Review: WYTCHES #2

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WYTCHES #2
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Jock and Matt Hollingsworth
Published by Image Comics
Release Date: November 12, 2014

Sailor and her family moved to Connecticut to forget the past, but it doesn’t look like the past wants to be forgotten. No sooner does this young woman — victim of a vicious bully, who is killed by… something in the woods — get settled in that she is once again attacked. Only, this time, the thing coming after her is not exactly human. Who is next to be pledged?

The idea of something living in the woods is scary enough to a city boy like me, but when that something is twelve feet tall and decidedly superhuman (and not in the leap tall buildings sort of way), it’s easy to see why the young woman at the center of this book is a little unhinged. Just looking at the full page art reveal of the wytches themselves makes me shudder, and that’s not all you’ll find in these 25 pages to put you on edge. If anything, seeing the unknown quickly becomes more of a relief than just knowing its there.

And that’s the cat-and-mouse game Synder and Jock are playing in their latest creator-owned series. What do we know for sure? What’s real? What’s imagination? If anything, Jock’s dreamy renderings, offkilter panel construction, and alarmingly vertigo-esque angles make you believe this could all be a dream. Overlaid with a beautiful, but frenetic pastel wash by colorist Matt Hollingsworth, Jock’s characters move from banality into absolute abstraction in their fright, and the end result is panic inducing. I actually get a flutter in my chest by the time I reach the 2/3 mark in the issue.

It’s easy to bypass that overwhelming artistic feel if you just concentrate on the word balloons, but Wytches is the kind of book that you may not even need to conventionally read in order for it to get its point across. The sort of retro instagram effect that cascades across increasingly frenetic and choppy flips between Sailor, her mother, and her father’s situations makes the comic a deeply uneasy read — right up until its frightening end. Jock and Hollingsworth are more than artists here. They’re magnificent storytellers in the oldest traditional sense. If these were blood-splattered cave paintings in the woods behind your own home, they couldn’t be more alarming.

While I can imagine an edition of this story without the burden of word balloon, Snyder’s dialogue is spot-on as ever, giving us the sense that these characters are really struggling with understanding, more so than even the reader, what is transpiring on the page. The initial set-up of Charlie’s book chapter, depicting a mirror world where wishes come true, is so creepy when extrapolated through the lens of the Rooks family narrative. This mirror is deeply cracked and we don’t just get to see that in Jock’s panel juxtaposition, but in nearly every character’s inability to reach a conclusion to their thought process before interruption. They are all fragmented, and the effect is frustrating to the senses, as it should be.

Once again, Snyder has conceived of a vision of horror that only gets scarier with each and every reread. Paired with the exceptional talent of Jock and Hollingsworth, the writer is clearly looking to unleash something new and deeply disturbing into the world with Wytches. I’m happy to meet it head on. Just don’t expect me to sleep tonight.

The Verdict: 10/10

 

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