Here’s a title I’d been meaning to check out for a long time. It was originally published as a 7-issue miniseries in Marvel’s creator-owned Icon imprint in 2016, but I passed on it then. By the time I’d decided to read it, it had fallen out of print as, for some reason, after Millar left Marvel Comics to sign an exclusive deal with Netflix, in which all of his previously created titles would be published by Image Comics, along with his new titles, this is one series that he didn’t republish under Image Comics. Thus it was no longer available digitally, which is my preferred method. Well, I finally decided to get a cheap used copy of the trade paperback via Amazon.

First, let me make two notes: this series is due to be republished by Dark Horse Comics, as will a planned sequel, which is why I’m posting this review under my Dark Horse category now rather than my Marvel Category. Second, I will be including some major spoilers here.

Written by Mark Millar and drawn by Stuart Immonen, this is a wide-ranging space opera story, in the vein of Flash Gordon. In fact, if I were to break this story down into a sentence, I’d say it’s “Ming The Merciless‘ wife takes their children and runs away from him.”

Morax is a galactic dictator, ruling his vast multi-planet empire from his homeworld ER. He’s utterly ruthless, ruling with an iron fist through force and fear. In an opening sequence, we see Morax ordering the execution of three of his subjects who turned in one of their friends who had publicly denounced Morax. According to Morax, their crime is that instead of turning him in they should have immediately beaten him to death with their bare hands, for daring to complain about him.

Yeah, he’s that kinda madman.

Emporia is Morax’s beloved wife, whom he genuinely seems to care for. We see that he met her when she was working in a nightclub and instantly asked her to be his wife, promising her that she would never want for anything. They’ve been married for 17 years and have three children. Eldest daughter Aine, son Adam, and baby Puck.  But Emporia has grown disgusted with Morax’s brutality and doesn’t want her children to grow up to be like him, so with the help of her bodyguard, Captain Dane Havelock, she plots to run away from him, escaping ER to get to her estranged sister, whom Morax doesn’t know about  (when he met Emporia he told her that a condition of marrying him was to completely forget her life before she met him and never even speak of it) and who lives on a faraway planet. This journey will require visiting several different worlds where they encounter various challenges including giant monsters, pirates, mercenaries, and Morax’s soldiers who are all on their trail.

Similar to Millar’s sci-fi titles like Space Bandits and Sharkey The Bounty Hunter, the galactic empire shown here is one of worlds filled with both humans and humanoid alien races, all living on planets with Earth-like gravity and oxygen, and everyone can communicate in English, thanks to vaguely defined universal translators. Planetary travel is accomplished mainly via spaceships equipped with warp drives.

But the major plot twist of this story is that although everything seems futuristic and alien, the planet ER is actually Earth, and this all takes place in Earth’s distant prehistoric past. 65 million years ago, to be precise.

As the opening captions of this book say: “Take the Earth’s four billion years and spread them over a single day. The Human race arrives two minutes before midnight. But lost civilizations rose and fell in that time with no record of their existence.” Morax’s empire is one of those lost civilizations.

It’s an interesting concept. I have watched some YouTube channels that speculate on lost civilizations in prehistoric times, and at the very least, it seems like a plausible possibility, despite the lack of any clear evidence of such a thing.

While the population of this prehistoric Earth are all humanoids, it appears to be a mix of people like Morax, who has a reddish-brown skin color (as does Aine), and those who look like regular modern-day White folks, such as Emporia, her sons, and Havelock. The family later meets up with Tor, an old ally of Havelock’s who helps them stay safe on their journey, he’s a dwarf who looks like a modern-day Black man, but it’s unclear if he’s native to Earth or is from another planet. But most of the aliens we see on the various worlds the group travels to look more non-human and come in colors like blue, green, and purple.

Tor has a limited teleportation device, a floating little apparently-sentient machine he calls “Ship”, which helps them travel undetected from world to world as they make their way to Emporia’s sister’s home. As we experience these other worlds and civilizations Mark Millar introduces several little details that seem small at the time but are later revealed to have significant importance to the story. In that sense, In man ways I find it one of the most cleverly-written stories of Mark Millar’s that I’ve ever read. And Stuart Immomen’s artwork is beautiful to behold. From drawing spaceships to giant ice monsters, he shows off his range.

But I do have some criticisms, which is why I must reveal some spoilers.

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First, this isn’t really a criticism, as it doesn’t distract from my enjoyment of the story, but the setting of this story is rather pointless. Why set this in prehistoric times on Earth instead of either setting in the future or just some different alien world altogether? I thought maybe at the end of the series there’d be a flash-forward or something showing how Morax’s civilization led to our modern-day civilization, but there’s nothing like that. Besides the fact that we get a few appearances of some dinosaurs, the prehistoric setting doesn’t affect the story at all.

Second, it’s clear from the start that Aine opposes the escape. She loves her father and is eager to be trained to take his place someday, considering herself a warrior (as opposed to her brother Adam, whom she considers weak). So why did she even go along with it? Why didn’t she rat out her mother at the start? She does eventually betray her mother to contact Morax, but her reason for it doesn’t make that much sense to me.

And lastly, Emporia manages to kill Morax in the end. I won’t say how, but it raises the question of why she didn’t just do that in the first place, so her family could be rid of him for good instead of running, risking capture, and then having to hide from him for the rest of their lives (which could be a long time as we learn that Morax is already over 150 years old)?

But overall I enjoyed and can recommend this book. It ends in a way that is self-contained, even as it promises further stories to come. So I’d say if you like space operas, give it a shot. Chacebook rating: FOUR STARS