I had access to Great Pacific Volume 1: Trashed through NetGalley. The concept of a guy trying to turn a heap of trash into a nation really raised my expectations ever since I heard of it, probably too much for a beginning that, though far from bad, didn't really make my day.

Joe Harris has a lot of ideas for this work and maybe he just tried to use too many right from the start, resulting in a protagonist that is exposed to too many odd situations before I even know who he really is and that seem to have no palpable impact on him. I also had some trouble with the strange mixture between ecological utopian science fiction items and a series of events and elements that reminded me of post-modern narrative, something that could have been awesome but ended up uninteresting, perhaps due to some failure in storytelling, lack of flow or of a consistent and convincing beginning.

Martin Morazzo's illustration  is competent, specially in terms of background and some specific elements, but is mediocre when considering some character's characterization, ending up with some very good panels and moments where it fails to help the storytelling.

This is an average comic, that would neither convince me to keep reading it nor really advise people to avoid it. In spite of this, I have heard that the next issues are much better than the one collected in Trashed, so I am actually considering giving it another go, if for nothing else, because I really want this concept to work out.

Last but not least, I must remind anyone reading this that the Great Pacific garbage patch is quite real and should probably, by itself, be making us change how we do a lot of stuff, shouldn't it?