Undiscovered Country, Volume 1: Destiny Review (Scott Snyder, Charles Soule)

In the not-too-distant future…

For 30 years the USA has been closed off from the rest of the world - they put up the walls and stayed behind them. Now, a pandemic called the sky virus is ravaging the rest of the world and for the first time in decades America is reaching out. A figure who looks uncannily like the Uncle Sam of army recruitment posters claims to have the cure to the virus and invites a select group inside American borders to retrieve it. But what’s happened to the states in those lost years - and what awaits the group behind the wall…?

The concept intrigued me and this title has some big names attached but neither Scott Snyder or Charles Soule have written anything worth reading in quite some time and unfortunately that remains the case - Undiscovered Country is another crappy comic from both. You thought Snyder’s Justice League was unreadable rubbish? Phewf - wait’ll you see this mess!

The book is aiming for a cross between Mad Max and The Walking Dead but it’s nowhere near as good as either. The Mad Max comparison is immediately obvious - some of the scenes, particularly in the desert, look ripped straight from Fury Road and one of the characters even looks like Immortan Joe. It’s so uncreative when you lean this heavily on derivation. But the barmy elements in Mad Max kinda makes sense within that world - nothing in Undiscovered Country made sense.

Why are there giant land fish being ridden like horses? Why are there flying snails? Why are there Cadillacs being powered by giant eyeballs? How does that buffalo talk? Why are there people climbing a giant wall in their underpants? Is that a giant starfish? Why are there so many giant things here - is that a giant shrimp!? I’m getting hungry… And I expect this will be explained in later books (that I won’t be reading) but why is there a mummy and an astronaut with glowing antlers with a lobster claw and cat paw for hands talking only in American slogans?

So much of this drivel feels like Snyder/Soule justifying its inclusion with a “Durr, we fink it’s kewl!” because no other explanation presents itself. Sure it is fellas. If you’re a drooling idiot maybe.

The Walking Dead comparison is probably because of the large cast and dystopian background but, as inconsistent in quality as Kirkman/Adlard’s series was, it was head and shoulders above this one. A lot of this dreary, dreary book is spent tediously telling the dull backstories of the extensive boring cast and how they got recruited for this trip into America - almost none of which are relevant!

One’s a doctor, one’s a disgraced academic, another’s a journalist with a pet drone; there’s more (lordy, there are TOO MANY characters!) but I didn’t care about any of them or what anyone was doing. The story is so incoherent, I had no idea what was going on - there’s a magic golden train peg and extensive babble about “walking the spiral” and something about time travel. It’s such gibberish!

I feel like Snyder/Soule are attempting to do some kind of social commentary (Trump’s wall, patriotism taken to the extreme, ooo a pandemic, that’s relevant!) but it’s so poor because none of this is remotely plausible. It’s not even entertaining or clever commentary, it’s a fever dream of nonsense!

Credit where it’s due though - I was really impressed with Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art, as I usually am. The dude, and his art team of Daniele Orlandini and Leonardo Marcello Grassi, are called on to draw some pretty outlandish things (to put it mildly!) and they pull it off admirably and with aplomb - kudos, guys. The range they have is remarkable and, as much as I disliked reading it, I always loved looking at the comic - it’s a shame this art is in service to such a bad story.

I struggled through this one, hoping blindly that there would be some payoff at the end, but it was disappointingly terrible all the way through. I wouldn’t recommend Undiscovered Country, Volume 1: Destiny to anyone - it’s really not worth it.