This week, I have devoured Jonathan Hickman's
Pax Romana. It's been on my to read list for ages, then I found it at a sensible price, so snapped it up. It's in the same visual style as
Nightly News, but without the clearly differentiated colour palette for different temporal and spatial settings.
The premise for the story is relatively straight forward, but opens up lots of possibilities. Apparently Hickman was going to do lots more stories spinning off from this and create a Pax Romana universe/brand, much like Mignola did with BPRD, where you can tell lots of different stories set in the universe in one-shot/mini versions.
If you haven't seen any of Hickman's indie stuff before, then this is very different to what you might know as a comic book. There's almost no grid layout and it's very texty. Some sections are done as transcriptions of conversations, though there aren't the same number of graphs and diagrams that Nightly News had. More comics should come annotated in that way.
But, going to Marvel and being really jolly busy put paid to that instead.
Although there's lots of stuff about the Catholic church, and a sprinkling of pantheism and paganism, it's a book about societal change, sociology and power instead of a book about religion. Of course, if you were particularly religious or Catholic, you might be offended by some of the ideas in this book. Above all else, Hickman is an ideas man.
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