With his wild beard, olive-green military fatigues, darkly petulant good looks and trademark cigars, El Comandante became the anachronistically glamorous face of leftwing totalitarianism.

At its best, steampunk can achieve a giddy kind of narrative energy through the juxtaposition of anachronistically advanced technologies and late-19th-century settings and mores.

Even “Europe” as a unifying ideal is put into question: “Goodbye, England!” a character merrily and anachronistically cried at the beginning.