Wednesday is Comic Day!

Writer: Jonathan Hickman Artist: Jonathan Hickman Publisher: Image Comics Pages: 120 Price: $14.99

Follow up:

I’m not yet decided on my final opinion of Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana. The story is a fascinating idea and very well researched. In the mid 21st century, the Catholic church comes into possession of time travel technology. The mid 21st century has not gone as the Catholic church would have liked, with Islam overrunning much of Europe. They decide to use that technology to send people back to the latter days of the Roman empire, the time of the Emperor Constantine (the first to accept Christianity) to “correct” things that went wrong.

The format is also novel. Quite different than the typical comic book, although I won’t go as far as to say for the better. While the art is often gorgeous to look at – it plays little role in the telling of the story. I would describe this book as more of an illustrated film script than a comic book. Part of Hickman’s decision for this format may lie in the fact they he has to communicate a lot of detailed information about the real historical events so that the changed historical events will make sense to the average reader (that isn’t a student of Roman history).

I found the reading of this story to be fascinating and compelling pretty much through to the end – but when I got to the end I was a little disappointed. I don’t know if Hickman has any plans to tell more of this story, it will be a shame if he does not, because it really felt rushed. The setup of the story required so much space that the actual plot and events get compressed. We essentially just get a taste of what happened and a chart to summarize what came next.

The illustration seems to mirror the story telling in that we learn little about many of the characters through the text, and even less from the art. Faces are often drawn in shadow or obscured by glasses or the rim of a hat.

In the end, I think my recommendation comes not from the product as a whole, but from the fascinating ideas that it raises. Instead of being a book with a complete story, it is a book that will cause the reader to create their own story. I’ve already spent time imagining the events that fill in the gaps.