Sheltered

Writer/Letterer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Johnnie Christmas
Colorist: Shari Chankhamma

A pre-apocalyptic tale of survival at any cost.

The men and women of Safe Haven have been preparing for any-and-all end of world scenarios for years. However, their bunkers, weapons and training can't save them from the one threat they never could have expected: Their own children.

My work on this wonderful book was quite limited: Ed sent me the lettered PDFs, and I copy-edited them, focusing mainly on grammar and syntax, while also making sure the story beats were clear and the dialogue had its intended effect. As you can imagine, with a writer as talented as Ed Brisson, this was rarely an issue.

The individual issues also had a great deal of backmatter — typically a column and a letters page — and I turned my keen copy-editing eye on this material as well.

Sheltered ran for 15 issues, and over the course of its run I learned some of Ed’s writing tics (such as using the word “that” superfluously — something I feel comfortable saying here, because Ed mentioned it on social media at the time), allowing me to better serve the material.

I consider this one of the most positive aspects of developing a long-term relationship with a copy-editor. Sometimes you need an editor to dig in and help you craft the work, and sometimes you just need someone to tell you that a sentence will still make sense if you take out that “that.”