3 out of 5

The digital mottled shading, jittery pacing, and odd panel bordering mark 19XX as a web comic, but Paul Martinez’s historical fiction makes for an impressively dense and handsome hardcover collection, giving the impression of a creator fully invested in and aware of his creations as well as eager to shed some light on points of interest from the era of the setting.  Occasionally the spread of characters and globe-hopping recalls Archaia’s Secret History – a similar “retell history with fantastical elements” spin, though 19XX thankfully is a lot more fun and straightforward than that wayward series.  Elsewise its closest spiritual cousin is Tintin, as good guy super-agent group The 19XX members Jorie and The Kid switch off narrating us through different parts of an elongated adventure tracking down evil super-agent gropup The Black Faun member Shining Skull, who’s on his way to Shambala to do evil things: when fisticuffs and scuffles occur, the breezy blend of danger and fearlessness of the troops (and Kid’s bet bunny) absolutely harken back to Herge’s famous figure.  But… these things aren’t occurring as frequently and as inventively as they do within most of Tintin’s adventures, leaving plenty of pages of talking heads that slow the flow, as well as the frequent narration switching which works with timed online posts but feels very hiccupy in print.  Martinez also has an incredibly odd and distracting lettering habit that sees single sentences broken up into several small bubbles and the colors, interestingly, seem flat in the book but work well when viewed online.

Still, the Tintin comparison stands strong, and though the 19XX tales perhaps feel a bit more generic and slow, capturing that adventuresome spirit is worth a lot, and as a quality is something of a rarity in comic form.  Plus, superficially, the hardcover looks really cool.