NYC Mech is a somewhat baffling comic.  It sounds quite interesting on paper, but when you actually read it, you wonder what exactly they're trying to do.

The high concept is that it's New York City, only inhabited entirely by eight million robots.  Rather than being a post-apocalyptic world, it's just a world where robots exist instead of humans.  So, eight million robots, occupying New York City.  Except the creators also seem to want it to be an accurate New York City.

So what we have is a story where four characters go off to rob a store, in a New York that looks exactly like the real one and is populated by people who look exactly like the real ones, except that they happen to be robots.  But nobody mentions that.  They smoke, they drink, they generally act in every respect just like human beings.

In fact, they don't act like robots in any way at all.  It's really just a comic set in New York where for some reason everyone's drawn to look robotic.  It seems an awful waste of the concept.  It's not a city of eight million robots.  It's a city of eight million people, filtered through a strange artistic conceit.  Quite what point, if any, is being made by populating the city with robots is difficult to decipher.  The obvious reading would be the typical city-dweller-as-robot routine, but the creators seem more inclined to celebrate the city.

The net result is to leave me wondering whether this is making some kind of difficult and ambiguous point that's flying completely over my head, or whether it's just extremely pretentious.  It's one or the other.  And quite honestly, dialogue like "Ice melts on my tongue and it's like a thousand tiny drops of sound fill my head" leaves me leaning towards the latter.

On the other hand, it's absolutely beautiful.  Whatever the point may be, there's no denying that the book has a striking visual style. Artist Andy MacDonald produces some intriguing hybrid human/robot characters, and makes the book feel strangely real.  Thanks to the art, I really do want to like the book - but the more I think about it, the more I realise that I haven't got a clue what the point is meant to be.  I'd love to see this art married to a story that actually did something with the premise - or even one which did something with the strange, disjointed sense of alienation that the art produces.

But this book just seems to ignore its own premise completely.  If the robots are just going to act like humans, what's the point?  Seriously, what's the point?

Rating: C+

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