Pax Romana

Pax Romana was a four issue mini series that was released by Image comics in 2007 and 2008. This series is written, illustrated, colored, and lettered by author Jonathan Hickman. Jonathan Hickman is best known for his work on Marvel Comic’s Secret Warriors and he has been working on the current arc of the Fantastic Four.

The story takes place in the future, where the Vatican has backed a group of scientists that have discovered the wonders of time travel. The church decided that in order to save the present, they would use the new technology to send back a representative of the church, as well as an army of men with modern technology to remedy the past and enhance the future.

Soon after the introduction of the project that will act as the basis for the entire story, the plan goes wrong and the true premise of the books becomes clear to the reader.

This series has both an interesting style of writing, as well as a fairly interest art style. When it comes to the writing, the issues read more like a book, taking a break from the standard style of comic writing, implementing pages of text that depict conversations between key characters that allow for Hickman to better lay out the storyline in a shorter amount of time. Hickman would also use a block of information when each character was introduced in order to give quick background information to better acquaint the reader with the numerous characters featured throughout the story.

When it comes to the art, Hickman uses a style that is unlike anything I have ever seen. He tends to choose a certain color for each frame of the story, using the color, accented with shading bringing to life the scenes of the story. I did not expect this type of coloring to add as much as it did the story, but it certainly left its mark. As for the art style, Hickman tends to leave it simpler than most artists, usually leaving out extreme detail in each pane, especially when it comes to the faces of the characters. Instead he focuses on the shading and slight facial marks.

I think that Hickman designed the series like this in order to allow for the story to be driven more so by the writing and the story as opposed to the art. In my personal opinion, I am usually more art focused, but Hickman is one of my favorite writers and it is shown in this series that that is his strong point, so I was more than happy to have the focus on the writing style and this spectacular story.

9 out of 10