A steampunk artist who insults the top hat crowd has my ear.
Stipan Morian co-writes and draws Our Soot Stained Heart for Mad Cave Studios, and he is blunt about the genre he works in:
That genre is too often hijacked by an annoying guy with a top hat and aviator goggles.
I can’t argue. What he puts in their place is a coal city where a worker named Peggy Stones lives under a harsh quota, and the idea started with his co-writer Joni Hägg and the old threat of coal for naughty children. That is a better engine than another airship.
Here’s the choice I keep chewing on. Morian says he gave Peggy white hair so she looks more like a lamb. Against a coal premise, that is a man picking his symbol on purpose, and it’s the kind of call I reward.
Hägg wanted something Dickensian, and I’d say coal and a quota are the right Dickens. Is it steampunk? Coal and a state that runs on quotas say yes, and I’d file it under SteamPunk with a straight face.