Pax Britannia

In the closing years of the 20th century the British Empire's rule is still going strong. Queen Victoria is about to celebrate her 160th birthday, kept alive by advanced steam technology. London is a fantastical sprawling metropolis where dirigibles roam the skies, robot bobbies enforce the law and dinosaurs are on display in London zoo. Welcome to Magna Britannia, a steam driven world full of fantastical creations and shady villains. Here dashing dandies and mustachioed villains battle for supremacy while below the city strange things stir in the flooded tunnels of the old London Underground. Stormtroopers diving out of the sun to prey on the innocent! Engines of Mass Destruction tearing apart homes and families! The monstrous torture-parlours of Master Minus and his Palace Of Beautiful Thoughts! There is no escape from The Ultimate Reich! But there is El Sombra! With his razor sharp wit and his sword will he liberate this small Mexican town from the mechanized horror that threatens it?

Al Ewing was born in 1977, three days before Elvis died on the toilet. Indoctrinated into the loathsome practice of comics at an early age by his disreputable brother, the child progressed from his innocent beginnings to the loathsome depths of sin represented by the British comic 2000AD, long known as a haunt of depravity. He remains esconced there to this day as a writer of the bizarre and fantastic, when not involved in even more sordid past-times. El Sombra is his first penny dreadful.