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.

Wytches #2

written by Scott Snyder
art by Jock

Sailor's (perhaps perceptive) paranoia from Wytches debut issue takes a more literal—and literary—turn in her father's new children's novel:  young protagonist Taylor slips through the funhouse mirrors into a world where wishes come true, where the sheer force of will and desire makes things happen and transforms the world itself.  If a world of candy, play, and no school holds an ingenuous charm, the dark mirror the Rooks family has fallen into is significantly more sinister, more sincerely nightmarish.  And Sailor seems to be at the gravitational center of this new nightmare.

The night attack by the creature outside her window left her neck lacerated, swelling, and—if the biopsy is reliable, as it likely is in this horrific and supernatural world—infected with the flesh of an older, far older woman.  And there seems to be something fateful about the Rooks choice of the new New Hampshire town, a rural secret whose reach extends beyond just the creatures in the woods.  Her duties at the hospital have brought Lucy to the bedside of a young hit-and-run victim with a miraculous recovery.  But his uncanny physical improvement is made considerably more pernicious by the strange IV drip and Dylan's sudden, crazed visions about Lucy's own car accident:  "I can smell it on you.  Someone by you was pledg-- «cough cough»" (Wytches #2: 12).  But it is his first accusing question—"What'd you really hit?" (12)—that brings half-remembered specters of wailing creatures to mind.

The mysterious man who spotted Sailor on the bus, the man who murmured "pledge" as she passed, he ends up in her room.  Legless, beating Charlie over the head with his prosthetics, the old man suggests himself the same—perhaps exactly the same—as the first issue's Timmy Cray.  For him, being a pledge nullifies family bonds:  "Sorry, Mr. Rooks, but you never had a daughter" (25).  A promise, yes, but also someone laid in surety for something else.  These pledges are hostages, and for their sacrifices it seems the New Hampshire town may be reaping some benefit.  "We're strong people up here, Lucy.  We stick together, and we're fast healers" (11).  A little bit The Shining, a little bit The Wicker Man, Snyder and Jock's Wytches is a slow descent into madness and conspiracy, psychological and body horror of the best kind.

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.