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Thursday 10 August 2017

God Country Review (Donny Cates, Geoff Shaw)


An old dude with Alzheimer’s somehow has a Final Fantasy-type giant magical sentient sword that cures his horrible disease while he holds it – but a space wizard villain something wants it back for reasons. Stupid fighting ensues!

God Country is a pretty boring comic. Too much of it is clichéd and derivative. The narrator has this down-home Southern-drawl-style way of speaking because the story’s set in Texas and I guess that’s just how everyone down there talks? It put me in mind of Sam Elliott’s narrator in The Big Lebowski or any Cormac McCarthy character (the book opens with a quote from Blood Meridian).

The characters are very roughly sketched out – Emmett is basically a crappier version of Jason Aaron’s Old Thor over at Marvel while the villain is simply Generic Bad Guy - while their motivations were either vague and nebulous or non-existent, making it hard to be invested in anything that was happening. The fantasy is unremarkable and the storyline of “Emmett and Giant Sword Fight Stuff” was instantly forgettable and dreary.

Emmett’s introduction where we see the terrible effects of Alzheimer’s was attention-grabbing and different though there’s barely any exploration of the illness afterwards and in the end its inclusion feels pointlessly contrived. The finale between Emmett and his son Roy tried for an emotional gut-punch that it never earned but I appreciated that it wasn’t as corny as it could’ve been.

A trite, tedious comic with weak writing and art, I couldn’t be doing with God Country and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

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