Pax Romana

[Strategos' Risk]

Latest new installment in the "future soldiers with guns go back in time and forge a new world order" sub-sub-genre. Preview here (http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12132). And here (http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12631). And finally here (http://www.pronea.com/samples/PAX_preview.pdf).

Pros:
+ Art is very good, epic minimalism.
+ Love the world-building and references, as well as faux-documentarian style.
+ Good tone and dialog.

Cons:
- Doesn't seem to the most sophisticated take on the subject of a reborn Rome.
- Not enough non-whites. Am I the only who's read The Next Christendom around here? Also references the "Islamics take Europe" meme.
- Might run into some cliches of the sub-sub-genre in the future. Most comic readers won't care, but... well, I'm a poster here, so I can spot them.

Mix:
~ The creators have probably played Assassin's Creed.
~ Doesn't seem to be over-stressing the future military angle.
~ No idea how long this series is going to run.

[Keenir]

Latest new installment in the "future soldiers with guns go back in time and forge a new world order" sub-sub-genre. Preview here (http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12132). And here (http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12631). And finally here (http://www.pronea.com/samples/PAX_preview.pdf).

Pros:
+ Art is very good, epic minimalism.
+ Love the world-building and references, as well as faux-documentarian style.
+ Good tone and dialog.


definately seems interesting.

though....

Islam's taken over, and monotheism is waning?
the lab is secretly funded - so where do the 5,000 super-soldiers come from?

[B_Munro]

definately seems interesting.

though....
Islam's taken over, and monotheism is waning?


Clearly, it's the _right_ kind of Monotheism that's declining. :rolleyes:

Bruce

[Iamwinterborn]

definately seems interesting.

though....

Islam's taken over, and monotheism is waning?
the lab is secretly funded - so where do the 5,000 super-soldiers come from?

A Secretly funded lab makes a breakthrough- Then the pope sends a private army back in time. The secretly funded lab is secretly funded. It doesn't have soldiers. Only after it makes a breakthrough do other people become informed, and who really needs to keep it a secret for more than a month or so if you are gonna send soldiers back in time to change the past to secure the fuure... etc. etc. etc. and run on sentences with bad tempo! :o

[Strategos' Risk]

Finished reading it with issue 4.

It was cool.

Mostly the ending was absolutely bollocks.

[Strategos' Risk]

I know I'm bumping this like crazy, but I was just now looking up this comic randomly and by sheer Fortuna found a very recent review/analysis (http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-826) of it:

The story is framed long after the initial temporal incursion, in the glittering technological utopia of Constantinople, as an elderly "gene pope" (a Bilal-esque figure who acts as the repository of the knowledge and genetic information of any number of holy men of various faiths) giving a lecture to a boy emperor about the secret origins of his world. (It's a conceit I found rather amusing, given how some scholars have suggested that the skeletal model of Western political theory could be seen as a dialogue between pope and emperor.) The world was born in 2053 AD, after the discovery of time travel and the subsequent dissemination of the technology to the Vatican. After a prolonged debate, the Pope authorizes an expedition to the late Roman Empire to prevent the Church's decline in the modern era, overseen by Cardinal Beppi Pelle, the Church's scienciest cardinal. To lead the military contingent and coordinate the logistics, a boon is granted to Nicholas Chase, decorated military scholar, blood relative of the pope, man of honor, and a progressive at heart.

Naturally, after arriving in 312 AD, it takes all of one day for Chase to assassinate Cardinal Pelle and take control of the expedition.

The bulk of Pax Romana concerns the argument over how best to alter history for the better, and of the increasing complications of that goal as time progresses. As per the initial plans, Chase allies his force with the Constantine the Great, accelerating his consolidation of the reunified Roman Empire. As a result, Chase and his subordinate tie themselves to Constantine's family, and eventually find themselves enmeshed in dynastic politics. At the same time, disagreements flare between Chase and his subordinates over the proper course to take in enlightening the world, over whether the initial plans to crash-modernize the world in the span of a few centuries should be adhered to, or if more flexible approaches should be taken.

Personally, I found Pax Romana more problematic than The Nightly News. Part of the reason for that lies in the structure of the comic: it's simply too short. Converting a decaying universal state into a industrializing liberal juggernaut is hardly a project that can be knocked out in an evening; writing a story about one would be an undertaking so vast that a mere eighty pages couldn't possibly do it justice. The brevity hampers key elements of characterization; one of the main story elements of the comic concerns Chase's relationship with Constantine and his son, but we simply skip by the years too fast to see anything emerge organically, while the rest of the cast barely read as ciphers. While this was acceptable in The Nightly News, the more "realistic" nature of Pax Romana means such stylistic choices are out of place, weakening the story as a whole.

My biggest problems with the story, however, have to do with Hickman's interpretations of history. I admit that I am a fan of metahistory, so perhaps it was inevitable I would butt heads with Hickman on this issue. Perhaps one of the odder things about Pax Romana is that it does not really have a sense of history. We're in fourth century Rome, but the comic never acts like it. There's always a sense that the story is taking place in the Year Zero, a time when everything is possible and all options are open. Granted, this was probably Hickman's intention, as part of a general criticism of utopian thought, but neither the characters nor the story seem to suggest any preexisting factors could impede Chase's designs. Which, once you think about it, is kind of ridiculous; any half-decent history of the Classical world will tell you that the problems of the later Roman Empire started long before Constantine came on the scene, and the possibility that the empire might be physically incapable of being revitalizing by the fourth century is never considered in the story. (For what it's worth, if I were in Chase's position, I would write Europe off as a loss, recenter the imperial bureaucracy in Anatolia, and contrive a way to construct a greater Byzanto-Persian state stretching across the Middle East. Hard as hell to defend, sure, but a far richer soil for kick-starting a new civilization than the Mediterranean basin was at the time.)

The plans devised to improve history are also odd: written from a sociological standpoint, they seem to explicitly assume that all human behavior has already been mapped, and that different ideologies and political systems can simply be plugged into an equation to obtain a desired outcome. The plans therefore come across as hubristically megalomanical (as in, for example, their attempts to stage-manage the more irrational aspects of human nature by controlling the outbreak of revolutions and changes between systems of government according to a grand timetable) and amusingly provincial (as in the assertion of the American Chase that the great enemies of democracy are fascism [which in Chase's reading comes off as run-of-the-mill autocracy] and communism, a fact that would probably prove surprising to the likes of Napoleon III and Prince Metternich).

On some levels, the shoddiness of these plans seem to be intentional on Hickman's part, as a criticism of the narrow-mindedness of utopian thinking. There are even a few instances where it seems as if Hickman is playing with this idea; in the middle of the comic, the Council of Nicaea is brought to a premature end by Constantine, who unilaterally puts an end to the arguments over Christian orthodoxy by declaring a crude ecumenicalism to be backed by force. In subsequent pages, it is revealed that Chase and his men pressured Constantine to make this move as a way to forestall the possibility of later religious persecution, blithely unaware they have just set a precedent by which the state (or any greater power) can interfere with religious questions for any reason, a precedent that that would have a nigh-unfathomable consequences for the history of Christianity and law.

Despite this, it's never terribly clear whether the story is meant to praise or condemn the chrononauts. Perhaps the reason for this problem may be that Hickman is still fixated on the ideal of the willful man of action. As in The Nightly News, men of will run roughshod over the world, offering little justification for their actions beyond "because I can." Even Cardinal Belle offers little justification for his desire to return to the past beyond a mere show of concentrated willpower, despite his membership in an organization for whom moral arguments are stock-in-trade. There are some hints of other, more compassionate motivations for altering history, particularly in the earlier sections of the comic, but once the jump to the past is made, the bellows of the supermen drown out all other possible motivations. (And supermen they are. Along with having artificially extended lifespans and a universally flawless command of Latin, Chase and his men are also gifted with a technological horn-of-plenty, as almost none of the wondrous machinery they bring back with them ever seems to break, degrade, or run out of irreplaceable fuel.)