Today’s post is a short write-up for Great Pacific, a new-ish series from Image. The premise is ripe for legal analysis: The story follows young billionaire oil heir Chas Worthington III and his efforts to start a new nation on a somewhat exaggerated depiction of the real-world Great Pacific garbage patch. In the comic-book version the patch is a Texas-sized patch of floating garbage dense enough to walk and even build on. In reality the patch is not anywhere near that dense—about 5.1kg of plastic per square kilometer—but I’m willing to grant writer Joe Harris the artistic license. It’s a clever way to write a story about a new nation that isn’t a microstate.
Without spoiling too much in this first post, I’ll just say that the way the book handles the fledgling nation’s attempts at gaining recognition is pretty reasonable. There are also references to some of the relevant treaties (e.g. the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), and I’ll be taking a closer look at that in a second post.
If you haven’t picked up a few issues of Great Pacific, give it a try. It’s a pretty good book, and I’m interested to see where Harris goes with the premise.
