Miss Endicott v2: Summer Steampunk Blockbuster

Knitting needles aren’t enough to stop a giant mechanical steampunk beast from destroying the city.

Nope, it’ll take more than that.

Thankfully, the recently returned mother of Miss Prudence Endicott is carrying a Really Big Gun!

Credits Crawling Through the Wreckage

What’s Going On?

At the end of volume 1, Prudence’s dearly departed mother, Marguerite, came back from the dead. Well, she wasn’t really dead, obviously. She fell in battle against a mysterious cloaked enemy with a robotic metallic face. She fakes her own assumed death and waited for the right time to make her dramatic re-appearance.

The underground folk are The Forgotten, the villain is a classic mad man who wants to destroy the city so that it might be reborn in a better image, and Prudence needs to reconcile her mother’s sudden re-appearance with the fact that they don’t get along that well.

Oh, and her charge is still being held by The Forgotten. That one local guy still thinks he’s destined to marry her. The conciliator’s bookkeeper is a brooding mess, but might have the final key to the puzzle.

But is it all too late? Is the destruction that’s about to rain down upon the city inevitable? How can Marguerite and Prudence beat a weapon of unimaginable size and strength?

An Impressive Second Volume

The tone of the book changes a bit in this volume. I really liked the more cheerful, Can Do attitude of Prudence in the first book. Her mother takes over the second volume and acts like The Punisher or, more likely, The Paladin: Have Gun, Will Travel. Prudence needs a few pages to recover from the revelation of her mother’s reappearance and how the deck is suddenly stacked against her.

It’s a natural turn in the story, though. It’s where the book has to go. Everything in the first volume sets up the cascade of dominoes that fall in this book. Derrien’s script is smart that way. He ties up all his loose ends and includes a dozen different characters along the way in the main plot. Some serve smaller purposes or may, in fact, be little more than comic relief, but it all comes together.

This is, in some ways, a great summer blockbuster. The main villain’s plans are uncovered. The machine we saw being built in the last book is complete. It’s Victorian era steampunk destined to destroy everything unless someone acts quickly.

Silly Marguerite Endicott thinks that involves a bigger gun. She’s entertaining in her dry, violent way. She’s like a Golden Girl Action Hero. It’s a perfect foil for Prudence’s displays as the conciliator as being a deal maker and a political power house, capable of talking people into just about anything in a way that feels like a win/win.

Marguerite takes over the book through her sheer force of personality and her determination. But you know she’s not looking at this the right way and she’ll need more help. The question is, will that help come in time, and will she recognize it when she sees it? Old people can be very stubborn, you know….

It’s an interesting conflict in characters between mother and daughter here, though I do miss Prudence’s confidence from the first book. It’s subdued in this first book while she gathers her thoughts at her mother’s routine. She quickly becomes a more active character again, but there’s still a new hesitation she feels against accepting the role as conciliator. She has a plan, but she’s so sad…

Thankfully, she snaps out of it and gets back to work, resuming her work, maintaining her priorities, and helping to battle back the big bad guy who’s become a seriously destructive force in relatively short order. This book moves fast.

In the end, I am very impressed with what Derrien did in his script to move all the puzzle pieces into the right place in a way that feels very natural. He advances all the plots at once, building them all up to the same crescendo. It’s a great bit of plot construction.

More Great Fourquemin Compositions and Storytelling

Fourquemin’s panel compositions are just as strong in the second volume as they were in the first. It’s a little spottier in the front half, as some matters of plot don’t lend themselves to the more splashy compositions, though they do work well for some great sequential narrative deliveries.

Fourquemin can tell a story, not just through the way his characters interact with their environment and where the artist places his virtual camera, but also in the way he illustrates moments in series of panels, often for comedic effect.

One of those cases happens a little later in the book when the villain is turning on his machine. I love this tier of panels. It strikes me as almost being a parody of all those “Suit Up!” sequences you’ve seen in countless superhero comics and movies. Every Batman movie had at least one of them in the 90s – it’s where the Bat Nipple came from.

I also love the trick he pulls in these two panels:

It’s almost dizzying how he starts with a low angle panel and the villain racing down the stairs towards the reader, followed by a high angle shot looking down the stairs as his descent continues. You almost don’t notice it, but at first glance it looks like one continuous shot. The stairs practically reach across the panels without a break. But they do. It’s completely different angles. The camera floats up a little higher between the panels

The effect is to add drama and speed to the appearance of a villain running down the stairs. Your mind fills in the rest, with the help of gravity.

I could spotlight a dozen more instances of Fourquemin’s storytelling, but just read the book and experience them for yourself. Pay close to attention to what he does in every panel when you go back to read the book a second time. You’ll find some neat tricks on display.

Recommended?

Absolutely. I like how this book brought together all of the characters and plot lines from the first volume and made them count. When things escalate and the danger ramps up, everybody plays a part, and Derrien’s script expertly weaves them all together. And Fourquemin, once again, shows a mastery of panel composition and clean storytelling.

It’s a fun book with some likable characters, a strong villainous plan with real consequences, and beautiful art. That’s what I look for in a comic, most of the times. Snap this one up!

It’s available digitally on Comixology. It will be available in print in October 2021 through Cinebook. (See link above.)

Bonus Panel

Am I the only one who looks at this panel that thinks, “That’s a great Jason Howard drawing?”