Comic book review: Sheltered #11- The brakes are on, and it’s starting to drag

Writer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Johnnie Christmas
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 10th September 2014


The main reason for me reading Sheltered was the hope that the craziness going on in the prepper camp, the craziness that has led to children killing their parents in preparation for the end of the world, would be revealed as a psychological operation designed by a three letter agency to demonise people who want to be independent and get off the satanic corporate control grid.

There were early hints that this could be about mind control and media demonisation when a couple of panels showed a very famous mind-control trigger book, that book being ‘The Catcher In the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger. I’ve been waiting eleven issues now for this thread to be developed.  Guess what? It hasn’t been developed at all.

Instead I have been reading a Lord of the Flies retread with kids getting crazy, picking on outsiders, fighting amongst themselves and slowly going insane. The end of the world hasn’t happened, obviously, and a couple of deliverymen have been killed. The kids are arguing, as you would expect, and that’s about it really.

Issue #11 is a very slow, ponderous drag (and it really is starting to drag now) through the inevitable plot process where the outside world begins to discover what is happened on the camp. It really isn’t very interesting anymore.

The characters seem tired and played out. Some cops make fun of the prepper camp, calling them ‘crack-pots’ and ‘Whackos.’ I would expect that kind of mentality from cops. After all, if you wear a uniform of the control system your indoctrination and mind control programming is going to make you demonise anybody that wants to break away from the cult that you are so proud to be a part of, and yes government worship is cult worship. It’s called statism, and its the most murderous and violent form of cult worship in world history. Cops are cult worshippers, as are soldiers, as are beaurucrats, as are politicians. Apart from that point, I find little of interest happening in this issue. There are no twists, no surprises. It’s by the numbers story-telling. Competent, but hardly enthralling to read.

The cops are going to find out what the kids have been up to, and that will be it. There will be another bloodbath, probably, to inject some action-based excitement into the final scenes, and what have we learnt? That we shouldn’t be self-sufficient? That we should live with chains around our necks and be good corporate slaves to a system that hates our guts and calls us names like sheeple and useless eaters? It’s all very depressing, isn’t it? I’m going to be a stubborn idiot and read the next few issues, just to see if the mind control aspect comes into fruition. If it doesn’t, and I’m 90% sure that it won’t now, then I see little point in this story at all. Okay, so you’ve updated William Golding's tale of savage humanity and bullying little brats for the prepper generation. Great, but what exactly have you achieved here? What have you said that hasn’t already been said before?

Rating: 4/10