Read for the Graphic Novel Reading Challenge.
This collection takes place in a steampunk alternate world, somewhere in Europe, where unnamed disasters have changed the landscape so that most people are living in cities, and don’t often go out into the unprotected wastelands. A great family named the Heterodynes once ruled here, but they have disappeared, leaving a power vacuum.
And so we find our heroine, Agatha Clay, living with her adoptive parents in Beetleburg, where she is a lab assistant at the city’s university. She works with a doctor that has the Spark, the ability to tinker with the laws of physics and build fantastic machines. She tries building machines herself, but hers never seem to work.
It isn’t until Baron Wulfenbach comes to check up on the doctor’s work, and chaos with machinery ensues, that Agatha discovers that she just might have the Spark herself. She’s dragged back to the Baron’s castle (actually a dirigible), where her adventures begin.
This is a really fun story. I’ve left out a good deal more description that I could have throw in, but this particular collection really is just the set up for the stories to come, and some of those details are important to find out in the course of the book. What I will say is that this is a great steampunk tale, with great characters. My boyfriend has been trying to get me to read this comic for years, and I can now understand why.