It’s time to discover and uncover Undiscovered Country #1, from Image. There has been a lot of speculation and wonderment around this title. Is it justified?

The background to this story from Scott Snyder and Charles Soule is well documented in seven pages of notes at the end of the book. But the gist of the situation is this: as the front cover indicates, the continental United States is ‘missing’ from North America. Alaska, Canada, and Mexico are shown, but the US draws a big blank. ‘Missing’, isolated and walled off from the rest of the world.

Speaking of the rest of the world, we know that Athens is in bad shape. Disease is being dropped from the sky. People are sick. Medication is hard to find, but we ‘hear’ that the isolated US has plenty!

Enter our exploratory team, who are invited to visit the walled nation. Drop-in and chat! It’s not as easy as all that, of course. Time and isolation have not been kind to the US. Militants have mutated everywhere! Duck and roll!

The entire state of Alaska has been abandoned. Hawaii receives nary a mention. Puerto Rico gets a big nada too. It’s all about the mainland, and we wonder why.
But the big and massive protectionist wall is presumably intact from Maine’s border with Canada at New Brunswick, all the way west to California’s ocean coast.

The artwork by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Daniele Orlandini with colouring by Matt Wilson is accomplished and works to convey a realistic cinematic feel. The vast expanses, the suffocatingly confined enclosures, the human drama.

As the cliché goes, this one has it all. The scene is set, the actors are on their mark. Time to run the cameras and see what develops in issue two!

Image Comics, Undiscovered Country #1, for 32 pages of comic content. Mature

By Alan Spinney

After a career of graphic design, art direction and copywriting, I still have a passion for words and pictures. I love it when a comic book comes together; the story is tight, and the drawings lead me forward. Art with words... the toughest storytelling technique to get right. Was this comic book worth your money? Let's see!!