Wytches #1

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock
color by Matt Hollingsworth

Some families take a lot of shit.  The Rooks are one of those families.  Wytches begins as Charlie, Lucy and Sailor Rooks recover from a series of traumas with a move to New Hampshire.  Lucy, now wheelchair-bound, was crippled by some thus-far unexplained accident, and Sailor traumatized by a fatal incident with a homicidal bully.

Strange occurrences still trouble Sailor.  A combination of bewildering guilt and skull-fractured delirium—and perhaps a little truth—pique her suspicion.  Her hate for her tormenter and her desire to see her die or disappear is realized in front of her.  Annie is pulled into a tree by clawed hands, snapped in half, and not seen again.  It is the darkest of wish-fulfillment.  But now she is haunted.  Eyed by a mysterious man in the woods murmuring "Pledge?" and seeing the monstrous body of Annie transformed out of her window, crouching in a tree.  Each would be ominous enough even without the strange, unnatural doe who appears in the Rooks' house only to vomit up what seems to be its own tongue.

Wytches is a horror ode to primal fears, the instinctive thrill of dark woods and unexplained phenomena, told in the most personal and brutal of ways.  Family.  Charlie is a besieged father and husband, dazed by his family's recent bad fortune and frustrated by his powerlessness to help his teenage daughter any more than he can.  As his wife Lucy so aptly finishes his sentence, "You just fucking love that kid, yes" (Wytches #1: 11).  But in the background looms the specter of the prologue's Cray family.  Young boy Timmy, no more than ten years old, bashing his own struggling mother's head in with the quiet, unmoved certainty, "Pledged is pledged" (6).  Whatever these creatures in the trees, whatever the circumstances of the pledge, however they finagled their way into the Rooks' lives, they have the power to rot away at the most primal of bonds.

Snyder's story is excellent, his dialogue more hit-or-miss, but Jock's expressive pencil-work and Hollingsworth's pooling colors give Wytches a morbid and foreboding atmosphere, as though the wytches themselves had etched them in.  By the time the empty-eyed, sharp-toothed doppelgänger of Annie appears in moonlight chiaroscuro outside Sailor's window, the tone is set (if the story still confused) for a wild, phantasmic ride.