SHELTERED #1, $2.99, Image Comics
Writer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Johnnie Christmas
Colorist: Shari Chankhamma
Fiction is full of post-apocalyptic tales. As a species humanity is obsessed with its own extinction, developing hypothesis after hypothesis dealing with how it might happen. Natural disasters, economic collapse, civil unrest, climate change, or even zombies and giant monsters. Most people are content to live their lives with the apocalypse firmly rooted in their entertainment. Some, however, obsess over how to survive not if, but when, an apocalypse happens.
That’s the basic premise upon which Sheltered is built. A community of doomsday “preppers” has begun assembling an isolationist community in the wilderness, avoiding the entanglements of normal civilization while gearing up for its inevitable fall. While the adults in Safe Haven busy about preparing for possibilities, a group of teenagers know that the inevitable is just over the horizon.
The story centers around Victoria and Lucas, two teenage kids being raised in the tension and anxiety of the Safe Haven prepper community. They each have their own, wildly different take on their situation: Lucas, fully indoctrinated into the pre-apocalyptic mentality, has plans of his own that even his parents aren’t aware of. Victoria, a somewhat new addition, just wants to be a normal kid, but it doesn’t look like she’ll get her wish.
Ed Brisson (www.edbrisson.com), whose previous writing credits include his self-published noir series Murder Book as well as the critically acclaimed Image miniseries Comeback, succeeds at brewing the same sort of tension in Sheltered as he does with his crime stories, but with a different kind of paranoia. Like his noir, the first issue of Sheltered doesn’t give you a black-and-white portrait of who the good guys and bad guys are, instead presenting glimpses of each character’s personality and putting them into a situation that lets the reader begin to develop their own opinions (which I’m sure will be yanked out from under us later).
Relative newcomer Johnnie Christmas (www.jxmas.com) renders Safe Haven with beautifully minimalist lines, and his work with camera angles and shadows really draws the reader into the mounting menace as the issue moves forward. Characters are unique and easily identified, and his facial expressions – which always toe the “cartoony” line but never step over or feel out of place – are especially potent. Christmas’s art is well supported by Shari Chankhamma’s (www.sharii.com) sometimes unorthodox colors, whose palette and design compliment the action at every turn and really help the sense of both isolation and outright cold.
I’m an unabashed fan of Ed Brisson’s work on Comeback, and the first issue of Sheltered engenders the same sort of anticipation as Comeback’s opening issue. Adding to the mix is Brisson’s research of real-life prepper communities, which gives the paranoid state of Safe Haven just enough wackiness to be interesting, but grounding it in the real world in a very creepy way.
I’m in for the haul with Sheltered. I’m looking forward to see where Lucas’s plans lead the group, how Victoria’s personality will tie into it all, and to find out what happens when the rest of humanity falls apart and all we’re left with are the wackadoos.
Check out our interview with Ed Brisson and Johnnie Christmas in episode 47 of the Trade Secrets Podcast HERE
