The Comic Cave - Wytches

 

The Comic Cave is a regular feature where we spin the Wheel of Comics and see what graphic novel story it brings up for us to deep dive into! This week we take a look at Wytches, a dark and creepy horror tale about the monsters stalking a father and daughter in their new home.

Witches have existed almost forever, the concept of people with powers and abilities that you don't understand, often frightening and monstrous. Over the centuries witches have played various roles, from healers and wise women, to monsters, and even victims. And whilst very few people in the modern world believe in witches and magic the way that we used to, witches remain a part of our culture and imagination. They appear in our stories, they get used a boogeymen, and you're guaranteed to come across a few every Halloween. But the witches that you think of when you hear the word don't appear in Wytches. Writer Scott Snyder instead creates something more monstrous, more primal, and more terrifying than a green skinned woman riding a broom.

Wytches tells the story of Rook family, mother Lucy, father Charlie, and their teen daughter Sailor, who've recently moved away from their old life to a quiet small town to try and get a fresh start following a series of tragic events in their lives. Not only is Sailor getting over a case of extreme bullying, but her mother was recently in a car accident that left her using a wheelchair; which also resulted in the loss of her unborn baby. Things have been hard for the Rooks, but they're hoping that this new start will be what they need.

Unfortunately, their first day in their new home doesn't go as well as hoped, as Sailor struggles to fit in at school, and is immediately asked if she killed her bully (who went missing following an incident between the two of them in the woods), and back at the house Charlie and Lucy have a deer walk inside, who then begins to scream and vomits up blood all over the office room. They're all shaken by the days events, but Sailor is affected the most, as it brings up memories of the day that her bully, Annie, went missing.

Annie followed Sailor out into the woods one day, screaming at her, abusing her, telling her how much she wished she was dead. Sailor, who's gone through months of this finally snaps and pulls out a knife, threatening Annie to leave her alone. It's at this point that Annie pulls out a gun. She orders Sailor to strip, and tells her that she's going to record Sailor masturbating with the knife so that she can release it to the school. As Sailor begins to take her shoes off a strange chittering sounds begins. Annie walks up to one of the trees where the noise seems to be coming from, and is pulled inside a small opening by long, monstrous arms, in a spray of blood.

In the present, Sailor begins to see a strange, twisted shape in the woods from her window at night, something that calls her name, and begins to believe that it's Annie come back. When something smashes its way into her room one night and bites her, it leaves her with something growing on her neck. The visions of the creature begin to become more intense, and Sailor eventually runs out of school, fleeing into the woods to find answers. As Charlie starts to head out to find her, he's attacked by a woman who begins to tell him about what's really going on, and the danger his family is in.

Wythes is a monster story, and one that plays itself out at a wonderfully creepy pace. The book opens in with a dictionary definition of witches, one that we're all familiar with, a definition that's repeated on the next page, clawed out, the writing obscured by slashes and cuts. Between this and the opening scene set a hundred years ago, the book doesn't play around with making it clear that these are not the witches you're used to, and that you're not going to be able to predict where the book goes.

As the drama with the Rook family unfolds we begin to learn more and more about the Wytches, about what they are and where they come from, and even with this information we still know very little about them. It's claimed in the book that they're thousands of years old, and that they might be an offshoot of humanity that evolved in a different way, but even then that's still just a theory. It's said that they're not magic, but that they have sciences that are so beyond us that they appear like magic, but once again that could just be conjecture. Even when we go below the surface and see them in their tunnels and caves, see them in their natural environment, we get very little insight into them. And this is perfect. The best horror comes from the unknowable, the things that you don't understand, and Wytches gives you that in spades.

The monsters in Wytches are used sparingly, appearing only in the background at times, hidden in shadows, and you're left wondering whether they were actually there or not most of the times that they appear. Scott Snyder seems to know that less is more, and having read some of his other horror comics before, seems well practised at making the medium frightening; something which is a lot harder than in some other mediums. It also helps that there's a very engaging human story going on too, and the relationship between Charlie and Sailor is the very real heart of the book.

We learn through flashbacks that Charlie is an alcoholic, and that in the past he had a decent relationship with Sailor, playing games with her and encouraging her creativity and belief in herself with her 'monster slayer' games, but drink caused a rift between the two of them. One of the incidents in which things come to a head for them is when Charlie has climbed up onto an old feris wheel at an abandonned amusement park, and is drinking in one of the higher seats. Heckling Sailor, who's too afraid to climb up after him, he verbally abuses her and berates her until she begins to climb up. The abuse gets to the point where she tries climbing even higher than him in order to prove herself to him and shut him up. Sailor falls, and Charlie is barely able to catch her in his drunken stupor, managing to save her from serious injury.

This incident happens at the same time that Lucy is driving in the accident that paralyses her and loses the baby, and Charlie and Sailor end up in the hospital that same night as the receive the news about Lucy. The two of them have a blow up, in which Sailor makes Charlie see that he's failing as a father, that Sailor thinks of herself as a failure as a daughter because of it. Ultimately it brings the two of them closer together, and it makes Charlie give up drinking to be the father that Sailor deserves. It's also the catalyst for Charlie to throw himself in danger again and again for her over the course of the book, willing to give his life to save his daughter from the Wytches. This relationship, and the things that Charlie and Sailor go through over the course of the book are not easy to read, and there are times when it quite literally had me crying. And it's because of this that I'd say Wytches isn't just a horror story, its a love story in a horror setting, a story about how far a parent will go for their child. 

Some of these themes are expanded upon in the essays found in the back of the collected graphic novel, in which Scott Snyder talks about what it's like to be a parent, and how you try your best to make your world a kinder, safer one for your child even whilst fighting against monsters both imaginary and real. The essay in which Snyder talks about his young son getting over his childhood fears of things like ghosts and the tooth fair, only to have a terrifying experience during a lock-down drill, where his son developed a fear of a gunman coming into his school is absolutely heartbreaking to read. The first of these short essays, however, was actually chilling in places. Its here that Snyder reveals the genesis for Wytches, of a frightening childhood experience in the woods, and a similar experience again as an adult. There were times reading that that I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and could very easily see how this pushed Snyder to create Wytches.

Whilst the writing is fantastic, I have to also heap a lot of the praise for the book at the art team. Artist Jock, and colourist Matt Hollingsworth do such a fantastic job at bringing the story to life, and at making the book scary. Comics are hard to make frightening, with it being a medium that married still images with snippets of words it's much more difficult to put readers into the emotions and the moment than a film or a novel. A lot of comics rely on things like gore and gross out moments in order to shock the reader because building atmosphere in a comic can be hard. But in Wytches this seems to be something the boo excels at. Some of this is down to how the art hides small things in the panels, the Wytches peeking out from behind trees in the background, or strange shadows that might be a monster.  But the way the art is presented also makes you uncomfortable.

Jock does some amazing work on all of the projects he works on, and his distinct art style has resulted in him receiving a lot of accolades and acclaim. But with Wytches his work has been given a whole new look and feel thanks to the colouring work from Hollingsworth. Colouring tends to be one of the parts of comic making that gets overlooked, and whilst bad colouring can make a book stand out for the wrong reasons a lot of folks tend to gloss over good colouring. If the colourist is doing their job right then you're not really noticing. But Hollingsworth brings a whole new level of create flair and wonder to the book that you can't not notice it. The back of the book goes into this in some detail, showing you the step by step process for the art. Most of the processes are ones that long time comic readers will be familiar with, but it's the final stages that make it something unique. 

The book incorporates hand painted colour splatter on every page. These blotches and sweeps of colours that don't fit into the scene begin quite lightly, and you almost fail to spot them in the first few scenes of the book where things are nice and normal for the Rook family, but as the issues go on and things become more and more nightmarish these intrusions of colour become more pronounced, more obvious. It gives the book an almost dream-like quality, where the images that you're seeing don't quite feel real, where it feels like something is interfering with what you're seeing, messing with your perception. This adds tons of atmosphere to the book, and results in a comic that looks so different from anything else I've read. The art in Wytches not only stands out as something wonderfully unique, but ends up playing a major part in the book being so damn good.

There are few horror comics that stick with me, few that feel like they've gotten under my skin, and fewer still that manage to do that and also elicit strong enough emotions that I'm wiping tears away when I close the book. In the back of the book Snyder talks about how he expected the book to do moderately okay, it being an indie book with dark subject matter meant that he never thought it'd be a huge hit, but it ended up being one, and when you read Wytches its not hard to see why. It's a book that feels like something special, and I truly hope that we get more from this story in the future.

Wytches was published by Image Comics from October 2014 to March 2015.

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