A Race to the Finish?

A Review of Billionaire Island #1

In today’s CGI superhero world, it’s easy to forget that in previous eras of turmoil, comics were often the best at commenting on those times, able to mix sci-fi and satire without big budgets or fretting over things like cooperation from the armed forces to make everything look authentic.

While there were many movies depicting the fears of nuclear war, Alan Moore was actually able to show most of New York wiped out with Watchmen. Then there was Rick Veitch’s The One, which speculated that ending the world might actually be a good thing. Even with a Marvel property, Garth Ennis and Richard Corben were able to publish one of the more effective post 9–11 stories with Punisher: The End, depicting the last days of both the vigilante and the rest of life on post WWIII Earth.

The first issue of writer Mark Russell and artist Steve Pugh’s four issue series Billionaire Island came out last week, wedged between a disheartening Super Tuesday and people’s fears surrounding both the Corona virus and the stock market slowly becoming reality today. Billionaire Island was clearly written and drawn months ago. Still, a story about an artificial island constructed over twenty years in the future as a safe haven for the wealthy while the rest of world deteriorates seems extraordinarily timely (especially since the…