RECOMMENDED: "Wytches" (by Snyder & Jock)

- by Ninja Ross, 11 February 2015

Feeling comfortable? Relaxed? Calm? That’s terrible! You need something to make you feel terrified and excited! Something with trees and monsters and stuff! You need "Wytches" by Scott Snyder and Jock! That’ll put hairs on your chest or something!

Click to enlarge!

The first issue is a bit of a slow start for the series, for the most part. Snyder spends most of the time getting us used to the Rook family and explaining their current predicament.

The family have moved to a new town, in order to escape a troubled life. This is a family that has experienced a lot of trouble, to say the least. Sailor, our main protagonist, is escaping an incident with the school bully, Annie. By incident, I mean Annie vanished without a trace and Sailor was the last person to see her. That’s quite an incident.

Charlie Rook, Sailor’s father, is battling his own inner demons while focusing on his career making books for kids. He’s trying to be the best dad he can be to a daughter suffering from anxiety and guilt.

Sailor’s mother, Lucy, is bound to a wheelchair after a car crash involving a deer. But, out of the three of them, she seems to be keeping herself together a lot better. Of course, there’s more to her than immediately meets the eye.

The family dynamic in this book is actually pretty great, with each character getting enough space to grow and interact with the world Snyder has created. It’s easy to enjoy the company of the Rook family, with a nice mix of sweetness and reality.

Tree's Company.

But the horror kicks in pretty hard as the book progress, thanks to a look at what actually happened to Annie and a severed deer head being thrown around. It isn’t too over the top here, it’s just violent and disturbing enough to create a sense of unease, but it’s subtle enough that it creates a nice amount of tension.

Each issue tells us more about the Rook family, but never loses the tension created in issue one. We slowly learn more about the Wytches themselves and “being pledged”. And these aren’t you’re average green skinned women with wands. Snyder has created a pretty nasty monster here. They’re a brutal bunch.

Besides Snyder’s scripts, each issue has a little essay written by Snyder that is well worth reading. The one in issue four is especially interesting, as Snyder tells us why he loves horror and why he loves writing it.

Jock is the perfect artist to bring Snyder’s scripts to life, with his dark, gritty artwork filled with odd, slightly distorted angles and fantastic character expressions. The Wytches look incredibly horrific, despite only getting glimpses of them. Jock clearly knows how to do horror.

And Jock is a hard worker! Not content with just drawing the book, he also provides the colours [EDIT: Jock actually is content with drawing the book! Not that it's a bad thing, of course. The colorist is Matt Hollingsworth.]. And these are some real pretty colours.

More like the Cray Cray family.

He [Matt Hollingsworth!] uses a lot of bright colours, despite the dark tone of the book. While that doesn’t sound like a good thing, it’s actually a fantastic look. The colour gives it an eerie vibe. But the book gets dark in the right places, with plenty of black and red thrown around.

This isn’t the first time Snyder and Jock have worked together, either; They worked on Detective Comics: Black Mirror, which was a pretty great Batman story. It’s good to see these two working on a horror book like this, really showing off their abilities.

Wytches is one of the best horror comics I’ve read in a while. It has a great atmosphere and is full of likeable characters and all kinds of nastiness. You should be running to a comic book shop right now, just to buy this book. RUNNING. With your LEGS and EVERYTHING.

 
Are you already reading "Wytches"? You are, right? Because you should read it. And comment below, so we can have a little Wytches chat thing going on here! Hmmm?

Tagged: comics, Reviews, RECOMMENDED.

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