Lady Mechanika (Aspen)

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shevek
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Although you might be forgiven for not having heard of Michael Turner's (RIP) iconic indie company Aspen Comics (named after their most famous title character, the super sexy girl from the ocean, Aspen from the Fathom comic)..it would be hard to imagine you walking regularly into a comics shop and not having already heard of Lady Mechanika, a book with a strikingly distinctive steampunk art style, written *and* drawn by Joe Benitez (and I love when a book is the vision of basically one person, because it's the most uncompromising position when done well).

I would say that despite the artistically ornate modern-day approach, ultimately this book has a 90s bad-girl feel to it, which is great. The reason why I say this is because Benitez is overwhelming known for his 90s-era work for Top Cow/Image on books like The Darkness, Magdalena, and Witchblade, which all perfectly exemplify that bad-girl style. He's also drawn for Aspen's magical/dragon series Soulfire and some DC stuff.

So, the premise of Lady Mechanika is that she is a woman who's the sole survivor of a 19th century serial killer. She wakes up with no arms and legs, and winds up rebuilding herself with mechanical limbs like a Victorian Jaime Sommers. But she also has amnesia about who she is. So she goes around solving supernatural crimes (the feel is quite a bit like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as you might imagine) and trying to find clues about her identity.

For the era of the late 1870s, she is a very liberated and libertine woman, and Benitez basically depicts her as a steampunk conventioneer's wet dream: all busty, with tight leather corset, tight pants, and high-heeled thigh boots..as close as you can get to a 19th-century version of lycra-spandex. She's a sexy superheroine for her time..but I think because she's not really overly objectified, the book has a pretty large female readership and she gets cosplayed a fair bit. It's basically like Benitez retconned the 19th century and filled it with leather-clad, goggles-wearing dominatrices. Hey, why not?

Here are some examples. I would bet there are some fans of this series on this forum. In fact I'm surprised nobody's tried to do a fetish parody..it seems pretty ripe for that.

Apparently, Lady Mechanika really does not like to be touched. Anyway check these graphics out:

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The evil Commander Katherine Winter
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Putting on that fantastic sexy costume piece by piece:
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This is a 19th century fetish getup if I've ever seen one:

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Anyway, you get the idea. Seems like Benitez took a break with LM (the issues above came out in 2010) then came roaring back in 2015 with The Tablet of Destinies, and 2016 with The Lost Boys of West Abbey and the latest mini-series, El Dama De La Muerte.

Has anyone read the three more recent mini-series and what you do think?
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