Source: Entertainment Weekly

Both the fun and terror of A Quiet Place are in the specific environment. How do people from diametrically varied parts of the globe survive when vicious creatures that hunt through sound crash land on Earth?

The first two movies, as well as the video game offshoot, saw this concept play out in sleepy, rural towns of Upstate New York, while the prequel film, A Quiet Place: Day One, turned the camera towards one of the noisiest locations in America, Manhattan. A Quiet Place: Storm Warning, the upcoming comic from writer/layout artist Phil Hester and artist Ryan Kelly, now hones in on a small island town in the Midwest.

Hester notes one specific element that screams American Heartland. “We see the operation of a river dredge, which is a boat designed to scoop out silt to keep waterways clear for commercial traffic,” the scribe tells Entertainment Weekly in an exclusive interview with IDW Dark editor Heather Antos. “There’s a character, Lonnie, in this story that uses a river dredge in his battle with the creatures, and the cacophony of sounds that come from operating a ship like that both provide him some cover, but also they’re like a signal flare maybe to the creatures.”

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A Quiet Place: Storm Warning is part of IDW Dark’s publishing lineup that turns some of the most familiar horror movies from Paramount Pictures into comic books. Unlike, say, Smile: For the Camera, however, Hester had to convince the powers that be that A Quiet Place could work in comic form.

“For comics fans, silent comics are great. We love them. Usually, they’re some of the most well-received comics every year for awards,” Antos says. “But for the filmmakers and for the studio, it was such a foreign concept to them. So we actually had to convince them that you could do storytelling quietly.”

Initiated by Jamie Rich, the former editor-in-chief of IDW Publishing, Hester created a test run to prove to Paramount that they could create a silent comic. (Fans may one day get to see that effort in some form, but for now it rests in a drawer somewhere.) “Doing that test run gave me almost a sense of ownership about this pitch that most creators don’t have when they’re brought onto a licensed project,” Hester remarks. “To me, this feels like a creator-owned project because I had to fight so hard to make it happen.”

The key became integrating sound as a graphic element on the page. “You see the sounds when they’re supposed to happen,” Hester continues. “If they’re a big sound, they’re a big sound effect. If they’re a little sound, they’re tiny.”

Antos points out the humor in their situation: “Of all the ideas we pitched, they did select the one that would require the most talking.”

Inspired by Hester and Kelly’s Midwestern roots, A Quiet Place: Storm Warning is set in the fictional town of Pearl, Iowa, partially based on the very real location of Beulah in the state. The population of a few hundred individuals is surrounded on all sides by the Mississippi River at flood stage. Hester explains the two rules of this rural small town: “No. 1, everyone’s in your business, but No. 2, people are probably your cousin to some degree. There are ties that you don’t know about.”

In the timeline of the franchise, the comic places us just a few days after the creatures arrive on the planet. It takes about that long for them to travel from New York to middle America. The citizens of Pearl are very much aware that something bad is happening, but most are convinced it won’t reach them.

Lonnie Fry, whom Hester likens to Brody in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, is the local fire chief and the one ringing the alarm bell. He advocates cutting off Pearl from the rest of the country to safeguard against the creatures, while his sister, the mayor, fears that could prevent rescue efforts.

“It’s mostly a character study of how an insular community reacts when it has to deal with something that is completely foreign to them, and how the unity that they take for granted every day can get tested by these stressors,” Hester says.

Of course, the creatures do make their way to Pearl. And, as the title of the comic suggests, they make landfall during a raging storm. “The people take advantage of that to move around or speak while being hunted by the creatures,” Hester adds. “But also, if you’ve ever been in a storm, you know they can come and go very quickly. So the people can be exposed in ways that they didn’t anticipate. Also, they’re in danger from the storm itself, so you’ve got a double threat for the citizens to deal with in this story.”

For Antos, “What makes A Quiet Place so fascinating is it’s not a story about these creatures that come to attack. That’s the inciting incident. What makes us invested is that we are so attached to the characters of the world. We see ourselves in this world, and it makes us question, How would we react in these circumstances?”

A Quiet Place: Storm Warning will release issue #1 on March 11, 2026. Pre-orders are due by Feb. 2 through your local comic book shop.

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