A comiXologist recommends:
Pax Romana
by: Mike Isenberg
“Who is this Jonathan Hickman guy, why haven’t I heard of him, and what else has he written?” – my reaction on first reading Pax Romana #1 back when it released in 2007.
Today, of course, anyone who follows comics knows the name Jonathan Hickman. Tapped by Marvel to helm some of their biggest series and major events (including the universe-shattering Secret Wars, which launches next week), Hickman has become something of a comic book superstar almost overnight. And for anyone who had a chance to check out his earlier work, such as Pax Romana, it’s come as no surprise at all.
In Pax Romana, the scientific research wing of the Catholic church discovers the secret of time travel technology. The church decides to use this gift to send a modern military force back to the year 312AD, in order to support Constantine The Great, and make all of history more Catholic.
The book focuses on the men and women chosen for the mission, the extremely high-stakes ambition of their cause (shaping and manipulating the development of humanity itself), and the conflicts and temptations they encounter among the way. The story is very smartly written, featuring a heavy emphasis on philosophy, ethics, and sociology, as the time-travelers debate amongst themselves over the righteousness of their path, and the duty they feel they owe to mankind.
Hickman’s art for the book is also quite stunning, with a consistent design sense permeating each page, and a narrative style that makes bold use of multimedia: besides the standard comic book scenes, the story is also told through the use of maps, timelines, scraps of data from Papal archives, and a handful of important conversations presented in the form of written transcripts.
In lesser hands, these transcripts might feel like lazy comic craft (“Is this just the script? Did you run out of time to draw it?”), but it’s clear a lot of thought has gone into when to use them, and for what sort of content; they break up the pacing in a way that is surprisingly refreshing, and give Hickman the space he needs to really get into the meat of the “Temporal Crusader” thought experiment that is Pax Romana without bogging down the overall story, which tends to move at an exciting, breakneck pace.
Pax Romana is smart, mature science fiction that makes masterful use of the comics medium and is incredibly difficult to put down. Highly recommended.
[Check out Pax Romana on comiXology]
Mike Isenberg is an Associate Production Coordinator at comiXology, co-writer of First Law Of Mad Science, and contributor to the New York Times bestselling FUBAR anthology series. He lives in Harlem with his cats, Tesla and Edison.