Pax Romana #4 (Image Comics)
By Adam Prosser
 
Comics are a medium founded, more than anything, on fantasy. I don’t mean the genre of “fantasy” (though there’s always been plenty of that), I mean fantasy in the sense of wish fulfillment. The concept of the superhero, which comes almost directly from a child’s id, is merely the most prominent of these, but there’s plenty of others—the fantasy of finding out you have a great destiny, the fantasy of traveling to exotic places, the fantasy of having  two beautiful girls fighting over you despite being a red-headed dork, the fantasy of being able to take a hammer to the noggin and survive with just a few birds chirping around your head.
 
One fantasy that’s been surprisingly unused, however, is the fantasy of time travel. I mean, of course there’s always been plenty of time travel in comics, but it works as basically an extension of “traveling to exotic locales”—the heroes just visit a historical period, have an adventure, and return home, with no lasting impact. What’s rarely addressed is the idea of time travel as a positive force—the dream of being able to go back and, one way or another, set things right, something that most people with an active imagination have dreamed of at one point or another. Of course, to frame the question like this suggests reasons why even the shamelessly pandering medium of comics has shied away from an empowering dream of heroic time-tamperers. After all, what constitutes “setting things right”? Who gets to decide? Even something that most people wouldn’t object to in theory, like killing Hitler, could have brain-melting ramifications. Wiping WWII out of the historical record raises questions that can’t be answered very easily in a goofy adventure story.
 
Of course, even a “serious” SF story is going to run into problems dealing with the issue, because you more or less have to acknowledge that anyone who would change history, except in the absolute direst circumstances, is a bit of a monster. It suggests the ultimate in sore losers, someone who just can’t deal with the world as it is and is attempting to steal a “Get Out of Jail Free” card from God’s Monopoly set. Someone like - as is the case here - the Catholic Church.
 
…What was I saying about running into problems?
 
This is more or less the premise of Jonathan Hickman’s Pax Romana - a Vatican-sponsored science team discovers the secret of time travel, and a team of soldiers and scientists is sent back with the purpose of stacking history’s deck in favor of the Catholics. In spite of my glib description above, much moral deliberation takes place, and Hickman is not unsympathetic to the Catholics, but unfortunately, their plan has a few holes in it, and Brigadier General Nicholas Chase, the man in charge of the military aspect of the expedition, is the biggest one. Chase has very different ideas from the Pope for what to make of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he’s the one with the guns. Now Chase’s own goals—which involve preventing the Roman Empire from falling, for a start—are on their way to being implemented—but Chase, too, is a regular, fallible mortal. Turns out trying to steer history in the direction you want is kind of a bitch.
 
An artist with an original viewpoint is always something to be celebrated, and Jonathan Hickman is most definitely one of those. His dense, stylized, innovatively designed and text- and icon-heavy comics bear little resemblance to anything else on the market these days. What’s more, he has little or no interest in telling a conventional story with melodrama and standard action beats. On the flipside, though - he has little or no interest in telling a conventional story with…well, you get the idea. The downside to this is that the breathtakingly epic story of Pax Romana is presented in a somewhat detached manner, and an awful lot of stuff is crammed into this final issue, to the point where major story points seem like they’re being thrown away. I actually wonder if Hickman had intended this as an ongoing series and decided to trim it back to a four-issue mini instead. Certainly the issue’s dizzying final pages present enough plots to power at least a couple years’ worth of storyline, but do so in a clipped, hyper-compressed fashion.
 
Still, when my biggest complaint about a story is that there isn’t more of it, it must be doing something right. I should be satisfied with what I’ve got. Or maybe I can build a time machine, go back to a year and a half ago, and convince Hickman to make it an ongoing series! Yeah! Nothing can possibly go wrong with that!


FOUR OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS



Dead Men Tell No Tales (Arrrrrrrrcana studios)
By Adam Prosser
 
As fads go, the current “pirate” thing isn’t so bad. Hey, pirates are cool. They actually offer a little variety—they existed in many different eras and traveled to all kinds of locales, they were violent and they drank and whored a lot, and on top of that they were always making deals with the devil and fighting sea monsters and coming back from the dead for vengeance. As is my understanding.
 
Still, after the bloated mess of the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the arc of the cultural pendulum is probably moving swiftly in a non-pirate direction. So you know what that means: comic books are just beginning to jump on the pirate bandwagon!
 
And that writer Dwight MacPherson and his ten-person art team (seriously) is eagerly jumping on a bandwagon with their comic “Dead Men Tell No Tales” is made incredibly clear by B. Clay Moore’s intro, which goes out of its way to reference Pirates of the Caribbean. The ride, not the movie, but still. Nevertheless, as mentioned, pirates are fertile storytelling territory, so that doesn’t have to matter. Right?
 
The hook for the story is that we’re following a treasure map as it goes from the hands of one famous historical pirate to another—Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Black Bart. The map leads, you guessed it, to a mystical treasure…but the treasure is cursed, and even the map seems to bring ill fate and worse to those to possess it. The obsession and violent antisocial behavior could be explained by the fact that these are, y’know, pirates, but the fact that they keep springing back to life with glowing green eyes, croaking the name of their murderers, after being killed and having the map stolen, is probably not normal.
 
And what exactly is this long-sought-after treasure, this infernal prize that damns those who seek it? Why, none other than…the holy grail.
 
…Wait, what?
 
Explaining this rather bizarre turn of events could make for an interesting story, if MacPherson had bothered to tell it. I’d attribute the grail’s destructive effects to the fact that these are all evil pirates, but we see the Templars who hid the grail (natch) going murderously insane as well. The only thing resembling an explanation we get is a statement that God protects “what is rightfully his” with “the bane of avarice”, which doesn’t really reflect too well on Jehovah.
 
By the way, turns out the holy grail is buried off the coast of Nova Scotia . Who knew?
 
The story is, when all is said and done, just a string of piratey vignettes—there’s not even a single main character who we follow through the story—but to MacPherson’s credit he does have a good handle on pulplish, swashbuckling dialogue and the over-the-top character types that world attracted. That might have been enough, but unfortunately this book has another problem—the art. I did mention that, between the pencillers, inkers, colorists, and “assists”, there are ten people? That’s far too many unless you’re deliberately going for a constantly shifting profusion of style, and that’s not what’s going on here. All the artists are mediocre to outright awful, at least judging from their work here. Seriously, this book is not really at a high enough level, artistically, to be published by a real comic book publisher.
 
This book is not going to do much to revive the public’s dwindling interest in pirates. Time for everyone to get interested in ninjas. Or cowboys. Hmm…cowboys vs. ninjas? Hey Arcana, I’ve got a great pitch for you…


TWO OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS



Wolves of Odin (OGN)(Super Real Graphics)
By Sean Fahey

You really need to look no further than the name of this column (and its rating system) to know that I have a fanatical obsession with vikings. They make me go berserk(er). So, it’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I’ve been looking forward to the vikings v. werewolves graphic novel Wolves of Odin with great anticipation. Just based on the premise and the cover alone, I decided that I was going to love this book. There’s that saying about books and covers, though.

At it’s core, Wolves of Odin has a terrific pulp adventure high concept that screams comic book. Threatened by the rise of Christianity among the norsemen, Odin turns several of his most devoted berserkers into werewolves to put the fear of god (rather, norse god) into the common folk. Odin’s son, Thor, has other plans (and hidden motives that are part of the story), and bestows on an elite viking warrior, Tyr, magical weapons to combat the werewolves. Carnage ensures. Seems bullet proof, but somewhere in the execution things come a bit unraveled.

At fifty-eight pages, Wolves of Odin is lean, but isn’t economically written. Creator Grant Gould spends an excessive number of pages introducing characters and explaining in excruciating detail the god’s motives. As a result, Wolves of Odin is heavy on the exposition, and not enough time is spent on character development. We get a good lesson in norse mythology, but when the action does come around you’re not really invested in the characters. This wouldn’t be so much of problem if the battles were on a large scale (where the action is, in and of itself, the point), but all the fights are small, personal skirmishes. When I know close to nothing about Tyr, I don’t care what happens to him.

Gould has a very good visual sense. Some of the problems with the lack of economy in the writing spill over to the art (nineteen of the fifty-eight pages have two panels or less, thirty-nine of the pages have three panels or less). But the man is very skilled at crafting iconic and heroic images (there are some great money shots here), and I dig his “cell-shaded animation” style.

Weighing all its pros and cons, with a price tag of $7.50 it’s hard for me to recommend to anyone to rush out and pick this up (with it’s aforementioned page layouts, it takes - no joke - fifteen minutes to read). It’s clear that Gould has more plans for this concept, and I’ll probably check them out. But like I said, if it’s got vikings I’m there. A fun read, albeit a bit disappointing.

(You can check out some preview pages here)


THREE OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS