Thoughts

An issue that delivers on the promise of the previous one’s cliffhanger. The team end up in Nova Roma, a lost Roman outpost in a mountainous valley near the source of the Amazon.

Everything you’d want from a Roman adventure is here. Gladiators, Senatorial intrigue, Chariots. This is all the great stuff you’d want to put in if you brought a superhero team to such a location.

If there’s one issue its that this story seems to have little interest in doing anything new with the Pulp Adventuring setting. The boys on the team become Gladiators, forced to fight in the arena. The girls on the team become, well, beautiful drugged women to be ogled. If such a tale had been told in the yellowing pages of a pulp fantasy novel, or a lurid technicolor b-movie of the fifties, this is exactly the steps the story would take.

It’s a shame that, so far, Claremont doesn’t seem to have any interest in doing something different with these tropes.

Fun Panel

Sunspot and Cannonball in the Arena leads to some great fighting action!

It was a Product of its Time

A bigger problem with this issue’s slavish devotion to the pulp cliches of yesteryear comes when we get some insight into the background of Nova Roma. It turns out that the city, founded by Romans, is now mostly people by Inca fleeing the Conquistadors.

Which is a neat idea but then Claremont has the story tell us that its these pesky Inca. With their backward concepts of absolute monarchy, they threaten to utopian Republic the new Romans built.

This reads just like the sort of colonial attitudes that you’d expect from the source material. The white Europeans represent a civilisation, always in danger from the “savages”. Amara, a good senator’s daughter, is hoping to fight against this. All of which makes her presentation as white and blonde, out to sabve her city from the Inca something of a regrettable cliche