The Battle of Blood and Ink
Overview: Welcome to Amperstam, a fantastical metropolis in the sky. Like many cities, Amperstam has it triumphs and follies, rich areas and poor areas, and a lush culture that extends from its highest tower to its mysteriously self-supporting base. What’s more unique is the technology that keeps it hanging there, the airships that service it, and the swashbuckling, indomitable clouddog Ashe, who might just change the world with her words.
Ashe publishes The Lurker’s Guide to Amperstam, a hand-printed broadsheet that gives readers an insider’s perspective on the city’s most delighted and terrifying happenings. Everyone loves The Lurker’s Guide, except for the government, which likes getting its own way a lot more than it likes getting bad press. But far be it from Ashe to let a little government intervention get in the way of the truth…
Pages: 144 Pages
Writers: Jared Axlerod and Steve Walker
Recommendations:
This book started out with a bang and had me really interested. It is set in a steam punk setting. The main location in this book is a city that floats. The government that oversees this floating city does not do anything for anyone unless it benefits them. If your ship is about to crash, and you need a place to land, you can plan to spend a long time working off the debt of being able to land. If you don’t agree with the government, you can expect to be hunted down until you are silenced. You get this much of the story in the first half of the book. Then the story loses its direction. It seems that they had a great start but didn’t have a great plan for how to finish the story. It just starts to get really dull as quickly my interest started to dull as well. The artwork in the book at times is superb and at other times I am not sure what they were trying to accomplish. There were a bunch of panels that just didn’t seem to serve a purpose.
Overall, I really enjoyed the first half of the book and then wish I didn’t have to read the second half to complete the book. The second half of this book just stops being interesting. It starts to feel like it was heavily influenced by other stories and becomes a little too familiar.