My acquaintance Mr. Greggy has a great respect for all things steampunk.  With this in mind, I bought Warren Ellis‘s Aetheric Mechanics.  Featuring Ellis’s name, the alluring title, and a flying battleship Winsor McCay would have been proud of,  the cover led me to think Aetheric Mechanics would be a fine comic treatise on steampunk.

Yet the novella didn’t appeal to me.  First, there was art.  No expense was spared on it, though its painstaking style, with its weak lines, made me hunt for objects of interest in each scene.  Still, early 20th-century England couldn’t be drawn much better.  The bustle of the streets is well captured, with minor steampunk elements side by side with horse-drawn carriages, much like the early automobile shared the streets with its four-legged predecessor.

I didn’t like the story until the last few pages, but those last pages revealed why AM was filled with dialogue aping a Sherlock Holmes episode.  There were a Sax Raker and a Dr. Watcham, replete with astounding rapid-fire deductions, eccentricities, and a plot picking up after Holmes — uh, I mean Raker — went over the falls with Professor Moriarty — uh, I mean “The Man Who Was Not There”.  In fact, everything is almost totally derivative.

But… Ellis does this for a purpose, and he’s within his rights for doing so.  Strange? Yes.  Highly creative, and the mark of a writer used to crafting stories within stories? That too.  This comic takes storytelling to an art form that can easily be glossed over by someone lacking literary analytical skills.  Ellis does a decent job setting up a pseudo-Holmesian scene, complete with period dialogue. To a comic reader who’s never experienced Sherlock Holmes before, the dry dialogue will read more amusingly.   But to an Arthur Conan Doyle aficionado, the text doesn’t do more than appeal with a few distracting echoes.  Again, it’s intentional.

As for steampunk, a few terms and concepts are weakly worked in, like cavorite, and apergy, and aetheric mechanics, but as the work concludes, things travel more toward the Twilight Zone, borrowing Einstein’s street cred for a plot twist that only happens in B movies, comics, and paperbacks.  I’ll have to try dropping a PS3 in a hadron collider and see what happens sometime; maybe this is why so many people will continue to be afraid of atom smashers and their kin.

Characters: B-. Nothing we haven’t seen before until the last few pages: “Sherlock Holmes”, “Dr. Watson”, a “brassy pseudo-Victorian lady”.  True, Holmes was never the life of the fraternity, and imitating his speech is daunting for anyone, but I had hoped that the story’s premise would have been chaotic enough to allow a more schizophrenic representation of this imposter detective.  While Raker conversed with Watcham within his chambers, it seemed as if very little of the final explanation had been applied.

Art: A-. The effort and detail are there, but too undifferentiated for my tastes.  Almost everyone in the city has a hat and mustache, making it a chore to find Dr. Watcham.  Perhaps I am an ugly American for seeing it this way, but after being spoiled by the synergetic art of Lucifer, it leaves me wanting a spark of Clowes-style emotive closeups or a dash of shading.

Story & Dialogue: B. Rawther dry; it’s a comic novella about people imitating Sherlock Holmes.  Lots of flavor text geared toward the Baker Street fanman, but I find myself missing the blue-collar bite of Golly or the constant zingers of Knights of the Dinner Table.  To quote Mark Twain: “eschew surplusage”.  I appreciated the main story concept a little better few days after first reading, but I think the hints could have been a little more flamboyant.

Color: N/A (Black and white).

Originality: B+. Ellis had to copy a master work of English literature; whether the reader can forgive him or will just bore through the story is about a 25-75 proposition.  To a person who delights in having every last word in ultra-niche forums, it is likely the former; to one raised in the shallow wading pool of pop culture, the borrowed concepts will seem put through a hydraulic press and dropped out sausage style.

Excitement: D+. One extended office chat, a lot more talking, an aerial bombardment and one very cool flashback.  Things ramp up in the last few pages, enough that the book could have been just those few pages without much editing or any major loss.  Re-read it, and your rediscovery of a few glossed-over details will bring the excitement level up to a C.  Kudos to the artists who devised the one-panel steampunk nightmare.

Overall: C+. The fact it’s a “graphic novella” should have been enough warning; it tried very ambitiously to achieve critical mass, but the nature of the story hobbled the enjoyment of it till the very end.  A shame because it could have been much more.  Perhaps, given a rework, it may someday be.