2 out of 5

When I like something, I guess I’m not as in need of internet-support, and so don’t go trawling the world of reviews for empathizers.  But when I think something’s shite, and I’m sort of surprised that it turned out as shitey as it did, I look to my digital public to rally behind my cries of shite-ness.  And a lot of the times I end up not finding those rallyers, and then I’m super confused: have people not read comics before?  How are they giving this shite a pass?

Shite in question: The Steam Man.  A series which got off to a pretty good start of super-compressed high-concept horror / sci-fi mash-up, then went toddling over head first – like its titular giant – in issue three and never seemed to figure out what it wanted to do thereafter.

We start off in a steam-punky 1899, watching a tophat-wearing, 4-man crewed, walking robot gargantuan stalk across a snowy plain, oddball creatures here and there, before our captain narrator jumps us back 5 years to tell of the construction of Steamy for the purpose of fighting off H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds buggers.  Yay, they won, but dem aliens tore open a door to Hell, which is where their taskmaster is from, and so here we are now, on the path of “The Dark Rider.”  Piotr Kowalski’s art has a perfect grace to it for the book’s initial tone: light with his figures to balance out the hatched detailing of the setting and surroundings, and Kelly Fitzpatrick’s gloriously splashes of reds and browns sell Hell as well as the extra planets in the sky and monsters dotting the fore- and backgrounds.  And Miller – a preferred scripter over Lansdale’s heavy hand – keeps the latter writer’s cheeky dialogue, so the story has a nice balance between step-by-step plotting a Big Idea shenanigans.  Things are outlandish, but in a good way.  Issue 2’s rushed background on The Rider doesn’t have enough time to convince us of the threat, but it does smush in more Wells references, which is fascinating.

And then that’s about it.  The Steam Man and The Dark Rider.  The art continues to be excellent, but the story just tanks: Steamy falls over, and it’s never clear why its construction was ever a good idea.  Dark Rider has an army of apes, okey dokey, and a demon horse, but no sense of motivation beyond that he’s supposed to be evil.  Steamy falls over again.  There’s a “rift” (a.k.a. a deus ex machina), and deaths without any impact because these characters were only ever meant to be shells to staff this hollow machine, and then it ends.  Zero stakes on either side of the equation.  Naught but an interesting idea that ends up going nowhere (and drawing from source material for no apparent reason), buoyed by some needed-better-material-to-show-it-off art.