Lady Mechanika The Complete Volume 1: The Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse created, written and drawn by Joe Benitez is super creative! The story is amazing, the plot is great, characters are well developed, and the graphics are stunning! This is a graphic novel and it goes above and beyond most graphic novels. The graphics are large and gorgeous! Wonderful colors, clear, and fonts match the steampunk theme. Text is easy to read also. This is a novel in every sense of the word- long, great plot, twists and turns, great characters, and suspense/action/adventure. For this author to write and draw all this is really awesome, that is real talent! Thanks NetGalley for a chance to read this amazing book!

This graphic novel is really well done, but I was a little bit disappointed in the plot and the dialogues. This doesn't mean that I'm looking forward to read the second installment in this series as I have a big love for steampunk whatever the form it takes.

Questa graphic novel é disegnata benissimo, anche se i dialoghi e la trama in generale non sono proprio il massimo. Questo non significa che io non leggeró il secondo volume, anzi, considerato il mio amore per tutto ció che é steampunk.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

YES!!! I am in L.O.V.E with this series. There is no way around it, I will have to read more!

Criticism first just to get it out of the way. Sometimes clothing would be torn in one frame then not in the next. Literally only noticed because adobe digital editions is so so so soso slow. I really have to stop requesting books that only do it in this format, but I don't know how to tell beforehand.... I digress. I also thought it could get a little wordy and the text was small -- again this might have only been an issue because I was reading on my laptop.

Okay, good stuff. I absolutely LOVE~ steampunk and this comic does it so well. The illustrations are beautiful and I literally wish I could own all of Lady Mechanika's outfits. All of them. I feel like the plot is moving along at a good pace and even with this current arc being over, there are still many more mysteries to be solved. This is a comic so beautiful I really wish I could hold it in my hands and just stare at the drawings...

Do I recommend this? HECK YES! If you like steampunk, you HAVE to give this a try. If you like sci-fi and/or comics I think this might be worth checking out. So far, I think this might be okay for young adults and up.

'Lady Mechanika Volume 1: Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse' by Joe Benitez is the type of rip-roaring adventure I like. I'm not much of a fan of the good girl type art, but I can set that aside and recommend this for fans of steampunk.

Lady Mechanika is a sort of construct. You can tell when she takes her goggles off and you see her red glowing eyes. She is fairly smart and an adventurer in this version of a steampunk London in the age of Victoria.

When a similar mechanical lady is found dead, it sets Lady Mechanika in motion. Perhaps if she learns about this young lady, it will lead her to the person who made her. Where it does lead her is to a gypsy circus with some odd characters and to a fancy party aboard an airship.

There are lots of pin up style shots of Lady Mechanika, and she seems to be a bit underdressed for the Victorian era, but maybe not for this alternate machine type one. Regardless of this, the art is quite good in this series, and the story kept me turning pages. I've got volume 2 up to read soon.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Benitez Productions, Diamond Book Distributors, and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

This gathers volumes 1 through five of the single comic books and was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had a better experience with this one than I did with the second volume of the series, which I requested at the same time as this. The steam-punk world is rendered and colored beautifully, and the story was an intriguing and entertaining one, well told. Lady Mechanika is a cyborg - inasmuch as such things went in Edwardian times. I am by no means a fashion expert, not even in modern times, so I may have this wrong, but the styles didn't look Victorian to me, notwithstanding what the blurb says. That's not a problem, just an observation. I rather liked them as it happens. Joe Benítez and Peter Steigerwald could probably make a living as fashion designers if they ever tire of comic books!

Lady Mechanika is quite evidently someone's creation, but her memory is impaired, so her origins are as much of a mystery to her as they are to us. I am wondering if the guy she meets in volume two (reviewed separately) might have some knowledge of that, but it remains a mystery in that volume, too! Her mechanical parts are her limbs, and her 'title' was given to her by the tabloids. Her backstory isn't delivered here or in volume two, so we don't know how she came to be a private investigator and adventurer. I was interested in this story because of the upcoming (as of this writing) live-action remake of the Ghost in the Shell movie, which is a favorite of mine. I'm looking forward to the new one.

When the story opens, the Lady meets the 'Demon of Satan's Alley' which appears to be some sort of a human animal hybrid and which isn't a demon but which has been demonized by the public. Some crazy guys blunder in and kill it before Lady Mechanika can talk to it enough to maybe find out what it knows of its past - and maybe of hers, too. She's not best pleased by that. Soon she's off adventuring and trying to track down this creator of mechanical melanges. In this regard, the story has some resemblances to Ghost in the Shell, including the overt and unnecessary sexuality.

There were some technical issues with this as there are with all graphic novels which have not yet clued themselves in to the electronic age. In BlueFire Reader, which is what I use on the iPad, the pages are frequently enlarging themselves to fill the screen which means a portion of the page is curt off, since the iPad screen and the comic book page size are out of whack compared with each other, the comic book being a little too 'tall and slim' for the 'stouter' table format.

This is something I can work with, but whenever there's a double-page spread, it means turning the tablet from portrait view to landscape and back again for the next page. This isn't such a hassle except that the tablet is self-orienting, so the page is constantly swinging around like a loose yard-arm on a boat at sea.

One image was a portrait-oriented double-page spread, and it was so set-up that I could not orient this to view it since the image always swung to the wrong orientation no matter what i did! The only way to actually see it as intended by the creators was to orient it as a landscape, then carefully lay the pad flat and rotate it while it stayed flat; then the image was view-able in all its glory, but this only served to highlight one other problem - the minuscule text. It's far too small for comfortable reading. I know comics are all about imagery, but for me, unless there's also a decent story, all you really have, is a pretty coffee-table art book. It seems to me that artists and writers might consider collaborating a bit more closely on legibility!

This is going to become increasingly a problem as the old school comic fraternity struggles to repel all technology boarders. Personally, I prefer e-format to print format as a general rule, if only because it's kinder to trees, which are precious. The sentiment is especially poignant when we read horror stories to the effect that 80,000 copies of Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom had to be pulped because of typos. At 3 kg of carbon emissions per book, that's not a charmed system. You would need to read a hundred books for every one print book to balance the manufacturing pollution of an e-reader against that of the print version, but then your ebook comes over the wire at very little cost to the environment, whereas the print book has to be transported to you, even if only home from the store in your car.

But you can also argue the other side, which is that reading devices employ petrochemical products, and precious and toxic metals, and probably contains 'conflict' minerals which were mined in the Congo (curious given the location for volume two in this series!); however, you can argue that a multi-use device, such as a tablet or a smart phone, can be employed as an ebook reader without contributing to even more environmental carnage than it might already have caused. On the other page, you can also argue that a book never needs upgrading (as countless young-adult Jane Austen rip-offs have conclusively proven), will last for years, and can be recycled when done with. So you pays your greenbacks and you hopes you get the green back.

For this volume, I think it worth reading in any format, and I recommend it if you can overlook the sexploitation which is relatively restrained in this volume.

The art and story are both entertaining. I had a few problems with everything downloading but that didn't effect my thoughts on the book overall. It's something I will add to my collection.

Steampunk, people with mechanical parts, airships... Set in the British Empire, presumably in the Victorian Era.

Plot:

I found the plot pretty confusing at first. Also it felt as if I was missing part of the story from an epilogue or previous volume. I did not find the dialogues interesting and lost interest in the story fairly quickly. But that's on me, it wasn't really my thing.

Nice little cliffhanger at the end.

Artwork:

Nice page-sized panels at the beginning of every chapter. The colour scheme is pretty dark, to the point that I sometimes could not make out enough details for my liking. But generally nice.

The larger tableaus were a little fuzzy.

I liked the costumes of the female characters. Proportions / anatomy was well done, despite some oversized boobs. Especially the cover art reminded me of pinups.

Bottomline, it was ok, but did not grab me. Nice artwork. 3 mechanized stars.

I received this free e-copy from the publisher/author via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review, thank you!

I enjoyed the art and story a lot. The pages felt a bit cluttered at points, it's a wordy comic and the steampunk setting and costumes, although beautiful and detailed, are a bit too much in certain scenes. I loved seeing the machinery and weapons as well, and the mood and settings were amazing. The plot is mysterious and full of action; the fight scenes were my favorite, but the suspense is what kept me reading.

I loved Mechanika's character since issue #0, in which we see both her badassery hunting monsters and her soft side taking care of them when she realizes it's an intelligente being. What I didn't love so much is her design. So, okay, although I might like boobs as much as any straight dude I'm obviously not the target audience for this. But seriously, her boobs-waist-hips ratio is just ridiculous. And it's not just her, is any young female character. So I was more than a little uncomfortable with some of the scenes and impossible postures. (Also, no one wears low waisted pants anymore. They are tacky. Please find another way for your characters to show some skin, because hipbones have been a no-no since 2001. And I don't care this is a steampunk story. Still tacky.)

In general it was enjoyable, but not the kind of series I usually get into.

this is a wonderfully written steampunk storyline, teamed with beautiful artwork! If you're a fan of steampunk, this is for you!

Absolutely freaking fantastic! Amazing artwork, characters, and story. Lady Mechanika is a badass and one of my new favorite heroines!

In the first pages we learn of lady Mechanika, a half human half mechanical woman who remembers nothing of how she came to be this amalgamation of human and machine. She is unique on the world, but soon "replicas" begin to appear, but they don't seem to last very long. She begans to follow their trail, but it runs cold as the last girl appears to be dead from gunshots injuries, and recovering her body only leads to encounters with people from Mechanika's past.

Her travels following more information on the mechanical girl puts her on contact with the Circus Romani, made up of a bunch of people who are distrusted because they are different (but who share the same distrust towards others), but who are gonna end to be crucial in helping her in her forthcoming adventures, as she ends up striking some kind of friendship with Sr. Gitano, who turns out to be the father of the deceased mechanical girl, called Seraphina.

I love the steampunk flare of this graphic novel, the little girl who wears pants and openly defies Lady Mechanika thinking she is an "imposter", the consistency of all the characters, how bad the bad characters are (even if some of them are come forward quite as "nazies"), and I think overall this is a very entertaining lecture.

With its gorgeous and sultry illustrations and its hip steampunk storyline, Lady Mechanika is a graphic novel that makes for an excellent read.  Part woman, part machine, the beautiful Lady Mechanika knows nothing of what came before her awakening.  Who she is and where she comes from are questions that lie behind her every act.  Her exploits are legendary, but is she the person she is believed to be?  The inventor Lewis provides her with the technology that aids her in her cases and provides valuable backup.  

Lady Mechanika is a fun, action packed adventure with monstrous technology and vivid illustrations.  Often over the top, the first volume of this steampunk series is easily enjoyed by teens and adults.

4/5

I received a copy of Lady Mechanika V. 1 from the publisher and netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

—Crittermom