Just a Note
I just wanted to point out that the Steampunk Star Wars series has been updated. Unfortunately a steampunk Death Star is still basically a big sphere in space with widgets on it; steampunk Darth Vader is far, far cooler.'
As for the people who got up in arms over the steampunk Jabba...guys, really. Victorian England, remember? Yes, Jabba looks like an "Oriental despot" in the exceedingly racists vein. What the heck else would you expect out of a character who is, even in the source material, an Oriental despot down to living in the desert and having slave girls in skimpy costumes dance for him while he smokes a frigging hookah? Seems the artist is considering changing the illustration, which I think would be unfortunate. He mentions being unhappy with the picture for other reasons, but I think the fact that he "ended up with Ming the Merciless1 as a slug" is not a reason. A steampunk Jabba would be exactly that kind of stereotype; he's almost that stereotype even in Return of the Jedi. The only other option would be to do him up as an aristocrat who played at being an Oriental Despot, and since I think that's what the artist was trying to do in the first place I'm not sure it's feasible.
Basically, the fact that he ended up with such a stereotype says to me that he's got the steampunk genre nailed. That does not mean such stereotypes are good in real life, just that that's what the era would have produced and having it in the picture is perfectly in genre.
1: Leaving aside that his Jabba is clearly a Middle Eastern stereotype, not a Chinese one.