Why it matters
It gave American comics a visually dense, explicitly named steampunk work at the turn of the millennium.
Calling a comic Steampunk is either admirable confidence or an invitation for the genre police to arrive with notebooks. Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo chose confidence, then filled the page with enough machinery to keep the notebooks busy.
Steampunk, created by writer Joe Kelly and artist Chris Bachalo, was published through WildStorm's Cliffhanger imprint. Its title makes no attempt at coyness. This is a comic that plants its flag directly in the genre, then fills the page with velvet, wire and revolutionary fury.
The series is set in a dark alternative world of oppression, machines, grotesque invention and revolt. Its steampunk identity is visual and political: elaborate hardware, Victorian nightmare textures, class violence and bodies caught in systems that treat machinery as destiny. It is not genteel brass adventure. It is more feverish than that.
Bachalo's art is central. The pages have an ornate, cluttered, kinetic quality that makes the world feel overbuilt and unstable. This is useful because steampunk can become too polished if everyone buffs the goggles too long. Steampunk prefers mess, density and bodily weirdness. The machine is not only outside the body; it threatens to become part of it.
Joe Kelly's story gives the visual excess a revolutionary frame. The genre often works best when its machinery is connected to power, not merely decoration. Here, invention and oppression are linked. The world looks extravagant because its systems are extravagant in their cruelty.
The comic sits naturally beside The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Sebastian O, though it has a different temperament. Moore and O'Neill turn Victorian literature into a shared grotesque universe. Morrison and Yeowell give us decadent dandy violence. Kelly and Bachalo push toward bio-mechanical revolt and spectacle. Together they show how lively comics steampunk had become around the Canon-Forge Age.
The title also matters culturally. By 2000, steampunk was no longer only a retrospective label for a few odd novels. It was becoming something comics could name directly and sell as an atmosphere, a visual promise and a mode of rebellion. That does not make the comic representative of all steampunk, but it does make it a useful marker of the word's growing public life.
Its bio-mechanical imagery gives it a harsher edge than purely brass-and-goggles work. Bodies, machines and political oppression seem to press into one another. This is one of the field's recurring questions: does machinery liberate people, or does it simply give power new tools for making bodies useful?
Readers may find the series heavy going if they prefer clean panel storytelling and lighter adventure. Bachalo's density is part of the experience. The page often feels packed, hot and overpressured, which suits a world where revolution has to fight through both machinery and nightmare.
Is it really steampunk?
Yes. The title is not bluffing. Steampunk is core comics steampunk, with alternate Victoriana, machinery, rebellion, body-horror edges and class pressure. It may not be the easiest entry point, but it is firmly in the engine room.
Readers who prefer tidy world-building may find it visually and narratively excessive. Readers who want steampunk comics to be ambitious, messy, angry and visually overloaded should find it an important landmark. Some engines purr. This one snarls and leaves oil on the carpet.
Find it
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