The Briggs family and their followers live in a heavily armed compound in upstate New York, and Jim Briggs, the founder, was about to turn state's evidence when his wife seized control of the land and froze out Jim and the community members who were loyal to him.
In the second collection, Lone Wolves, Jim Briggs strikes back from prison, engineering a potentially bloody coup against his estranged wife: funded by a white supremacist faction, he outspends Grace in bribing the local law and promises stability and profits to the community's opioid dealers.
Grace is forced to consolidate power, enlisting her boys and her daughters-in-law — who were raised outside of Briggs Land — to put down the coup forcefully, in a paranoid civil war footing that ends up with the Briggs accidentally kidnapping a pair of Canadian hikers, bringing the feds back down on them.
It's a taut middle chapter in a story that is full of antiheroes and characters who are empathized with but never sympathized with. As with DMZ, Briggs Land does an excellent job of showing that the real sides in any battle are "combatants" and "noncombatants" — not the warring factions who consider themselves to be the real stakeholders in the conflict.
Briggs Land 2: Lone Wolves [Brian Wood, Mack Chater, Lee Loughridge and others/Dark Horse]
