REVIEW: Great Pacific #1

Chas Worthington III has a plan to fight oil-based pollution, but no one wants to hear about it. He’s got a risky—and as-of-yet mysterious—plan to get what he wants that involves the Great Pacific Gyre. Read on in this Major Spoilers review.

GREAT PACIFIC #1
WRITER: Joe Harris
ARTIST, COLORS: Martin Morazzo
LETTERS: Doug E. Sherwood
EDITOR: Shawna Gore
PUBLISHER: Image Comics
COVER PRICE: $2.99

Previously in Great Pacific:  Brand-new series. Everythng you need to know comes in the first few pages, so worry about being lost.

NEEDS A LITTLE TIME TO MATURE

Meet Chas. Chas Worthington III. He’s the 14-year-old heir to an increasingly hegemonic energy company that’s drilling all kinds of oil and getting into the coal-mining game. Chas has some moral objections to they way they do business, but you wouldn’t know it since he apparently doesn’t exercise his vote on the company’s board. For a kid, though, Chas has some excellent business sense—he wants to fight the pollution his company causes and he’s even helped invent something to do the work, but he knows no one is going to touch it unless there’s a profit motive. Unfortunate verisimilitude.

I’ve not knowingly read any of Joe Harris’ other work, so I can’t say whether or not the writing in this book is above or below his par, but I found the dialogue fairly simplistic and the characters less than multidimensional. The shame of it is that I enjoy the message of the book, but this issue spent a little too much time with world building and not enough with storytelling.

“Great Pacific” actually gets kind of interesting toward the end. There’s an excellent twist that involves Chas walking away from his company in a very Nolan-Batman-esque fashion. For me, however, the twist was too little too late; I just couldn’t get emotionally invested in the story. If I had to predict where this story was going, I’d put my money on Eco Batman without the mask or gravelly voice. The more I think about it the more the Batman parallels stick out to me—maybe it’s no surprise given that Harris has some Bat background.

LIKE THE FRONT OF A GORGEOUS GARBAGE POSTCARD

For all my criticisms of the book I’ll say that the art is not one of them. The first three pages were a convincing downpayment on high quality illustrations throughout the rest of the book. Nothing’s perfect, to be sure—some character designs scream “dumb.” “snarky” or “evil,” but they were probably drawn to match the character traits.

Martin Morazzo’s art truly shines, though, with vistas. There’s an island-sized agglomeration of garbage in the Pacific and, surprisingly, it’s the most beautifully rendered thing in the issue the few times we see it.

BOTTOM LINE: NOT MY CUP O’ TEA, BUT YMMV

I understand, appreciate and support the underlying message of this book—put simply, I give a hoot. That being said, I can’t recommend anyone spend $2.99 on it. From the too-young and too-noble protagonist to the one-dimensional and stereotypical Evil Corporate Board to the overly preachy message, the book’s story grated on me as I turned each page. On the positive side the plot seemed to pick up in complexity toward the end and I have a feeling the next couple of issues will be much better than this one. But I won’t be picking them up. 2 stars

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