Writer: Mark Alan Miller; Joe R. Lansdale Artist: Piotr Kowalski Dark Horse is quite possibly the king of publishing comic adaptations of existing works, and they also have a penchant for pushing darker, off-kilter stories. The Steam Man is one of those stories that is both, adapting the dark, twisted old west of Joe Lansdale's steampunk story The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down. Steampunk and "weird west" are genres that are only seldom visited in comics, and when they are, it's often done in a very "checkbox" style, using antiquated language and technology simply because the story demands it. So how does Lansdale's story fare in comic form?

The premise of The Steam Man seems to be something of an Americanized version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where Alan Moore took all the great characters of 1890s British adventure literature and blended them into a cohesive work. Lansdale does something similar here–although he oddly can’t get away from the British genre either, despite putting it in an American frontier setting. The first issue doesn’t quite make this clear, but some unspecified event causes the world to go haywire and dangers from beyond invade Lansdale’s old west. The opening issue shows the aftermath of an invasion by the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and the beginnings of a battle with Wells’ Morlocks from The Time Machine. Solicitations suggest that we’ll be seeing threats from Burroughs’ John Carter novels, and the general tone of the story feels reminiscent of Stephen King’s Dark Tower works.

The solution to these threats is the titular Steam Man, who resembles the cult-hit hero of The Iron Giant but is, in fact, based on one of the earliest robot stories to appear in American literature. (Specifically, it comes from an old dime novel, The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward Ellis.) This is no autonomous robot, but essentially a man-shaped tank powered by Captain Beedle and his crew of monster hunters. Really, the story is less about the Steam Man itself and more about the team determined to destroy every martian and vampire that threatens their world.

The artistic effort on this book is admittedly impressive. Not only does Piotor Kowalski work an excellent amount of detail into these pages, he does an excellent job of conveying perspective in relatively tight spaces. The early recap pages showing how the alien invasions began convey an excellent sense of the Steam Man’s height and the dominance of the Martians, even though it’s confined to some pretty tight panels. Additionally, the coloring job is impressively appropriate for this story, relying heavily on browns to illustrate the wood-and-steel atmosphere of an earlier era, as well as reds to simultaneously portray a sunset and a creeping evil as the vampires come out to play. This kind of muted coloring worked well in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to convey an “older” feel to the story, as if we were picking up a timeworn copy of an old pulp novel. The same effect is believably achieved here.

The story is, unfortunately, not quite as strong. Miller and Lansdale are restricted by the limits of a 22-page comic, of course: this is a miniseries, so the story has to be chopped up and not convey everything in the first issue. The story is not off to a bad start: it does a fine job setting up the situation, the threat, and the hero’s quest. Steampunk and weird west fans will probably find something enjoyable here. However, I think it suffers from two flaws. One, it doesn’t spend a lot of time on how the world got to be this way. Granted, Landsdale has indicated in interviews that the story behind the otherworldly invasion will come later in the story. That’s fine, but the opening pages very quickly gloss over the Martian invasion and the creation of the Steam Man. A one-page origin story seldom works, particularly when your story isn’t at a national-level of consciousness. A #0 issue which explored more of the Steam Man’s creation might have helped.

Second, there isn’t much of a cast of characters here. The focus on Captain Beedle as an Ahab-like protagonist chasing a particular monster is fine. The majority of his crew is, however, a bunch of ciphers whose personalities never really develop. The exception is the lone Native American member of the team who plays that stereotypical role of the “wise Indian” who provides wisdom and otherwise pokes fun at the white man’s strange customs. This kind of story probably needs a Native American given the time and the genre, but it’d be nice if he did something other than an overdone part.

Still, this isn’t a total writeoff of The Steam Man. On its surface, it is a delightful mashup of multiple genres: aliens, westerns, giant robots, demons, and who knows what else is coming. With Halloween approaching, this might be a good diversion for readers who are looking for a bit of weird horror. I’ll recommend giving this a try with a caution that the book will need to work at really distinguishing itself from other weird western stories in future issues.

Rating: Three steam boilers out of Five.