Cover Image: Lady Mechanika V.2

Lady Mechanika V.2

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Member Reviews

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.

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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...

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The story begins in Africa where they hunt down a bigfoot for sport. Returning to London, she encounters a little girl who warns her about the danger that someone tried to kidnap her. Mechanika assists her and finds a dead lady in the place they head in the futuristic Mechanika city, called the city of tomorrow.

Germans do kidnap her and get away after a chase leaving Lady Mechanika in the dust.She begins her search for the girl by unraveling first who has kidnapped her and where they take her and why.

The entire work got the same steampunk look and a taste of Indiana Jones, with the lingering feel of the Japanese manga comic called black butler. the mystery solving intertwined threaded story is gripping and leaves me on the edge of my seat unwilling and unable to put it down.

What I loved the most that the spotlight on the little girl showed off her in a girly dress first, but her name was Wilfred, Fred on short and she totally rocked a guy's outfit too. after she is rescued they head off to Africa to go and find Fred's grandfather who left on an expedition months ago and never returned.

Diverse characters are also well represented in it, in the portrayal of Akina, who also has the vitiligo skin condition.

at the end of the comic the readers can get a little inside of the drawing room witch is always a really beloved feature I see in comics.

Naturally I give 5/5 stars recommendation to this Comic since the art is amazing and the diversity of it all just soothed my soul.

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Just like vol 1, the artwork and story is amazing, and, as always, Lady Mechanika is a badass! The story is gripping, fun, and fast-paced. I think I might even like it better than vol 1. Do not miss this series!

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