Wytches #3

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock

So the bald, legless intruder in flannel, the one who spied Sailor on the school bus and attacked Charlie Rooks, is a woman.  She's not there to take Rooks' daughter away; she's there, perhaps, to help him keep her.  After all, she herself was a pledge.

Charlie Rooks:  "Who are you?"

The woman:  "Heh.  Someone who's been there.  To the cauldron."  (Wytches #3: 9)

This issue does little to advance the immediate plot.  The action is spent entirely in the search for, or more accurately, talk about the search for runaway Sailor.  But it snaps several of the first two issues' vague and atmospheric menace into sharp relief.  Sailor has always been pledged.  Her anxious disposition is, no doubt, a consequence of feeling constantly under threat, the wytches always in the shadows.  And now we have a survivor, mutilated and disturbingly proficient in distressing pharmacology, but a surviving pledge.  She knows how this works.  And based on her questions, she suspects a dark history for the Rooks family, one that predates Sailor's pledge.  Someone pledged her.  "But, like I said, it's a deep pledge.  Someone's suuure got it in for you all, Mr. Rooks" (9).  Some secret, some history, some past in the New Hampshire town.

Like Sailor, whose phone is filled with ramblings "like a crazy person's thoughts" (17), Charlie seems to be losing his mind.  He's been drugged by a surreal and vanishing intruder, he's got a history of stress anxiety and drinking, and he's seeing and experiencing things he can't explain and which other people aren't able to corroborate.  His wife Lucy certainly thinks he might be slipping away again.  The local police are reluctant to take his word despite their protestations to the contrary.  But it's a supernatural conspiracy, and it's impossible to believe just about anyone.  Like Charlie, we find ourselves in a hostile and unknowable world, filled with strangers we can't trust and a menace we can't quite see in the dark.  Wytches still makes little sense, but quite honestly, that's the point.

Not to say Jock's pencils and inks aren't stellar.  They are.  And in many cases his composition decisions are exceptional, but colorist Matt Hollingsworth is most responsible for Wytches' unique stylistic look.  There's a disorienting chaos in his colors, one that obscures and washes the inks and challenges the images underneath, both aging the illustration and giving it a modern, vibrant, slightly neon glow.  While many comics, particularly out of Image, feature short, informative descriptions of author or artist processes, this is one of the best:  a step-by-step explanation of Hollingsworth's mixed-media approach.