The first time I spoke with Ed Brisson about Sheltered was shortly after we interviewed him for Trade Secrets at Emerald City Comicon in 2013. At the time I thought the concept was really cool, but I was wary about how he might be able to pull it off. It was a narrow concept; a story set in a closed intentional community, and I couldn’t really wrap my head around what would drive the story beyond a group of paranoid preppers yelling at each other.
Holy shit, have they pulled it off.
The first of Brisson’s work I read was his 5-issue time-travel crime story Comeback. One of the things that makes Comeback so fantastic is the purposeful narrowing if it’s scope. It doesn’t concern itself with the end of the world or universe-destroying paradoxes or even the nitty gritty of sci-fi time travel science. It instead focuses on character moments and an intense crime story that happens to have a sci-fi twist.
And that’s exactly what he’s done with Sheltered. Sheltered‘s focus on character moments and minor crises is what keeps me turning pages. Lucas, the prepper colony’s de-facto leader after his coup in the first two issues, is a true believer in his cause. That belief makes him almost sympathetic at times, but fucking scary all the time. As we watch Lucas’s plan fall down around his ears, we’re given other characters to root for (Victoria), and even worse ones to hate (Curt).
Issue #7 set up the beginning of a chaos that Lucas can’t even hope to reign in. Issue #8 brings it all to a head, and builds to one of the best final page cliffhangers I’ve read in a while. It’s been a long time since I’ve stared wide-eyed at every page of a book, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and that’s exactly how I read Sheltered #8. After I finished, I actually uttered an out-loud “Oh… shit.”
Somehow, artist Johnnie Christmas has crawled into Brisson’s brain and pulled all of that tension out onto the page. Christmas’s art isn’t the clean-lined, cross-hatched work of a major superhero book. His linework has a grit to it that evokes more horror film than action flick, lending the perfect atmosphere to the cold claustrophobia of Safe Haven. His masterful touch with facial expression allows him to take “talking head” pages and imbue them with emotion that elevates the dialogue well beyond just the words being said. Couple that linework with Shari Chankhama’s fantastic, unique colors, and everything just falls into place.
Issue #8 lets us finally see a pressure valve open, venting just a bit of the tension that’s been building from the start, only to show us that it hasn’t released, only shifted position. Somehow, the creative team has diverted our attention from Lucas’s horrible takeover to Curt’s dangerously manic immaturity, and has us all holding our breath until we can be returned to the comparative normalcy of Safe Haven’s madness.
Sheltered, from the get-go, has been a slow burn. It has, thankfully, been allowed to evolve at a natural rate, and has done so without constant re-hashes or reminders of what’s going on. We’ve been given the opportunity to feel the fear and anxiety and paranoia of Safe Haven build into suspenseful nightmare, and it hasn’t even hit its peak yet. This is a fantastic book. Go buy it.
