I’ve no idea how I missed this until now, but the Classic-Space LEGO page has a huge collection of Steampunk related images that someone there has painstakingly collected for a long time, it seems. 237 images – some photographs of wargaming miniatures, some stills from anime (most obviously, Laputa, Nausicaa and Porco Rosso), and quite a lot of concept art.

I’d be tempted to write about so many of the images there – analysing how the marvelous devices work, the people who’d use them, the society that would have to exist to support them, etc etc. But there’s just too many! What a happy complaint to be making.

The above picture generates for me fantastic visions of hundreds of these improbable machines flitting over smoggy cities and rolling green hills, possibly delivering mail and landing with a bump and a clank in little rows outside the post sorting offices, and taking off again like a flock of disturbed pidgeons flapping wildly! I pity and envy the delivery boy riding it – waking up at the crack of dawn to get the engine ‘awake’, making sure the fire stays fed through wind, rain or snow, the terrible heat from the boiler and the cold from the skies, but the thrill and exhilleration of the wind in your face with only a handrail between you and hundreds of feet of blueskythump. That’s good concept art to me – one that makes a whole new world in my head!