The Displaced #2
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThe Displaced #2 is a structurally pivotal chapter in one of BOOM! Studios' most autobiographically grounded original series of the 2020s — the first sustained attempt in mainstream indie comics to use the disappearance of a real, named Canadian city as a springboard for existential horror about grief, media amnesia, and social erasure. Where issue #1 established the central catastrophe, issue #2 is where the series shifts its dramatic weight from the spectacle of loss to the moral fractures within the survivors themselves, with the story crystallizing around a core group of twelve whose dwindling numbers force increasingly desperate ethical choices. The issue's willingness to push an ensemble thriller into genuinely uncomfortable territory — including a live-television hostage sequence that exposes the lengths people will go to simply to be remembered — marks it as the moment the series graduates from high concept to serious character study.
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The Displaced was conceived by Canadian writer Ed Brisson in 2008, originally simply titled 'Oshawa,' and grew directly from his complicated emotional relationship with the Ontario city where he spent his first fourteen years. Brisson first pitched the project to a publisher in 2011, but the collaboration fell apart over creative differences; the story sat dormant on his hard drive for over a decade, revisited periodically, until a 2022 rethinking — specifically, the removal of a narrative element rather than the addition of one — finally unlocked its shape. BOOM! Studios announced the series in November 2023, and issue #2 shipped March 20, 2024, with series editor Elizabeth Brei overseeing the team of Brisson, Italian artist Luca Casalanguida, colorist Dee Cunniffe, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. The complete five-issue series was later collected in a trade paperback released in comic shops on December 4, 2024.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Written by Ed Brisson, with interior art by Luca Casalanguida, colors by Dee Cunniffe, and letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou — the same creative team as issue #1.
- Released in comic shops on March 20, 2024, as the second chapter of a five-issue limited series published by BOOM! Studios.
- The issue advances the central cast to a surviving group of roughly twelve former Oshawa residents who, having been outside the city when it vanished, are now themselves being progressively forgotten by the world.
- Issue #2 introduces an explicit moral dilemma: the narrative reveals that being literally forgotten by society has practical criminal advantages, splitting the survivors along ethical lines over how to use — or refuse to use — that invisibility.
- A key set piece in issue #2 involves one survivor taking a television studio audience hostage in an act of desperate self-assertion, which critics identified as the series' 'second big set piece.'
- Cover A features main art by Casalanguida and Cunniffe; variant covers were supplied by Declan Shalvey (Cover B) and Ramón Pérez (a 1:25 virgin variant), both of whom are GTA-region-connected artists Brisson specifically recruited for the series.
- The Displaced was a creator-owned project Brisson had been developing for over fifteen years before publication, rooted in personal nostalgia and the experience of feeling like an outsider returning to one's hometown.
- The entire five-issue run was collected in a trade paperback available in comic shops December 4, 2024, and in bookstores December 10, 2024.
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