Book Review: Undiscovered Country
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55, photography by Steven Zucker on Flickr
Kayleigh Lau reviews Undiscovered Country, a new comic book series suitable for our times.
A virus consuming the world! A country completely shutting off from the rest! Political blocs falling apart! But it’s not the morning news, it’s Undiscovered Country. When famed comics writers Scott Snyder (of Batman and American Vampire) and Charles Soule (Daredevil, Death of Wolverine) first came together in 2016 to collaborate on a new, radically-minded science fiction comic series, they couldn’t have guessed how very prescient it would later become.
Even before the very first panel arrives, the world feels familiar (?) and filled with an instant sense of dread. Issue 1 (released Nov 2019, Image Comics) begins 30 years after the United States seals off its borders from the world and withdraws entirely from international relations, slipping into an unbreakable radio silence. Yet, even as the fate of a once-pervasive nation remains a mystery, the rest of the world itself has been divided into two different empires, with each crumbling under the weight of a fatally incurable Sky Virus. The book instantly plunges us into a chaotic world – the main characters are literally airdropped past the USA’s electromagnetic border in the first pages, as part of a diplomatic mission to find a potential cure. The pressures of time and impending doom pervade every panel and every terse, businesslike speech bubble – especially as we find out that the entire human race has only six months left to survive.
(Spoilers) This mass of plot-points comes to us in Undiscovered Country’s first 18 pages, so that speech and text boxes visually crowd our early glimpse of America and the rest of the comic universe too. This exposition is a necessary, yet occasionally leaden slog, with overwritten dialogues and obligatory flashbacks to mission planning. It is only midway through the first issue that the diplomatic expedition fully gets going on American soil, and it starts to feel like an entirely different book: America in isolation has mutated into a gang war, with demonic half-human gang leaders and alien-like predators. This finally allows that early tone of bureaucracy and solemnity to shift to exploration and chaos, in true Mad Max-style. At long last, Giuseppe Camuncoli’s art is given room to breathe, showcasing uncanny half-familiar landscapes and whimsical hues that put the apocalyptic worlds of Hollywood to shame, with a new visual twist on every page.
The plotting and the art is rapidly cinematic, with a real sense of movement on the page: cliffhangers are interrupted by flashbacks or sharp tonal changes of scene with each flip, while the narrative line bounces between the present and varying degrees of the past, whether it’s three days or thirty years ago. But beneath it all, this is very evidently a book about lofty ideas and acutely modern fears, in the guise of bright colours and mutated man-eating slugs. In the midst of the first issue’s elaborate world-building, this is a world that’s both foreign and eerily familiar – like a future that hasn’t yet come to pass. In particular, the real thematic heart of Issue #1 lies in its ideas of disease and walls, where each one reinforces the other.
In Undiscovered Country, the characters face threats on 2 fronts: the immediate threat of survival in remote America, but also that implicit threat of a world-ending disease, which gives the book its real clock-ticking gravity. Disease has always been a lingering trope in our imagination of the apocalypse, whether it’s the biblical plague of Revelations, or the big-screen pandemics of Contagion or 12 Monkeys, simply because it always remains beyond logical human control.
Disease, just like words or emotions, is communicated from one individual to the next, physically placing them in the same state of mind and experience of infection. The virus is the “common feeling” (or sympathy - syn “together”, pathos “feeling”) that projects itself from one person to the other, showing the fundamental physical and psychological permeability we all have with the outside world, no matter how much we try to wall ourselves off. Sickness and the transmission of disease is then literally to be in physical sympathy with someone else on a huge inclusive scale, but this is now a sympathy that condemns instead. In the presence of a disease, even the skin we think of as a barrier is no longer enough to protect ourselves.
However, in the face of sweeping existential threats and the “other”, humanity seems to instinctively tend towards division and breaking itself down to the lowest common denominator: the country and the individual. Social distancing becomes the inevitable result of disease, but there is always the danger of spiralling into social alienation instead. In the comic, the United States exists as a body, but one that is profoundly afraid of the contagion of the outside world, whether in the form of the virus or other refugees. The rhetoric of contamination is a timeless one, and speech bubbles like “No foreign boots on American soil” would hardly seem out of place in the Fox broadcasts or the Trump rallies of today.
There is a constant, deep-seated tension between the impulse of isolationism, and the American exceptionalism – that “shining beacon on a hill” – that wants to declare itself to the world. Undiscovered Country dwells on this endless contradiction, creating an America that is both alienated from the world, and yet is the world’s final hope for a cure. As a region, it is instantly unique and set apart, especially as the rest of the world’s countries have been absorbed into a patchwork of identities, either as part of the Pan-Asian Prosperity Zone or the Alliance Euro-Afrique.
Unsurprisingly, walls now fully define the national landscape in spirit and in geography. A vaporizing electromagnetic shield separates America from the world, making the otherwise arbitrary, invisible conception of national borders into an alarmingly physical presence. Even within the country, sprawling concrete walls are built along the borders between one state and another, such that in this new, self-contained America, fragmentation extends within too. In one deeply chilling scene later on, “trespassers” into a state are forced to endlessly crawl up its border wall, painting trails of blood behind them. From the beginning, the nature of America’s gathering of fifty states and the designation “the United States of America” is a wholly paradoxical one itself, and Undiscovered Country plays up and corrupts the notion of states in its post-apocalyptic way. In the absence of historical treaties and state governments, America is now carved up into schizophrenic “states of being” – forming warring gang territories, filled with genetically-modified animals, guns and warlords. In this future, America in isolation has only devolved itself, returning to a corrupted Wild West slash civil war and endlessly replays its own turbulent history. Yet as fantastical as this sounds, on a broader level, the comic only glimpses what could happen after a time of profound isolation – a little like the lives we live now.
As Snyder explains, “It's a book that re-examines who we are, and who we might become at a crucial moment in our history”. In the end, Undiscovered Country shows what happens when a country dwells in a constant state of siege, regardless of whether its enemies are real or imagined. In shutting itself off from the Sky Virus, the America of the comic only dives deeper into its own national infection.
The first issue of Undiscovered Country is available free online here.