Writers: Scott Snyder, Charles Soule
Artists: Giuseppe Camuncoli, Daniele Orlandini
Colorist: Matt Wilson
Letterer: Crank!
Publisher: Image Comics

What if America closed its borders and kept them shut for the next 30 years? What would happen to the country after all that time? That is the premise behind Undiscovered Country. This issue begins with a group of people flying into American airspace for the first time in the aforementioned 30 years. All of the individuals involved have personal stakes in the matter of the US opening their borders. Hopes and dreams. The biggest question is: what has happened to America since closing its borders?

Scott Snyder, Charles Soule, and the rest of the team have crafted a story based on real-world fears and turned it into an adventure. In a world where America is already talking about building walls and stopping immigration, it’s not that difficult to think that America would shut itself in.

I was expecting America in Undiscovered Country #1 to either be a super-advanced nation that had surpassed all other nations of the earth technologically (but become some sort of dystopian totalitarian state) or to have regressed into a primitive state where nature took over. The truth is far stranger than fiction (even though it is fiction?). Giuseppe Camuncoli and Daniele Orlandini have taken real technologies and turned them into an advanced reality for the future. They have built walls that would boggle our minds; they have turned the world outside the States into disaster zones. The things we see inside America’s borders — landscapes, cars — are familiar, but not much else. The other things they draw are the revelation that this is a new world.

Matt Wilson’s colors do two jobs: the first is making the world familiar and grounding the reader in reality. The second job is drawing the reader’s eyes to the fantastic, strange, and unusual. And boy, are things strange.

The final page of this issue is a dystopian call to patriotism and one that I did not see coming. Snyder and Soule did such a great job writing, I just got caught up in the story.

In the vein of The Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Undiscovered Country #1 is a fantasy adventure story that would rival the best pulp comics.