Customer Reviews

Pax Romana

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I took up this graphic novel at the recommendation of Blair Butler. And I am happy to report I was not disappointed. The pages contain an original story, compelling artwork, and a tale filled with interesting characters. My only complaint was that I found it painfully short. I finished it in a few hours and I was left desperately wanting more. But in the grand scheme of things, I suppose that is a good thing. Better to be left wanting more at the end of the story then to be sick of it and just want it to be over.

Most likely you already know the basics of the story, in the future the Catholic Church funds research and discovers time travel and decides to send a force of people back in time to right the wrongs of the church and other. Hilarious high jinks and frivolity ensue....okay not really, but we do get an interesting at an alternate history and how the human condition shapes the destiny of man. In between wonderfully composed panels you have the occasional page or two of written transcript that is used to reveal characters motivations and feelings in long form, but fear not, for even that read is quite fascinating.

So if you are look for a remarkable story that will get you thinking and you don't mind a concise (If not short) telling of that story then I believe you will thoroughly enjoy this book, as did I. After this introduction to Jonathan Hickman I plan to read his other works very soon.

Hickman's latest work taps into time-travel and an alternative history of the world. Unfortunately, the Rawim and Tyler reviews are completely right: it's just too short. The story is well paced until the Fourth Chapter when events and people accelerate too quickly; its as if the book "jumped" to the end and dismissed the previous three chapters. If this was (or is) the opening salvo to an epic saga, then Hickman is on the path to greatness. The closing timeline suggests a larger story with more installments, but this is mere speculation. However, if "Pax Romana" is strictly a "one-and-done" book, then Hickman has thoroughly disappointed a burgeoning fan base.

While the earlier The Nightly News intentionally used a hodgepodge of vague characters to keep the reader off-balance, Hickman reverses this tread with a handful of pseudo-protagonists and each has the potential for a well-defined story arc. There are no obvious "good guys", just fallible individuals who take the reins of past history. The groundwork is there for Fabian Rossi and Holy Roman Empire, Manon Karembeu and the Refuge of Briton, or Emmanuel Mfede and the Kingdom of Africa to explore their portions of this alternative world in their own books. Now, we can only hope Hickman will deliver future stories in the Pax Universe.

Don't get me wrong - I still enjoyed "Pax Romana" for Hickman's layout and artistic style. I believe the general audience will crave more simply because I want more. It's a solid story premise, but ends too abruptly.

Jonathan Hickman is making a splash at Marvel Comics with his complex and interweaving story lines in Secret Warriors, Fantastic Four and S.H.E.I.L.D. I would recommend anyone to pick up any of those titles, but you can't ignore Hickman's independent work through Image Comics. I think Hickman is a visual innovator and provocative writer who takes fantastic ideas and makes them work for the reader. I have read Nightly News and Transhuman and I even tracked down his Top Cow pilot season entry--The Core. I was impressed by all of them, so I went looking for Pax Romana. It did not disappoint. One word of warning, reading anything from Hickman requires you to pay attention. It is dense with language, references, and original layout using black and white, negative space, and flashes of color. It is well worth the read however, because the premise is so fantastic you can't help but be a little impressed. If you are interested in a comic creator who looks to maximize what the comic page can do, then you should check out Hickman.

I have greatly enjoyed Hickman's SHIELD series for Marvel so I decided to read more things by him. I read his current Fantastic Four, his Secret Warriors and then Nightly News. All of these were great, but in my opinion, Pax Romana was even better.

Pax Romana is about a group of people who go back in time to 312 AD to Rome a bit before Constantine's ascension to power. They go with a lot of resources (tanks, nukes, satellites) and there plan is to make the future better. They want to prevent the dark ages and make a world that is not only technologically advanced but also morally advanced (for example a world where men and women are equal with no slavery and no racism). They have an interesting plan.

The plot is ambitious, but Hickman uses unconventional comic book techniques to make the story flow in a very entertaining way, making you think hard without getting bored. I was very surprised by that.

This book reminded me a lot of Foundation by Asimov. In Foundation it is not about going to the past to prevent the dark age, but it is about preventing a dark age from coming. A scientist predicts that the Galactic Empire will fall into a dark age for 30,000 years and he creates a plan to minimize this to 1000.

There are many similarities between both books, the plan to make a better future, the way the books focus on events over a short period of time even though it is supposed to be about a long period of time (in Pax we get to see mainly what happens between 312 and 338, but not much farther, while in Foundation we get to see the development of the first 60 years of the plan). There are other similarities but I won't mention them as they contain bigger spoilers.

When I first read what this book was about in the solicitation, I wasn't impressed and decided to skip it. I bought it because I liked other books by Hickman. I am glad I gave it a try as it is now one of my favorite comics I have read.

This book has both amazing art, and groundbreaking storytelling. I have recommended this book to everyone I know. Well worth the buy and read.

This is simply a well-made comic. Thought-provoking narrative, well-designed layouts, amazing art. A worthy successor to The Nightly News. Amazing.

The book arrived sooner than expected and in great condition. A great online buying experience. Completely pleased with my purchase.

Pax Romana is how you take a time-tested and somewhat worn staple of science fiction and make it seem brand new.

The story takes the reader not on an adventure so much as an examination as to why anyone would want to change history and, given the right resources, how they would go about doing. Hickman examines not just the ethics involved with altering human events, but at nation building, artificially creating culture, using forms of government to engineer, over generations, the desired state, as well examines the insurmountable divide between between religious ambition and harsh, human reality.

Make no mistake, countless sci-fi authors have played in the time travel sandbox and the notion of altered histories. However, Hickman manages to craft a scenario that that reads not as a flight on fancy as much as it does a record of events that actually happened.

This is a fantastic work with a grand scope that pulls it all off with excellence.

I picked the TPB up because of Blair Butler's highest recommendation. After finishing in about 2 hours, I began to hate myself for the 2 hours I lost and I also firmly believe that Hickman must have some compromising photos of Lady Blair to get her to write the glowing foreword to the TPB. I feel sorry for the great Alan Moore; calling Jonathan Hickman the next Moore or Frank Miller is the greatest insult to these great writers. Moore and Miller used the graphic form to change the way we viewed the medium itself; Hickman did nothing of the sort. He took what he read from widely popular philosophy textbooks and put them in graphic form.

To begin, the overall story/plot is nothing new. Hickman took what has been widely written by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Marx, etc. and decided to put their lessons in graphic form. Throw in a few political intrigues (lightly borrowed from Herodotus and Thucydides) and time travel (borrowed from Timecop and Terminator movies) and bam, that's the whole book. There is not one once of originality in the entire book. I foresaw the ending after just a few pages but I thought what Hickman intended as the ending would be the middle of a longer story. The entire story is incredibly short, in spite of the few pages all in prose. Definitely skip this one.

In the 21st century, anyone who still write about time travel in a comic book should be banished to writing for Skymall for the rest of his life. I give the one star because of the artwork that was pretty good. Jeez, a story about going back in time and changing the present/future? Those kind of stories are so refreshing, right up there with knock-knock jokes. They are absolutely not lame at all.