Pax Romana

Pax Romana 1-4

Jonathan Hickman, why do you always tease me so?  I went into this expecting a story, and ended up getting an interesting ‘history’ lesson with an abrupt ending and no satisfying conclusion.  Typical Hickman.

I’ll give him this much: He’s a lot better at interspersing his comics with walls of text than Alan Moore.  (Thinking about post-volume 2 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)  He’s clearly put a ton of thought into this alternate history, and he’s eager to share as much of it as he can.  It really is fascinating - Given access to time travel in 2053, the pope elects to send a group of 5000 people back to the reign of Emperor Constantine in order to correct past mistakes and strengthen a decaying Catholic institution.  However, plans change from the start when the military faction of the cadre assassinates the cardinal in charge of the expedition and institute their own strategy for more drastic world change.

Hickman spends three and a half issues methodically walking the readers through every step of this new society that’s being built.  Then he just decides with two pages to go that he’s done, skips a thousand years into the future and says, “This is how it turned out”  It’s as if you’re watching Hamilton, enjoying every beat of this magnificent story that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s crafted, get to the end of “Say No to This,” and are then told, “then a lot of things happened and here we are today with Trump as our president!  The end.” The pacing is absolutely perplexing and maddening. The timeline at the end hints at a grand, sweeping story that I would have loved to read. It’s similar to the appendices at the end of Lord of the Rings, but at least there, Tolkien had already told a complete story.

Hickman’s a lot like Brian Michael Bendis in that he started out as both a writer and artist before focusing on writing only.  As with Bendis, that’s a shame, since his mad graphic design skills create some beautiful, original looking comics.

Lots of text, but Hickman makes it work.

Regret buying: No

Would buy again: No

Would read again: Yes

Rating: Nice