UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
Make America Weird Again
RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher Image Comics
Writers Scott Snyder, Charles Soule
Artist Giuseppe Camuncoli
“Mad Max meets Lost” is one heck of an attentiongrabbing pitch, and this latest ongoing series from Image goes about fusing these concepts in an admirably barmy way.
Undiscovered Country is set in a future where America has used mysterious technology to seal itself off from the world for three decades, allowing nobody in or out – until a global pandemic results in a small group of diplomats and scientists being unexpectedly invited into the lost continent to receive a potential cure.
Naturally, this journey quickly goes wrong, and as the varied cast of protagonists are trapped in this bizarrely transformed America, these first three issues manage the feat of feeling both thrillingly original and weirdly derivative.
Writers Scott Snyder and Charles Soule are clearly in this for the long haul, setting up multiple mysteries, a huge world to explore and a web of character complications, and many sequences have a similar sense of excitement and discovery as the opening chapters of comic classics like Y: The Last Man or Saga.
Then, without warning, they’ll also deploy clumsy videogamestyle “fetch quest” plotting, or lean so heavily on their influences that they’re virtually recreating them (especially when it comes to the Mad Max references). Despite this, Undiscovered Country is already a compulsive read, while the art from Giuseppe Camuncoli is characterful and evocative. Let’s just hope Snyder and Soule can overcome these teething troubles and move this already intriguing story into territory that’s genuinely fresh. Saxon Bullock