The story follows two voices: - Ulysses, a present-day archaeologist who finds a glowing slate in the dig site. - Marcus, an educated household slave in 79 AD who replies on that slate.
Why I’m posting:
I’d love narrative feedback. – Does the story make sense? – Are Ulysses and Marcus believable? – Which directions would you explore next (politics, tech, moral fallout)?
What’s live today - First issue, 25 rough pages. - No paywall; just a PDF.
Next steps
Regular releases toward a 8 or 10 issues collection. I’ll revise based on your critiques and wild speculations.
Grateful for any thoughts on pacing, historical plausibility, or character depth.
Thanks for reading!
Technological revolutions aren't just driven by opportunity, but also practical need; mine draining was the first "killer app" for steam that let it catch on because it solved a real problem and allowed it to be proven as a concept.
But England was also in a unique position in other ways: It had natural resources like coal and iron, as well as rivers to efficiently transport these, a stable government, and relatively high wages compared to mainland Europe, which served as an incentive to replace workers (and animals) with machines. All of these stars aligned at the right time for steam to become a viable entrepreneurial project, which simply wasn't the case in, say, Germany or France.
1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...
Many inventions are like this. They seem simple in hindsight, but at the time, required putting together tools, techniques, materials and insight from multiple sources. There's an old BBC TV show called "Connections" that explores the origins of many modern technology and the often strange paths that led us there. For example, without people loving perfume, internal combustion engines might have taken decades longer to have been developed.
Before the Saxony (flyer) spinning wheel was developed and spread through Europe in the late Middle Ages, about 9-10 spinners using hand spindles were required to keep one weaver in sufficient yarn (thread), and that includes the most tedious part of weaving, dressing the loom. Such was the need for yarn that most girls and women spun hours a day - possible while waiting for something to cook, watching children, walking around the village (I was able to spin while walking within a few weeks of learning)
Even with spinning wheels, there were still more people spinning than weaving. There were advances in loom technology in the early 1700s that increased the spinner to weaver ratio again. It wasn’t until Arkwright’s Water Frame that a powered device could reliably spin yarns strong enough to be warp; the Spinning Jenny that preceded it produced less-strong yarns.
Anyhow, ACOUP has a really great textiles series that shows some of that math. TL;DR - it’s all about the spinning (and the picking and combing)
[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=1Mjd2GCRPmAC&newbks=1&newb...
It's a mode of production more than anything.
For China you had river power which also served as a major trading round.
One of the big blockers was that trading and banking was seen by many cultures as only moral if exercised without profit. Intentionally profiting was often seen as a form of theft so you needed the moral reclassifications of these social relationships before industrialization was incentivized.
So without moral judgment approving accumulation, your assembly line is just a logistical curiosity and not a revolutionary device.
Short answer: no. Longer answer: read https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... (which covers it better than I could, from an actual historian).
Perhaps someone can ask the guy to build a "roman" steam engine.
The MC's hair colour and stubble change between the first three frames and everything has that yellow sheen.
Edit, to be less rude of me, clearly what you've worked hard on here is a chatgpt prompt which generates a fun comic. Why don't you submit that for discussion/comparison instead of a sample of model outputs without providing the prompt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome,_Sweet_Rome
I think this is the original Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k067x/could_i_de...
I do understand that it allows people to be creative in areas they don’t have skill. I can imagine sensibilities changing over time, even if just between generations, in the way Douglas Adams described. Or maybe, as this sort of thing becomes rampant, people will seek even more the authenticity of human craft, despite / because of all its flaws, the challenge of doing it well, and the awe and human connection that results.
Because you can't actually tell the difference, reliably, for the rest of your life.
You will never know if that detail was borrowed directly from a human hand without alteration, generated and composed, or added with the flourish of a digital pen or brush, or modified via very specific prompt, or edited with photoshop, or edited by an AI agent using photoshop, or a tiny grease stain, a weird compression artifact that ended up looking cool, etc.
You're a fraud if you say that you can reliably know absent of context, and you grasp for metaphysical assertions because you're a fraud.
As for the other types of machine help eg photoshop. Yes, it’s an interesting question where to draw the line. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There are lots of areas of human life where the boundary isn’t neat. That doesn’t mean there is no boundary.
Originally, I thought you were suggesting an endogenous Roman industrial revolution, which, no, that's not historically plausible (see https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... for details as to why). But on a closer reread, I found that you're talking instead about Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court-style introduction of the Industrial Revolution to the past. Which... probably still no?
There's a few factors that make Roman Industrial Revolution unlikely. It's dubious that the Romans had the technology to make a working pressure cylinder necessary for a steam engine--that requires some degree of precision engineering that I don't think they had. But there's other missing technologies: for examples, the Romans lack the spinning wheel (it would be invented ~1000 years later), and even more importantly, their looms likely aren't up to the production capacity that automatic thread production would enable. It's not implausible that this is part of future-tech-transfer, but getting this tech transferred would require a decent amount of specialized knowledge not easily available to either person here.
More importantly, I don't think the Roman economy is really at a stage that can handle an industrial revolution. Most production is still relying essentially on local production. A shortage of wool workers isn't an "oh no, we have too much wool, how ever are we going to turn it into yarn?" problem; rather, it's a "whelp, we've got nobody to deal with all the sheep" problem.
The final note is that your plan for the inevitable old-versus-new conflict is... well, "industrial revolution turns everyone into Revolutionary American liberals" is a summary of that idea, and I don't think that's anywhere near an accurate read of what a Roman reaction to an industrial revolution. I'd go into more detail, but I don't trust my own knowledge of the 1st century Roman Empire sociopolitical structure is accurate enough to model what it would look like in detail.
>> It can't be done. Without Newton, Watt, and Da Vinci, there would be no so-called Industrial Revolution.
> The story is about a man from the future sending Leonardo da Vinci's designs to the Romans.
Which is also the alternative title of the Sonny Chiba film "G.I. Samurai" (1979), in which a few dozen Japanese Self-Defense Forces soldiers find themselves in the 1560s.
(1) The art style is 100% "WikiHow meme", when I think you were probably (or should have been) shooting for "ligne claire". It's... distracting, at least. The facial expressions in particular are WikiHow-style.
(2) I can't quite read that "handwritten note" on page 14, nor is it explained to the reader how the protagonist figures out what date it is ("A.D.") for the Roman he thinks he's time-travel-talking to. Nor why he immediately jumps to time travel paradoxes; wouldn't it be obvious at first that this is, at weirdest, some sort of MMAcevedo situation, not a magic time travel communicator? Or is that my HN bias showing?
There might be some inspiration in there to guide the story towards breaking some of the chicken and egg problems. Maybe the Romans find a way (and reason) to exploit the English coal deposits and start encountering the same problems the English did eventually: how to pump water out of shafts.
Years since the founding of the City (Rome), Ab Urbe Condita. Although during Imperial times they used years since the current emperor started his mandate, ehich could be confusing as sometimes there would be three emperors in a year.
Btw I loved the comic and I will anxiously wait for the next edition.
