Great Pacific vol. 1: Trashed!

There’s no more land on Earth to discover.  Short of a major undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption forming a new island somewhere, every square inch is accounted for and spoken for.  But what if new land was somehow created?  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a real thing and writer Joe Harris has taken it to its logical conclusion — that the accumulated junk has formed into a solid mass which can be occupied.  That this has been done by a fugitive oil heir who wants to leverage his billions into creating a new country is to me an irresistible concept.  Unfortunately, this first volume tends to play it more as a sci-fi tinged near-future adventure than the sociopolitical power struggle that it wants to be.

Chas Worthington is the oil heir in question has decided that he doesn’t want the life of a wealthy socialite that his father left to him.  Instead, he’d rather put his fortune use in higher pursuits.  So he fakes his death, leaks word of the misdeeds of his company’s executives, and heads off to settle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as his own sovereign nation with his best friend.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Except for the fact that the patch already has its own share of problems.  An angry tribe, pirates, mutated wildlife and a giant octopus are the least of Chas’ problems once the U.S. Government gets word of his scheme and weapons of mass destruction are also uncovered on the Patch as well.

Though the actual logistics of starting and running your own country may come into play in the next volumes (it’s advertised in the back of this one under the title “Nation Building”) the story suffers from the fact that it’s painfully clear that Chas hasn’t thought this through.  Yes, he’s established as a very reckless and impulsive character, but if you’re going to start your own country, I’d imagine that a well-supplied military would be first on your agenda.  You’d also want help that doesn’t take off the first time they get a bad feeling about things too.

Instead, this volume focuses on Chas’ misadventures after he takes off to survey his new country.  Along the way he meets Zoe, a French pilot who crash-lands on the Patch, tribesmen who are led by a young leader who knows more than he’s letting on, and is alternately chased/followed by a giant octopus.  I’ll admit that it makes for a decent enough adventure, and Harris does a good job of keeping the momentum going through this part of the book.  However the introduction of “Great Pacific’s” supporting cast is not without its problems.  Zoe isn’t really fleshed out as a character here since her main function is to introduce a subplot.  I can see that she’s also there to break up the sausage fest on the Patch and almost certainly serve as a potential love interest for Chas down the line.  The tribesmen are more problematic since it’s hard to swallow that tattooed, loincloth-suited savages still exist in this day and age and are able to make it out here on their boats.  I’m also not impressed by their leader who is more mysterious for the sake of being mysterious than an actual character or the.  Then there’s the thing they do at the end of the volume which is baffling considering the level of technology they’re shown to have.

As for the octopus… I’d be more amenable to its existence if it didn’t display a basic personality and act specifically to advance the plot.

Martin Morazzo has the difficult task of drawing all of this, but he proves himself to generally be up to the challenge.  Granted, his characters need a bit more work to make them look more natural in appearance and expression, but his storytelling is clear and he can illustrate a convincing patch of trash.  I can imagine lots of work went into “Great Pacific” and it’s easy to see it looking better as time goes on.

This first volume is more introduction than anything else and it also studiously avoids a lot of the actual real-world logistics of seizing a giant patch of garbage in the Pacific for oneself in favor of running around with tribesmen, pirates, an octopus and the U.S. Navy.  You can see this most clearly at the end when some vaguely explained backdoor dealings give Chas’ claim some legitimacy in ways that are not immediately clear.  Reading this, I can’t help but think that the material would’ve been better served by more attention to grounding it in our world than to running around on the frontier.  It has been shown that politics don’t have to be boring and I hope that’s something Harris takes to heart as he continues to map out Chas’ journey.  The idea behind “Great Pacific” is still irresistible at the end of the volume, but it has a ways to go before it can live up to its potential.