I’ve just started to read the novel House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, and the short piece preceding the first chapter has done lovely things to my head. “I was born in a house with a million rooms,” it starts, “built on a small airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called The Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.”

In that first sentence, there’s more imagination than I’ve encountered in some whole volumes. It’s something that interests me at the moment, having just read Jonathan Hickman’s graphic novel Pax Romana. Again, imagination is the keynote: under the control of the Vatican, a military force is sent back centuries in time to ensure the dominance of the Holy Roman Empire. Boom: when did you last come across a concept with that kind of scope?

Somehow, Hickman deals with that idea and its ramifications in one slim volume. Yes, you could say that the scale of the thinking is so big he doesn’t do his story justice. Hickman uses the device of a narrator recounting events to a young listener that enables him to skip through chunks of detail. What would be a chunky trilogy in the hands of some authors is a regular sized graphic novel for him. The emphasis is on ideas and their resolution, with several sections pretty much text-only recounting the arguments of the time travellers about the ethics and practicalities of what they’re doing.

For me, it’s interesting to compare Pax Romana with the much-feted Asterios Polyp. By striking chords familiar to readers of well-received ‘grown up’ books, and demonstrating a facility with realising intellectual conceits in graphic form, Mazzucchelli has won support from those who feel that comics should aspire to mainstream notions of the highbrow.

Hickman will never be reviewed in that way. Especially now that he’s banging away playing with Marvel’s toys. Hopefully he’ll continue to come up with creator owned work demonstrating greater imaginative flair than needed to get a group of guys in tights to beat the snot out of another similarly clad gang.

What makes Hickman stand out is his design sense. His use of info graphics informs his storytelling choices. Timelines are part of how Pax Romana functions, Hickman laying out significant narrative events in paragraphs tracing a sequence from the appearance of 21st century troops in the 4th century BC to 1421 AD in the amended timeline, when man has a colony on Mars.

Of course, big ideas don’t have to be confined to science fiction. Dave Sim and Gerhard did 300 issues of Cerebus without a rocketship or raygun, and with plenty to say about politics and religion. Berlin, by Jason Lutes, is an ambitious sequence of graphic novels about life in pre-WW2 Germany. Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad is a commentary on war in Iraq in anthropomorphic form.

Those examples are well and good, but the market continues to gravitate to giving a diminishing audience more of what it thinks it wants, rather than exposing it to tastes of difference. Comics readers are like toddlers who turn up their noses at any new food offered them, and twenty years later are stuck eating peanut butter sandwiches, baked beans and fries, with can of Coke in hand, still baffled by the notion of vegetables or spicing.

Or maybe it’s worse than that. There’s a fine true tale about a radio station that started up in Florida that was only going to play Led Zeppelin. And before they started up properly, they did test broadcasts, playing only Stairway to Heaven and one other Zep classic for several days. On encountering this on their radios, local police came round to the station armed for trouble, since clearly a diet of such uniformity indicated the presence of a madman…

I’m just saying.

Grateful readers are invited to support my caffeine habit through PayPal donations