Great Pacific, the Image series from Joe Harris and Martin Morazzo, is founded on a great idea – the urban legend of the enormous mass of garbage out in the Pacific Ocean as the last, if artificial, frontier, and the whiz kid who thinks its his manifest destiny to terraform it into a nation all his own. I say ‘urban legend’ because, in actuality, it seems like that while we like to think of that floating junkpile as an island, it’s actually just a significant concentration of trash that’s mostly tiny chunks, often under the surface and in no way forms a land mass that’s visible to the naked eye.
For the sake of this book, however, the notion of an undiscovered country of humanity’s waste has a lot of storytelling potential. Chas Worthington thought he was hot shit because he swiped some high-technology and fundage from his father’s company, faked his own death and set off for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to use said high-tech to transform it into a habitable land under his control – and he’s fittingly calling it New Texas. Of course, it never occurred to him that he might not be the first guy to try to claim that island for his own, and his big plans have quickly spiraled into the ol’ shitter.
There are already hostile tribesmen on the island (a none-too-subtle allegory to Native Americans) and a stalking sea monster they call Yalafath, not to mention the cute, mysterious French woman Zoe who crash landed there in search of discarded nuclear weapons, who turned out to be a mercenary ready to sell Chas out to her pack of scruffy employers. Then, by the end of Great Pacific #5, Chas has realized that the first order of business in founding any new sovereignty is raising an army to defend its borders. Or maybe it’s the second order of business, after making sure there’s no one else on your little patriotic fantasy island in the first place.
Harris’ story is interesting and seems like fertile ground, despite the literally infertile ground he’s basing it on. The biggest drawback to the series is the art from Morazzo. His faces all tend to look like constipated cats or snaggletoothed chipmunks. I guess Morazzo might have lost his mind from having to draw landscapes made up of teeming piles of tiny bits of litter all the time and thus has little time to create human forms whose faces don’t look like they’re sliding all over the front of their heads. His detail with the backgrounds and the setting is impressive, but his characters are so off-putting that it’s honestly difficult to look at them.
Some comic books have enough artistic pizzazz to command you to own them in print form. Great Pacific seems like one of those books you’d rather get digitally – you still want it enough to follow the story, but it’s not going to be something you pass on to your kids or anything.
