In the first volume I mentioned the heroine is a half-mechanical steampunk Lara Croft; should have saved that description for this one, as the plot starts with a search for an ancient artifact in secret caverns in Africa. Unfortunately she’s hunting abominable snowmen in the Alps with dilettantes while this is going on, but after a brief stop in London she eventually gets out there.
The first thing shown is a jewel-encrusted mechanical messenger bird, which tells the reader what they’re dealing with right away, in case they hadn’t gotten it from the cover.
For all her baddassery and proneness to hiding her feelings, she’s surprisingly good with little girls. Unlike the previous collection, where the girl was mean to her and called her a liar, this one goes as far as to dress up as her. Even better, “I kicked him in his trinkets just like you taught me.”
But then I love every moment where she shows her human side, like the rare times she laughs, or says something like, “Cheeky little bugger.”
There’s a beautiful shot of the desert’s desolation, with Mechanika and Fred looking tiny. Even better is the one where they’re silhouetted against the sun that reminds me of Star Wars. As before, the artwork is superb and the highlight of the book.
At the end is a cover gallery where Mechanika again reluctantly plays model.
Didn’t like it quite as much as the first, but still wonderful, and well worth the read.
3.5 pushed up to 4/5

Not as good as the first one.

My general problem with Lady Mechanika, after two volumes, is that it doesn’t follow through. In the first volume she was decided on finding her maker. In this volume that story is completely forgotten and something completely different is happening on a different continent.

Not to mention that this is Lady Mechanika and the tablet of destinies, except that Lady Mechanika is not even in the story line with the tablet. So to call it like this would be something like “Aragorn and the One Ring”. I mean… uh… they are in the same world?

I firmly believe that this could have been much better, had the story been more condensed and had there been fewer sub-plots.

Much like the first volume, there is a recipe in which there is a male mastermind who has a bunch of generic soldiers and a female assistant, while Lady Mechanika on the other team finds unlikely friends and a mysterious guy who helps her from afar. Maybe if they hadn’t followed this already used story, it could have been much better.

I continued liking the art, however. It was very intricate and detailed, and also pleasant to look at. The more female characters come in, the more obvious it is that they are all the same when you remove the colors. But I will choose to disregard that and enjoy the general feel of the book which was pretty good.

I thought the first volume was good but this one ended up being so much better. I really enjoyed this story a lot more than the first one. I felt this one went a little bit away from the main story which is about Lady Mechanika trying to find out about her past and how she came to be part machine. I feel for this it ended up working out really well and being really enjoyable. In this story Lady Mechanika swore she would protect this little girl, Winifred, after an adventure went wrong with her parents. Winifred believes something has happened to her grandfather who went away on an expedition. Lady Mechanika begins investing into the news and her next journey begins.

I loved everything about this comic. I loved all the new characters we are introduced to. There is always so many interesting people that are coming and going but they all work well for the story. There was one character who was helping Lady Mechanika for a little while and then they had to go there separate ways. I was a little upset that just because I really enjoyed that character's presence and felt Lady Mechanika and this character worked well together. I'm sure there will be plenty of characters I end up growing attached to that will come and go.

Another thing about this comic that I love so much is the artwork. The artwork is so well done. I swear it just keeps getting better and better. It's so detailed and really makes you enjoy the story even more. All the costumes the characters wear look fantastic. I always can't get over how good everyone looks. If I was into cosplay I would cosplay as Lady Mechanika or someone in this series because of how well done the drawings are.

I am so thankful for being able to read volumes 1 and 2 of this series. I do plan on getting the 3rd one when it comes out in May. This is going to be a comic I'm going to tell people about. I feel it should be a lot more popular.

This is now one of my favorite graphic novels. The writing is sophisticated & the artwork is phenomenal! I can't wait for the next volume!

This book was definitely interesting! I cannot wait to see what the rest have in store. It was a really great follow up to the first volume. This is definitely one graphic novel series that I will follow closely

You know how much I loved Lady Mechanika Vol. 1 and told you that I immediately started to read Lady Mechanika Vol. 2. I was excited about reading this since I loved the first one so much, but maybe that was the problem, I expected the second one to be just as good.

The Graphics/ Artwork

The graphic was once again beautiful, I loved the gadgets and costumes as much as I did last time. Benitez, once again did a great job displaying Lady Mechanika and her allies, who were much more diverse than the last volume.

The Story

The story was a bit more slow than the last one and I didn't have much of a care about it in the beginning. I had to stop for a couple of days before I picked it back up again. The story picked up again towards the second half of the book which I really appreciated. This took the story away from Lady Mechanika's origin and introduced new characters. This story showcased the type of things our heroine usually does on a daily basis and that's help people. Considering how Lady Mechanika feels about herself, you can tell that everyone who meets her and knows her really thinks highly of her. There was a lot of speaking

Our Heroine

Lady Mechanika shows a lot more of her sensitive side in this book, and while the book showcased her fighting skills there was not as much this time instead showing that our heroine can use her brains almost as well as her brawns. This was a point on the books behalf.

Lady Mechanika is approached by a little girl who "contracts" her to go after her daddy which has disappeared. While doing so, someone kidnaps the little girl, and Lady Mechanika decides to go after the girl. In doing so, she gets to meet new allies and we get to meet alchemists and new adventures and astonishing visual art.

In this volume, the bad guys (gasp! germans! how original! not...) has the good guys working for them in order to obtain something called the "tablet of destinies". Manwhile, Lady Mechanika has manged to free the niece of one of the guys, and its on her way to free them. She meets some good guys and some good gals who reminded me a lot of Mad Max kinda people.

For my taste this volume relies more on the art, which is astonishingly good; than in the script, which is very similar to the one of the first volume: bad guys get the good guys, lady Mechanika meets some good guys which help her save the day, the end.

Even with all the great art and lizards and heroics this volume sadly kept failing at graving my interest... :-/

'Lady Mechanika Volume 2: Tablet of Destinies' by Joe Benitez and M. M. Chen is the second volume of the series, and I actually liked it a lot better than the first.

An explorer on a mission finds an incredible find. Enemies from Europe want this discovery. This time around Lady Mechanika gets wrapped up helping a young friend and an old friend. There is an adventure that takes place half way around the world. There are airships and mechanical birds. There are new enemies and allies.

The art by Joe Benitez is great, but this time around, the story is pretty good. The story felt a bit more cohesive, and the supporting characters felt a bit more rounded out than in the first volume. Lady Mechanika is still a bit cold, but that's to be expected of someone who is not fully human. I'm glad I gave this series another chance.

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.

Lady Mechanika Vol. 2: The Tablet of Destinies by M.M. Chen and Joe Benitez is a terrific graphic novel that should not be missed. It is like reading about a female Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider with a spin all its own. I loved the first volume and this volume is just as good. Love steam punk and this is top of the line there also. Fonts are easy to read, not like some graphic novels. Gorgeous illustrations. wonderful plot, and great characters that shine with personalities of their own. Love this series. Thanks Netgalley for letting me read this book!

Just as intriguing as Vol.1 Lady Mechanika is whisked away to the exotic world of Africa to recover weaponry from an ancient civilization that could spell doom for humanity. Throw in a few surprises and you'll be desperate for Vol.3! Great art as before with gripping action scenes and dialogue.

Love it. So beautiful, and great story. Recommend to everyone.

Fantastic artwork, though at times it is quite dark to see. The story was good.

The sequel of this steampunk adventure continues with more mystery and amazing art!

Another thrilling adventure for Lady Mechanika, this volume moves away from the quest to find out more about her origins and instead moves the action to Africa, where the hunt is on for The Tablet of Destinies, an ancient artifact that may hold the key to a highly destructive weapon. The plot has plenty of action and adventure to keep the reader entertained. The artwork is beautiful, despite some questionable manipulations of the female anatomy in some of the splash pages. There is a neat device used throughout of using a frame of cogs and gears to frame certain panels, and this works well in the context of the book as a whole.

I'm turning into a fan of Lady Mechanika....
This was at least as good as the first volume.
The storyline has been done before (numerous times), but it didn't feel stale at all. I liked the little winks to Indiana Jones and The Rocketeer.
I also like the fact that the 'damsel in distress' isn't a helpless creature in these stories, illustrated by Fred in this volume, who does the very best she can to escape her captors...

Lady Mechanika volume 2 is just as visually stunning as the first volume. Joe Benitez takes the complex characters you met in the first volume, on a totally different kind of adventure. I love that Benitez took this installment in a totally different direction. I loved the whole Indiana Jones adventure feel.

I also like many of the subtle details Benitez worked in, such as the private social club not allowing women. It gave the entire volume a very authentic feel, while still paying homage to steampunk fantasy and adventure.

Even better than the first one regarding the plot, and as fine as usual for the steampunk illustrations. I really hope there is going to be more of Lady Mechanika in the future!

Meglio del primo per quanto riguarda la trama e bello come al solito per le illustrazioni steampunk. Spero ci sará un futuro per Lady Mechanika!

THANKS TO NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

This is a fantastic series I love steampunk and I love this series. It is beautiful to look at and the story is a compelling adventure. I just love the juxtaposition of the steampunk and natural worlds there is such beauty in this art.

This combines volumes one through six of the original comic books and was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

In a beautifully wrought steam-punk world, the young daughter of a friend of Lady Mechanika's is in need of assistance, and the Lady responds. Her father has disappeared on a quest in Africa, and Mechanika sets out to find out what happened. Her quest is lent added urgency when the young girl is kidnapped. Mechanika meets a mysterious guy in London, who offers air transportation to Germany, where the kidnap victim is, and where lies another clue pointing to a specific site in Africa, so they set off there, only to crash in the desert and be taken prisoner by slavers!

Meanwhile in interleaved portions, we get the view from the other end of this quest, where the professor and his assistant are under pressure to decipher ancient scripts and uncover what the villains believe is an unprecedentedly powerful weapon.

The adventure was well-written, fast-moving, and full of action and feisty characters, including the distressed young girl at the start. The artwork was beautifully done and colored. That alone would have been sufficient for me to rate this graphic novel as a worthy read, but what bothered me too much here was what I let slip by in volume one, and it was the sexualization of all the female characters. When the blurb says, "Lady Mechanika immediately drops everything" it really means her clothes, and for me, this is what brought this particular volume down.

I found it disturbing, because Mechanika is fine regardless of her physical appeal or lack of same! She doesn't need to be rendered in endlessly sexual ways to be an impressive character. It's sad that graphic novel creators seem so completely ignorant of this fact. It's like they have this phobia that their female characters are going to be useless and entirely unappealing unless their sexuality is exploited. I'm not sure if this failing says more about the creators or about their readership, but either way it's obnoxious and I sincerely wish they had more faith in women than they evidently do. Do we really want to be writing comics which only appeal to people who see women as sex objects and very little else? Do we really want to be perpetuating a message as clueless as it is antiquated, and which offers only the sleazy equation that girls = sex = girls? I hope not.

This abuse was bordering on being abused in the first volume, but it was nowhere near as rife as it was here, so why they went full metal lack-it in this one is a mystery. Unlike in the first volume, it was all-pervasive here, with full-page in-your-face images of scantily clad adventurers bursting at what few seams they had, entirely impractically dressed for their quest.

I guess I should be grateful that the African woman who joined Lady Mechanika wasn't bare-breasted, but what I most noticed about Akina (other than the fact that she at least had a Congolese name) was that she looked like your typically white-washed model from Ebony magazine, not like the Congolese woman she supposedly was, whose skin would have been darker, and her face broader and less Nordic-nosed-white-westerner than this woman's was.

Why are comic book artists so afraid of showing the real world? Do they think real Congolese women are unappealing? Or is it that they feel they cannot sell the sexuality of a black woman (as opposed to a pale brown one)? If this medium is to grow-up and maintain relevance and meaning, then this kind of bias needs to be dispensed with urgently, because it's bone-headed at best, and racist at worst.

So, despite the appeal of the art in general, and the entertainment value of the story, I can't condone these practices, and I cannot rate positively a graphic novel which is so brazenly perpetrating abuses like this one did.

I found this one to be better than vol. 1. There were still downloading issues but again it didn't effect my opinion of the book. The story seems to flow a little better and I found myself invested. I definitely recommend this, especially for steampunk fans.