Graphic Novel Review: HOURGLASS’s gears are powered by adventure and romance

Hourglass

Cartoonist: Barbara Mazzi
Publisher: Silver Sprocket
Publication Date: March 2025

A common complaint about steampunk is that it isn’t so much a genre as an aesthetic. Detractors argue that all a steampunk artist needs to do is to take the standard trappings of historical fantasy and glue some gears on it. But what if, Barbara Mazzi asks, you added all the gears? And what if these gears actually did something—something terrible and divine? 

Hourglass takes place within the interior of a city-sized machine that can inject years of life into the body of anyone able to pay for the privilege. Twenty (named for her age) is a low-level mechanical technician who works inside the machine. The monotony of her days is dispelled by the occasional visits of Martel, a young woman from the highest class of society. Martel enjoys the privilege of immense wealth, and soon she will be granted the privilege of near-immortality. Seeking an escape from the sterility of her home, Martel finds adventure and romance in the constant movement of the machine.

Martel’s carefree relationship with Twenty may have continued in perpetuity had not a single gear come loose on the night before her birthday, when her mother was scheduled to visit the city for the first time in years. From this tiny point of friction, larger anomalies begin to appear, and Twenty must find a way to fix the disruption before she becomes fodder for the machine.

The worldbuilding of Hourglass is as intricate as the machine that powers its story, but tense action and meaningful conflict propels the reader forward. Even though Twenty and Martel feel at home in the machine, an ever-present sense of danger haunts its cavernous spaces. If life can be so easily given, after all, it can just as easily be extinguished. The dynamic action and heated arguments of Hourglass are expertly paced by the insertion of quieter scenes of character drama and romance, and I found myself flying through the pages.

Barbara Mazzi’s stylish artwork is the perfect vehicle for these characters and their world. Instead of moldering in the usual steampunk attachment to the Victorian era, Hourglass delights in the lavish luxury of the 1920s. Designs inspired by Art Deco contrast strong angles against delicate filigree. Meanwhile, the interior of the machine is a chaos of detail that reminds me of the detailed mechanical designs of Studio Ghibli films like Castle in the Sky. Mazzi’s warm shades of gray convey the warmth of the machine’s interior, while the mellow gold of the spot color emphasizes the magic of this world and the humanity of its inhabitants.

If you’re weak for gorgeous but cruel female characters, Hourglass has you covered. Martel’s immortal mother is an appropriate antagonist for a story that isn’t content to brush the issue of economic class disparity under the carpet. She’s not evil, at least not actively. Rather, she simply doesn’t care about what happens inside the machine.

This cultivated lack of interest also applies to her relationship with her daughter, and I suspect that the negligence she exhibits toward Martel reflects her disregard for the wellbeing of the society she represents. Regardless, she steals every scene in which she appears, and the nuances of her eventual villain monologue elevate her above the stock character of “bad mother.” Not fearing the degradation of age is the prerogative of the young, after all, and the endowment of extra years of life is indeed an incredible gift.

Still, Martel is determined to find her own path. As she comes to terms with the machine and what its maintenance means to Twenty and her colleagues, Martel confronts a range of perspectives that defy binary value judgments. No matter what the future holds, the urgent sense that something must change pushes the story forward to an immensely cathartic finale.

Even as Hourglass confronts the reader with difficult questions about wealth and technology, it never ceases to be an entertaining adventure. The characters are as bold and appealing as the story’s eye-catching setting, and Barbara Mazzi’s art delights in the visual intricacies and speculative potential of steampunk. 

Hourglass is available now via Silver Sprocket

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