‘Aquila: Blood of the Iceni’ – Gordon Rennie, Leigh Gallagher, Patrick Goddard (Rebellion)



It has been one of those weeks and I am so glad that it’s over, done and dusted. I will hopefully have some actual books ready to be reviewed next week but in the meantime, lets round this week off with a comic book about a massive bloke cutting a swathe through Roman history with his sword. It can only be… Aquila!
If you were reading 2000AD around the first half of the 2010’s, you would very likely have come across the ‘Aquila’ storyline. I seem to be incapable of collecting single issues these days and so prefer to wait for a cheap trade edition to catch my eye. This is how I first came across ‘Aquila’ last year. Having read ‘Aquila’ already, I knew it would be just the ticket to sort my head out after the week I’ve just had; reading a bit of faux historical ‘Sword and Sorcery’ fiction usually does the trick as a bit of a palate cleanser before getting into anything else. I thought I’d also see if I could be a little more critical of ‘Aquila’ this time round, instead of the ‘wow, sword fights with monsters are cool’ reaction that I had last time round. Lets see how that works out, shall we…?

69AD. Aquila was a slave-turned-gladiator who was amongst those crucified following Spartacus's failed revolt. Dying a slow death, a Roman eagle carved into his chest, he cried out to the gods for vengeance - and Ammit the Devourer answered, offering him invulnerability in return for delivering to her the souls of evil men, for which Aquila hunts the breadth of the Empire...

Lets get one thing straight, sword fights with monsters are cool and nowhere are they are cool as what Rennie, Gallagher and Goddard bring us here. The combination of concept and execution works incredibly well here with panels crammed full of eye catching action that keeps the pages turning. In that sense, ‘Aquila’ is very easy to get into and very easy to get invested in as well. If there’s some kind of confrontation happening on each page then of course the reader will want to know what’s going to happen next. Fair play to Rennie in particular for maintaining the flow of the story so that all the fights etc don’t lead to plot fatigue. ‘Aquila’ is a fairly short read with a place for everything and everything in its place. For a story that’s so chaotic, I found it quite funny seeing how well ordered it was.

The thing is though, there isn’t actually an awful lot of plot; hardly any in fact. There are moments when Aquila looks like he might do something a little more fulfilling than just killing another bad guy (like winning free of his promise to Ammit and actually being able to die)… And then he just goes off and kills another bad guy. I get that it may be a case of setting things up for future stories but it looks like those future stories never happened so all we’re left with are hints that remain unfulfilled and an awful lot of killing. That’s alright if that’s all you want but I wanted a bit more and I thought ‘Aquila’ was in a good place to deliver on that… which it didn’t.

‘Aqila’ is a fun read then but ultimately felt more than a little bit shallow. Maybe that’s a sign I’m back in my reading groove, maybe it’s a sign that ‘Aquila’ is just a shallow read that’s meant to be forgotten about after you finish it. A filler story that you deal with in order to get to the ‘Judge Dredd’ story in the comic. This wasn’t a comic though and that’s why I felt a little bit disappointed after I put the book down.

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