Great Pacific #1 Review


Image releases tons of great books each month, and this week we add another “great” book with Great Pacific #1, by Joe Harris (Joker’s Asylum: ScarecrowGhost Projekt) and Martín Morazzo. How does this new, environmentally inclined series fair? Here’s the official description from Image:

TRASHED!”, Part One
Chas Worthington dreams of big things, solving bigger problems, and making his mark on the world. Only no one takes the twenty-one year-old heir to one of the biggest oil fortunes in history very seriously. That is, until he turns his back on his cushy life of wealth and prestige, and seeks to solve an environmental disaster twice the size of his native Texas known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The epic sci-fi adventure and survival tale begins!

Before we really sink our teeth into the review proper, I feel the need to point out that Great Pacific is not necessarily accurate in its depiction of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch itself. While I’m hardly an expert, everything I’ve been able to find online suggests that, among other things, the Patch is not a full-fledged floating island of garbage one could potentially walk on (apparently it’s more like a soupy area of ocean containing countless near-invisible plastic bits). Indeed, Image bills Great Pacific as science fiction and Joe Harris might have done well to include an educational appendix, to distinguish fact from fiction, à la fellow Image writer Matt Hawkins in Think Tank. But enough about that…

Harris casts Chas in the tried and true comic mold of the spoiled-billionaire-playboy-who-develops-a-conscience, with such esteemed characters as Tony Stark, Oliver Queen, and his possible namesake, Angel of the X-Men, Warren Worthington III. But where all those characters turned to superheroics, Chas hatches an elaborate scheme to escape his corporate responsibilities and undo some of his company’s environmental destruction by cleaning up the Garbage Patch.

Harris can be commended here, because although Great Pacific is obviously a book with a message, it never gets excessively preachy. What it does do is fail at being truly cohesive. Not only is the book’s flow difficult to follow in places, but it’s not always clear exactly what’s going on.

Martín Morazzo’s art is good, but lacking in places. The faces, although excellent most of the time, are occasionally stiff or squashed, and the figures can be stiff as well. Early on, a couple characters appear to be floating in midair, although I have to assume they were jumping. It did contribute to my confusion about the story though. Morazzo also handles colors on the book, and while it’s all very vibrant, there are places where the palette is too simplistic.

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If Great Pacific can iron out some of its storytelling problems, it stands a chance of joining the long list of truly great books put out by Image, but issue #1 isn’t there.

3/5

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