Issue 3 was my first issue of the Lady Mechanika series and while there is the recap page at the very beginning, I still felt a bit lost starting in on the story with this third issue. But with that said, this issue was so pondering and full of blustery word balloons it felt like I didn't need to catch up on the previous chapters because I don't think anything really important happened this issue regarding the overall story. I got the feeling I would need to read the next issue just to see what this series is all about. 

When I do reviews I don't pull punches, I don't play it nice because I'm given free comics for review purposes. I tell you exactly what I think after having read said comic. So having said that read and if you want my honest opinion in a more fleshed out way...

What's obvious from this issue is that the main character Lady Mechanika is searching for a companion/friend of hers a woman much like herself, half machine/half human. She's somehow traced the clues to a Gypsy Circus and a standard cheesy melodramatic comic book misunderstanding battle between characters happens and after the dust has settled and hands shook, the circus folk and Mechanika figure out little as to the trail of her missing companion. So Mechanika follows another trail leading directly to the big bad character of the series (so I am assuming), a character by the name of Blackpool. By the end of the issue Mechanika with her male compatriot/assistant/inventor head into the big city intent on a confrontation with Blackpool. 

So that's the gist of the story as far as I could tell. The story overall as far as it affected me kinda sucked. Maybe because this third issue was kind of a bridge issue or a middle part of the story, but I was so very bored reading this issue. The first thing I noticed was all the worthless dialogue. There were so many word balloons. One thing thats so special about comics is that the art can tell the story almost as much as the dialogue. A lot of current writers just fill up a page with way too much dialogue or text. I don't know why they do it, but I think the modern comic writer has to understand that the art is what sells a comic first and most of the time. Let it tell the story too rather than just adding illustrations to the words. What's so bewildering or maybe not so much, is that the writer is also the artist on the series. I've seen this kind of occurence before where a person mostly known for his art, as it is for this series (Joe Benitez), tends to kill his own art with way too much dialogue. I don't know the psychological reasons why this happens, but I've seen it before. 

So my advice to Mr. Benitez is chill with the dialogue, let your beautiful art tell the story and your words fill in the important details where its needed. After awhile I just stopped reading the word balloons because it was just drowning me in an effluence of pointless exposition. So I just looked at the art and while most of the time I could still understand what was going on, there were pages where it was just pretty pictures filling the pages around the word balloons. 

So no, I have no interest in reading another issue of this series despite the beautiful artwork. You may have a different opinion about this issue, but that's how it goes. If you paid good money for this comic I hope you liked it, but I am glad I got to read it for free, I would have been very disappointed if I had paid for this comic with my hard earned money.