Briggs Land: Lone Wolves #4 Review

Writer: Brian Wood / Artist: Mack Chater / Dark Horse Comics The great thing about comics as a form of storytelling is that we’re at the point where there’s a story for just about everyone… even the people that think there isn’t a story for them in comics. Whatever you see on television or movies or novels, I can almost guarantee you’ll find its counterpart in comic book format. Briggs Land: Lone Wolves is a towering testament to this idea. Political commentary in comics is Brian Wood’s bread and butter, so a crime drama about a major secessionist movement in America is clearly him taking the kid gloves off. This book, much like a lot of Wood’s work, is immensely strong when it zeroes in on standalone tales with minimal action and heavy character development. Issue #4 slows things down from the last time we saw the Briggs family, focusing on Abbie Briggs, an outsider who married into the fold. When the book starts, she’s running off in the middle of the night to help a teenage girl though a tough situation. Though the book seems to go through the story very straightforward at first glance, there’s a lot of things at play here. For one, we end up getting a (so far) rare look at how the common people of the outside world view Briggs Land that proves to be effective and feels like a very realistic encounter given today’s political climate. Very little about the concept of Briggs Land is black and white. There are people… people who live inside and outside of Briggs Land… w…