Last month, I picked up Aetheric Mechanics, a graphic novella from writer Warren Ellis and penciler Gianluca Pagliarani. I read it within a few weeks of Neil Gaiman’s “A Study In Emerald”, and some comparisons are inevitable: Gaiman and Ellis are both writers who work in multiple disciplines (starting from comics and moving into novels and screenplays), and each of their stories could be described as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. (In the case of Ellis’s, the elevator pitch would be “Holmes gone steampunk”; for Gaiman’s, “Holmes meets Lovecraft”.) I say “could be”, though, because neither one stops there. To go into exactly how would, I’d say, spoil chunks of the plot for each, and both are plotted tightly enough that their structure only comes into full view upon the story’s conclusion.

Aetheric Mechanics takes as its starting point the arrival of its narrator in London, 1907; four pages in, he boards what can only be described as a flying platform, and it’s plainly clear that this 1907 is not the one we know. The narrative likewise blends elements familiar to anyone who’s read  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories with more jarring moments, as elements that might have seemed familiar are reimagined in a slightly but significantly altered context — all of which build until the story, and its central mystery, reach its conclusion. It’s a solid, nicely paced work, giving equal space to a sense of wonder and the gut-wrenching instability on its flip side.

One aside: between this and the Mountain Goats’ Heretic Pride, Sax Rohmer is having a banner year as cultural reference points go.