A Quiet Place Part III will be the end. In a 2021 interview for A Quiet Place Part II, series star Emily Blunt said her husband John Krasinski, who directed the first movie and its sequel, was looking at the movies as a trilogy. The spinoff film, A Quiet Place: Day One, will also factor into A Quiet Place Part III, as Alex Wolff has been confirmed to return as the character Reuben. The movie has already begun filming, but there’s still more than a year’s wait for its release, which is scheduled for July 30, 2027.
However the end of the A Quiet Place movies doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the extended A Quiet Place universe. Case in point, while fans wait for Part III, the franchise is getting another standalone spinoff story in a rather unexpected medium.
A Quiet Place: Storm Warning is a five-part comic book miniseries from IDW Publishing. Written by Phil Hester with art by Ryan Kelly, the series takes place in the fictional small town of Pearl, Iowa, which exists on a little island in the middle of the Mississippi River. The series chronicles how the 600-person town deals with the pending arrival of the ultra-sound-sensitive Quiet Place creatures, who have just landed on the east coast and are making their way westward. While most of the townsfolk underestimate the danger, hypervigilant Fire Chief Lonnie Fry takes the threat more seriously. While his town thinks the horrors experienced elsewhere may bypass them, he wants to blow up the bridges to Pearl before the non-swimming creatures can reach them. (Seems like a good idea to us!)
Already three issues into its five-issue run, A Quiet Place: Storm Warning makes inventive use of comic book sound effects to tell a story in a franchise that is deeply reliant on both sound and silence. Rather than just accent the action as comic book sound effects traditionally do, they’re essential storytelling tools that move the story forward, as even the slightest sound could lead to a character’s death.
Ahead of A Quiet Place: Storm Warning #4 (on sale June 24), Polygon sits down with Hester via Zoom to talk about how he went about telling a Quiet Place story in a silent medium and to see if he can share any deeper insight into the still-mysterious creatures from A Quiet Place. Check out our conversation below, along with an exclusive preview of the comic itself.
Polygon: Before we get to A Quiet Place: Storm Warning, I’d love to hear your thoughts about the movies, particularly the first one.
Phil Hester: It’s a really well-crafted film. I was drawn in immediately by the level of skill of the filmmakers and the discipline in the screenplay to not explain everything to us right away. They were really patient with the way they let the audience figure things out.
My understanding of how this comic came about is that IDW acquired the license, but the Quiet Place filmmakers were initially unsure about doing a comic at all.
Yes, they needed a proof of concept and the editor-in-chief at IDW at the time, Jamie Rich, was like, “I think I know a guy who can show you that this can be done,” so they brought it to me. I’m a big fan of silent storytelling. Almost 30 years ago, I created a comic book called The Wretch, about a superhero who did not talk at all and you never learned anything about his or her backstory. The character was a complete cipher, so actions had to do all the storytelling.
What was your proof of concept?
I took a scene from the screenplay, the scene where the mom is in the basement and she steps on the nail. She’s got to keep her mouth shut, even though she knows these creatures are running amok on the farm. I told them, “I can show you guys how sound does work in a comic book, how sound effects themselves can become almost like characters on the page.” And with that four-page sequence, we proved that it could be done.
Where did the story come from?
It came from me. I pitched a lot of story ideas. The problem was, when you tell a comic book creator, “Pitch me ideas,” we go crazy. We try to dig into the lore a little bit more than we probably should. That role belongs to the filmmakers, but comic book creators can’t help it. You know, we’re gonna be like, “Where did these creatures come from? Can they get sick? How do they communicate with each other?” That stuff I kind of ran wild with.
The pitch that spoke to IDW and Paramount the most is the one that was probably closest to me, because I live in a small town in Iowa not far from the Mississippi River. I’ve been to the town that Pearl is based on, which is Sabula, an actual island in the middle of the Mississippi.
I didn’t know that was a real place.
It’s very small. I live in a town of 1,000 and Sabula is even smaller than that. But I’m familiar with what it’s like to live in a little town like this and how it can be both supportive and claustrophobic at the same time. So, dealing with that sort of town, because I know it so well, that pitch rang more true with Paramount and IDW. But I pitched some wild stuff.
Even three movies in, there’s a lot we don’t know about the creatures. Did working on this comic give you any extra insight into them?
No. They’re the shark in Jaws, you know?
Was Jaws an inspiration for your story?
I think it was an unknown one to me until I got into writing it. My editor on this series, Heather Antos, pointed it out to me. Then I was like, “Oh yeah, this guy’s Chief Brody.” Then there’s the mayor, who happens to be his estranged sister. It’s such a great story and it was the perfect thing to lean into with this.
From your perspective, how intelligent are these creatures?
That’s tough to gauge, because they seem to not be able to resist bait. When they hear a noise, they go for that noise. They don’t discern that it could be fake. They seem more like attack dogs than anything else. When I was pitching it, that thought led my mind to all sorts of places. Like, who do these attack dogs belong to? Also, they’re not eating people, so what do they eat? We saw a little bit of that in A Quiet Place: Day One, where there’s these energy pods that they’re eating. I’m like, “Where are those coming from? Who’s putting those there?” That’s the comic book guy in me.
Thankfully, there’s enough to chew on in the story of our little town. The thing it proved to me is that, if you set a story on day one of the creatures’ invasion, you can tell 9 billion stories because everybody’s going to have a different experience.
