Barbara Slate Week continues, which is a (work) week's worth of spotlights on the work of Barbara Slate, an underappreciated comic book creator who I've long been a fan of.

Today we take a look at Slate's 1991 mini-series Sweet XVI about a group of teens in ancient Rome...

In this series, written and drawn by Slate, we follow a Roman princess in the days leading up to her sixteenth birthday. But, you know, in roman numerals, of course.

Slate gets a lot of humor just out of the usage of roman numerals in the story...

She also gets humor out of the surroundings...

In the end, though, this is basically an Archie comic book set in Ancient Rome, with Princess Cornelia being Veronica, her best friend Aria being Betty and Antony being Archie.

You can see that here...

I really liked the mixture of informative pages, like where Slate teaches us Roman numerals or here, where we learn how to make a Roman braid...

A funny subplot to the series is that a farmer accidentally received an invitation to her party through an errant messenger pigeon, and he sets off on quite an adventure to attend her party, even getting swallowed whole by a giant alligator...

This is a sweet, endearing comic book with some well-developed characters and a whole lot of corny (but adorable) jokes. It is nice to see Marvel give this project a shot.