Deep Sequencing: The Unhistory of Pax Romana -Vs- My First Year History Textbook

Or how Pax Romana borrows the elements of a History textbook to tell the ultimate story about rewriting history.
Pax Romana is by Jonathan Hickman; Image Comics
World History: Volume 11, Since 1500, 5th Edition is by William J Duicker and Jackson J Spielvogel

Pax Romana is a great comic about the Catholic church sending a group of mercenaries back through time to prop up the church who instead go rogue and use the Roman Empire to enact a campaign of Scientific and social reform to change the future. Basically, it's a time travel comic where the objective of the travellers is to destroy history to save the future. It's a great, thinky, quintessentially Hickman plotted comic that also features his distinctive, deconstructed comic art style. It is also a comic that is framed as a history lesson given by The Gene Pope to a young Roman Emperor, and as such functions like an history textbook. This aspect of Pax Romana is enhanced by the inclusion of  several elements of an actual history text book.

I am that guy who kept all of his undergraduate textbooks, and incidentally still have a textbook from a World History survey course I took in my first year of University. I think it might be fun to compare Pax Romana to this textbook to illustrate the many ways Pax Romana borrows from textbooks to enhance this aspect of the comic.

This will contain *SPOILERS* for Pax Romana and human history, so keep reading at your own risk.

For instance, both Pax Romana and the textbook have timelines:

They both sport maps:

They both contain historic primary documents:

Both Pax Romana and the History textbook have portraits of historically significant people with descriptive captions.

The comic and the text both have transcripts of historic conversations:

Both the History Textbook and Pax Romana feature images of significant buildings and diagrams of their floorplans:

There are even historic correspondence in both books:

And of course both the textbook and the comic have their narrative framed by a disembodied authoritative voice:

By co-opting the design elements of History textbooks, Pax Romana banks on the authority of the textbooks which makes the comic feel more complete. These elements the difference between a comic that feels like a sci-fi comic geeking out and a reasonable, academic thought experiment with intellectual bonafides. And I think that these elements are a big part of the magic of Pax Romana and the reason I'm still thinking about this comic more than a year after I've last read it.

So I Read Pax Romana

A 250 word or less review of the Pax Romana graphic novel
By Jonathan Hickman, Image Comics

Time travel stories are a staple of genre fiction and comic books. Typically, these stories are built around a few general plots: accidental time travelers try not to alter history, or our heroes try to prevent a villainous entity from changing the past, or time travelers attempt to alter a single event in history (often a personal one) usually with dire consequences. These stories often play with ideas of causality and the paradox of traveling through time and generally portray fiddling with past events as irresponsible or immoral. Pax Romana says fuck all that, let's “destroy the past to create the future”. The plot of Pax Romana, briefly, is that a group of time travelers decide to disregard their orders and prevent the fall of the Roman Empire in an attempt to engineer the conditions for a better present/future. The writing in the book is characteristically excellent with the particulars of the story being very intellectually satisfying and with some reveals being jaw-droppingly clever. Visually Pax Romana, being a solo Hickman enterprise, is a kind of deconstructed comic book with a generous application of white space that, by making liberal use of timelines, transcribed conversations, and other trappings of textbooks, appears to be a kind of alternate history teaching manual. This is a visually dynamic book built around a great high concept and executed with a brilliant eye for details. Also, if anyone invents a time machine, I suggest we give the chrono-tunneling-initiatrix-controls to Hickman… for the good of humanity.

Word count: 250

Previously:
So I Read The Nightly News
So I Read The Red Wing
So I Read Transhumanism