Hello and welcome to Comic Book Herald’s Hickmania, a series running through 2022 where we’ll be reading and analyzing the creator-owned works of writer Jonathan Hickman, from his debut The Nightly News through to his most recent output. We’ll be reading one creator-owned work a month through 2022, and each month I’ll release a new analysis with a new guest discussing the comic!
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Previously: Past episodes of Hickmania
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Today we’re talking Pax Romana
- How does the time traveling religious crusade and society building in Pax Romana hold up almost 15 years later?
- How does Hickman incorporate science fiction and alternate history elements into the comic?
- Do we wish Pax Romana had run for more than four issues so the world could have been explored in more detail?
- How does the shaping of societies compare to Hickman’s work on X-Men in House of X / Powers of X.
- How effective is the use of text conversations to convey larger ideas in the comic?
“Pax Romana’ takes place in a future when Islam has overrun Western Europe and monotheism is on the wane in the East and the West,” Jonathan Hickman told CBR News. “There’s a breakthrough. They discover time travel in a scientific lab that’s secretly funded by the Vatican. The pope sends a private army back in time to conquer the world and maintain the dominance of Catholicism.”
Pax Romana is:
Everything: Jonathan Hickman
Publisher: Image
Referenced interviews:
https://www.cbr.com/hickman-saves-the-future-destroys-the-past-in-pax-romana/
https://www.academia.edu/14656528/Jonathan_Hickmans_Pax_Romana_and_the_End_of_Antiquity
Schedule:
January 2022 – The Nightly News
February 2022 – Pax Romana
March 2022 – Transhuman
April 2022 – A Red Mass For Mars
May 2022 – The Red Wing
June 2022 – The Manhattan Projects
July 2022 – Secret
August 2022 – God is Dead
August/Sept 2022 – East of West
October 2022 – The Dying and the Dead
November 2022 – The Black Monday Murders
December 2022 – Decorum
December 2022 – 3W3M