Horseman, Travis & Caracuzzo, Giancarlo – Amiculus: A Secret History Volume 1

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Amiculus: A Secret History Volume 1

A word of warning before I move onto the comic: Travis’ website seems to be down at the moment, which can be a worrying sign for a young comic series. Maybe it’s fine, in which case I’ll cut this line out of the review before I post it. If it it still here, that’s probably a bad sign, especially for a series that has me hooked after only one volume. If you’re not a fan of ancient Roman history and/or speculative historical fiction, it’s possible that you won’t get much out of this series. Still tough to say for sure, as this volume is very much about getting all the ducks in a row for future volumes. But for those of us with an interest in the history, this first volume is fascinating. The gist of it is (and Travis helpfully lays this out in the introduction) that the western Roman empire ended in 476 AD, while the eastern Roman empire survived for much longer. This story details what happens with Romulus, the last emperor on the western side and somebody who ended up as a footnote in the history books. Which, as Travis is happy to point out, means that he has plenty of room to tell the story of Romulus, how he eventually lost power and the players involved. This book is broken down into three sections: the historian who leaves a large battle 60 years after the fall of the western Roman empire to learn the real history of Romulus, Romulus as a child ruler who was given strict rules to follow, and the start of that final battle. Along the way we meet a few characters of various levels of mysteriousness, all of whom I’m going to leave out of this for now until we learn more. But the point is that the mysteries are compelling and I’m very curious to see what happens next, which is all you really want out of a first volume. As for the basics, the writing is solid and compelling, the art does remarkable work depicting the chaos of battle scenes after the fact and more subtle moments of character expressions, even the colorist does great work. Like I said, the only way you’d have a problem with this is if you were against historical fiction, which I don’t think describes a lot of humans. But I could be wrong! $15, give the man some money so he can finish this saga and it doesn’t end of being one of those series where I always just have to wonder what would have happened next.