Wow. As critical responses go it’s not very informative, but that was how I felt after reading Warren Ellis’s Aetheric Mechanics at a favourite cafe. In just 48 pages, with excellent artwork by Gianluca Pagliarani, he sets up a world derived from various old pulp traditions in which Sherlock Holmes analog Sax Raker investigates what he calls ‘the case of the man who wasn’t there’. He is accompanied in this venture by Doctor Richard Watcham, newly returned from the British Empire’s frontier in space, to discover that the Ruritanian air force is menacing London.

So far, so what? Steampunk yarns are nothing new, and often tiresome, more an outdated fashion statement than anything of substance. What makes this one unusual is the sheer craft that writer and artist put into the story. Every panel and every word count for something in creating the world and the plot that unfolds in it. Every detail has some significance, whether the patterns of smoke made by the Navy’s flying platforms indicating that they’re propelled by something like a helicopter blade; the potential meaning of the shift to the story’s narration by Watcham, recording the latest of Raker’s adventures; the imagination displayed in the realisation of this alternative London.

Ellis can sometimes be said to talk a better story than he writes, but on this occasion he’s disciplined and focused to excellent effect. The reason for this may be that Aetheric Mechanics is one of the latest batch of titles for Apparat, a line of comics from Avatar allowing Ellis to create works that aren’t in line with the established history of comics, but instead are inspired by whatever pulp tangents take his fancy. In this instance, he’s inspired — as Michael Moorcock and Christopher Priest have been in different ways in prose — by an imagined continuation of what H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were getting up to in their fictions. Add a dash of Jules Verne, a touch of The Prisoner of Zenda, and you’ve got most of the ingredients necessary for Ellis to have conjured Aetheric Mechanics.

There’s one other necessary ingredient too: the large Hadron collider, which featured recently in popular consciousness as a potential bringer about of the end of the world. It plays a similar role here, but I don’t want to spoil exactly how this piece of thoroughly modern science interacts with the fantastic world conjured by Ellis and his artistic collaborator.

This is a work of two equal talents. Ellis has constructed an immaculately tight ‘graphic novella’ (his term) and Pagliarani has brought it to convincing life. The opening sequence of troops returning to the Royal Albert Docks from the war in space is masterfully realised, and the same goes for everything else Ellis gets him to draw. Early alternative technologies look credible, and even more importantly so do the characters that this story is peopled with.

For all the cleverness of concept and elegance of structure, this is a story that relies on readers believing in what’s happening to the characters, and the art is more than up to the challenge. Ellis is an established name already, and I’d like to think he’ll do more work of this originality alongside his higher profile gigs for Marvel. And, on the evidence seen here, I’m sure this is just the start of what will hopefully be a long and fruitful career for Pagliarani.