own. Charlotte and her mother take note of a little top-hatted clockwork teddy bear. It reminds them of a place they once went to a zoo filled with clockwork animals known as Whimsies. A zoo filled with mechincal animals seems like just the place that Mr. Lewis, Fred and Allie might want to go to. Mr. Lewis is quite a gear-head with a mind for mechanics. He might like to see a place full of such whimsies and take the children there as well.
Holly-Rosing has a very warm and formal approach to storytelling. It’s not overly laden with unwanted exposition or long-winded backstory. It’s a simple and simply enjoyable opening to an adventure that seems to have quite a bit of darkness lurking around the edges of the central formality of it all. There’s quite a bit of energy and momentum that Holly-Rosing is building-up in the course of the first issue that suggests some kind of complexity in the events to come. It’s all quite charming. And there’s just enough hint at the coming darness to suggest something chilling lurking underneath it all.
Benitez and Montiel carry the sense of formality through the story. Layouts may look a bit tipped and slidden across the page at odd angles..but on the whole it’s all quite well-rendered and cleverly captured with mood, emotion and intonation clearly present on the page. Just as there is a darkness n the margins of the script...so too is there a darkness arund the edges of the art. There’s something subtly sinister as automatons and steampunk mechanical inhabits the margins of the world that Benitez has been conjuring to the page for quite some time now.
Holly-Rosing is doing a splendid job of establishing a new adventure for Lady Mechanika. The tone of the series is a perfect match for what has gone on before without attempting to crudely ape that scripting style of previous entries into the long-running indie comics series. The creator of The Boston Metaphysical Society is a perfect match for Lady Mechanika. The opening suggests a remarkably cozy adventure is on the horizon. Plot and art seem quite well-integrated on what should hopeflly be a very, very satisfying series of issues with Lady Mechanika.
