Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Joe R. Lansdale and Mark Alan Miller
Artist: Piotr Kowalski
Editor: Daniel Chabon
Release Date: 16 December 2015
Price: $3.99

Ah, memories are made of The Steam Man #3! When I was just a nipper, giant mechanical robots were all the rage. Huge towering constructs controlled by ‘little’ men inside their heads. Of course, these characters are the most unlikely, unwieldy and totally destructive creations ever thought up by the fevered brain of a comic book scribe. Where would you hide them for a start? Spare parts would be a nightmare and don’t even get me started on property damage. They’d be sued by everyone and their brother as soon as they took one step. And for a skyscraper tall hero you have to have an equally large villain. It’s a recipe for total disaster. But we loved them even though they eventually fell out of favour.

Now Joe R Lansdale is trying for a re-boot of the genre with The Steam Man. Lansdale avoids the problems of big city settings by having his clanking Goliath striding through a deserted wilderness and that giant antagonist I mentioned earlier, well, in The Steam Man #3 it’s a sentient pile of lumber called, with no prizes for originality, Sticks. This walking log pile is set upon our intrepid monster hunters by the mysterious Dark Rider, taking advantage of the fact The Steam Man has come a cropper in the wilderness and is undergoing emergency repairs.

The Steam Man #3 is almost entirely taken up with the giant robot equivalent of changing a flat tire. And that concept is just loony enough to snag your interest. However, more action and less roadside repairs are needed to makeThe Steam Man #3 really stand out from the crowd.

Reviewer: Gary Orchard
Reviews Editor: Steve Hooker