Monthly (Comic) Book Club - October - Wytches by Scott Snyder20035
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Monthly (Comic) Book Club - October - Wytches by Scott Snyder Wytches #1-6 Week 1 (10/2-10/8): Wytches #1-2 Week 2 (10/9-10/15): Wytches #3-4 Week 3 (10/16-10/23): Wytches #5-6 Discussion topic ideas: * Thoughts on the story or artwork * Details in the story, artwork, or presentation * References to outside events or other works of fiction * Making of/Behind the Scenes details * Editions you will be reading from * Items in your collection pertaining to this week’s selection |
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 If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| Jock has a few new classic covers, but I've only seen his interiors a couple times. Looking forward to seeing how they look. | ||
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| As I'll be thinking each week when I read, it's time to dig through the ditches and read through some Wytches The issue starts with a dictionary-type entry on the meaning of witch. It's sort of a cliche thing to do, but the blurb for the book talks about the difference between people who were thought to be witches and actual witches. So I'm guessing we're going to find out about things like that. Otherwise, we get introduced to the Rooks family and the daughter Sailor in particular. Along the way we see some creepy stuff, in particular something that lives in or moves through trees and kills people. Let's see where it goes. |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| Issue 2 moves things along pretty quickly. Sailor is having nightmares and visions, and maybe (probably) was attacked by a wytch (maybe Annie). Then she runs off into the woods and sees a bunch of them with her uncle Reggie. Lucy also had a literal run-in with a wytch in the past, where she had an accident that put her in a wheelchair. And some weird guy breaks into the house and attacks Charlie. That escalated quickly, as they say. | ||
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I spent like an hour the other day digging around for my copy. Now I gotta dig through some long boxes for it  |
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 Staple topics, nice.
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| May need to check this out. | ||
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| Issue 1 introduces us to the Rooks family who has recently moved in order to start over. The mother was in some sort of accident and is now confined to a wheelchair but the main reason for the move was the daughter, Sailor. Some time previously, Sailor was involved in a serious bullying incident. One night in the woods, Sailor’s bully is disappeared by a mysterious force and rumors of her involvement with the girl’s death has hounded her. Despite being a victim of the bulky, Sailor still feels responsible for her disappearance because it was something she wanted to happen. A major but mysterious idea of pledging also runs throughout the book. The issue begins with a mutilated woman trapped within a tree begging for help. Someone has pledged her to a mysterious “them.” When she asks her son for help, he betrays her, feeling that the pledge is more important than helping his mother. So somehow this pledge comes with pain and death, is something so powerful that it can turn your loved ones against you, and it is something that you can be forced into without your consent. When Sailor is riding the bus to school a mysterious figure in the woods is asking for a pledge and when Sailor’s bully seemingly reappears to her one night, the figure is outside, casting bones. |
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| The story moves along quickly in issue 2. After being attacked by what remains of her bulky, Sailor now has a mysterious bump on her neck. Sailor tries to carry on at school as normal but is haunted by visions of creatures until she steals a school bus and drives it into the woods to confront the visions. Meanwhile, Lucy, Sailor’s mom is working at the hospital with a hit and run victim. The boy seems to be healing quickly and seems to know more about Lucy’s accident than she has admitted. Again, the idea of a pledge or being pledged comes up. There is also the boy’s IV; it has now been replaced with a strange fluid by persons unknown. Sailor’s father then encounters the man from the forest in Sailor’s room and as he begins some kind of ritual tells him that he never had a daughter. So who is Sailor? And what does the biopsy result on the bump in her neck mean? The issue also begins with an excerpt from Sailor’s father new story in which a young boy gets lost in a fantasy world where everything is reversed and all your wishes come true. What does this story mean in the context of the greater story of the Rooks family? On the art, Jock’s line work is very bold and stylized, to a degree. It can feel like a graphic poster at times. His characters are recognizable and their faces very expressive. Looking at it in the first issue his style did seem familiar and then I realized I’d seen his work somewhere before, in Andy Diggle’s The Losers, which was adapted into a movie some time ago. Diggle’s not my favorite writer and thinking back, I’m not sure how much of the book I read but I did enjoy the movie. Hollingsworth’s coloring varies from subtle and naturalistic but almost always splashes color in a way that makes the image look unmistakably digital, even including artificial halftone dots across every scene (though that might be on Jock’s part). As scenes ratchet up in intensity, like Sailor’s vision in the pool or encounter in the forest the splashes of color and texture become wilder and more obvious to match the energy of the scene. |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| I forgot to get to the reading over the weekend. Hope no one pledges me in retaliation. Off we go... Issue 3 goes more into the tragic history of the Rooks and the present, with Sailor having run away. It sounds like Lucy was expecting, or at least that she wanted to have a second child, but presumably never got to because of the accident. In the present, Charlie's attack is shown in full but apparently there was no actual evidence of it beyond him having a head wound. The attacker (a woman, not a man as I thought) does some weird stuff and stabs him with a needle. Later on, Charlie can see the result of it, and thinks he sees someone trapped in a tree, but while they're searching for Sailor he just comes off as a weirdo or drunk. I haven't minded the art too much so far, and the cover for this issue is pretty striking, but I thought the dots/splotches were too much this time. They're on every page and in some places it obscured the art for me. There are some pages at the end that show Hollingsworth's coloring process, and it looks like he adds them. It does add to the tone of the book but I could do with a little less. |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| Issue 4 mixes Charlie's search for Sailor with him being a drunk asshole in the past. He made her climb a ferris wheel to try and get over her anxiety, which seems to have the slightly positive effect in the present of encouraging Sailor to try and escape the wytches' burrow. But not what you would call top-notch parenting. In the present Charlie finds the woman's house and learns more about the wytches, until the woman kills herself. But back home, Lucy has apparently been dosed because she doesn't remember who Sailor is. To be continued... | ||
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| I felt issue 3 to be a bit filler-y. Charlie mostly stands at the edge of the woods and when we see the woman’s attack on him it basically boils down to “find me later. The cop’s pause after Charlie told him what the woman did to him struck me as suspicious. Like he was hiding something. While his urging that Charlie and his wife should go home makes logical sense, the fact that he dismissed even searching the woods after a school vehicle was stolen and found crashed is certainly questionable. Charlie’s brother found begging for help from inside a tree is definitely a haunting image that brings to mind stories of murder victims found in the hollows of trees. I really hope there is a satisfying purpose for those stuck in a tree and it’s not just something creepy thrown in like the dead deer earlier in the series The necrosis spelling the word “here” was a bit incongruous and almost silly. |
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| I really enjoyed issue 4. By far my favorite of the book so far. We learn roughly what we’re dealing with. Snyder basically takes the stereotypical idea of a witch and creates a monstrous creature that could have inspired that description; their “gifts” could be seen as casting spells, they have mites growing in their hair, and they like to cook and eat children. Clara’s story, however brief the snippet we got, is sad and really contextualizes the danger Sailor is in. The flashback of Charlie and Sailor at the ferris wheel was really effective in defining who these characters are and why Charlie is so focused on saving her, besides paternal instinct, and it gives us hope that Sailor has it in her to make it out alive. The stinger with Lucy, with the added context we just got, hits you in the gut |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| Taking a weekend trip for a wedding, so let's finish this up. #5 is the rescue mission. It turns out the cop working Sailor's case is in on things, so he's able to lead Charlie to a tree that will get him to Sailor. He uses all the goodies he got from the weird lady and climbs down into the den. He finds Sailor but the heat starts to run off his protective smell, so the wytches will be coming. There honestly isn't too much to it; the cop isn't too concerned about if Charlie succeeds or not because either the wytches or the townfolk will get them regardless. But mixed in with this is a flashback to Charlie and Sailor at the hospital after Lucy's accident, where Sailor is angry that Charlie has been absent (drunk) and Charlie promises to make it up to her. That's touching. But now, can they get out of the tree? |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| #6 has the escape, which was relatively easy, but the cop was right: he got loose and brought the town. The wytches follow and the family is trapped in their house before they can run away. Worse, it turns out that Lucy's family has a history with the wytches, and she pledged Sailor in exchange for walking again. The cruelest twist of all. But Charlie spreads pledge juice on himself and Lucy, and Sailor sprays it on the townsfolk as she runs to the car. Sailor is the Final Girl, and Charlie did everything he could for his daughter. I think this was a solid little story. I don't think it was terribly original; any element you pick out has been seen lots of places. But it was well-done in combination and I think Jock did a good job too. I wasn't a huge fan of Hollingsworth's paint splotches, but they certainly gave the book a unique look and appropriate tone. |
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| Yeah issue 7 was pretty straightforward. Lucy has started to forget about Sailor just as Clara (the crone) had expected of Charlie. The police officer arrives unannounced and as he goes to “help” Charlie, Charlie notices the list of names Clara had given him which includes Sweet’s name. Charlie overpowers Sweet and forces him at gunpoint to take him to Sailor. In the forest we get another little tidbit linking the creatures to the well-known ideas and stories of witches. They mark the entrances to their lairs with ginger growing on the tree, which is how the witch living in a gingerbread house in the woods dame to be. In the caves you see the Wytches around a cauldron, again invoking images of witches around a large black cauldron. They did a good job, I think, linking the flashback to the current events in the story. Sailor has felt different, abnormal, in a way Charlie himself felt he was. Due to Charlie’s drinking he’s been an emotionally absent father at a time when Sailor really needed him. Charlie reaffirms his love for his daughter and that he is there for her, just as he is now in the caves to rescue her. The issue ends with Charlie finding Sailor but his camouflage scent has rubbed off, alerting the Wytches to his presence. |
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| @xkonk Did your reading include the epilogue, of sorts? The TPB collection includes a 6-page story at the very, very end, after even all of the bonus materials. It is set in 2003 in Ohio, so well before the events of the book, and is seen almost entirely from a first-person persoective. A brother arrives to visit his sister and her newborn son. He brings her some sandwiches from their favorite place back home, which suddenly paralyzes her. He tells her that he’s not well but that “THEY” would fix it if he gave them what they want. He tells her not to look but she opens her eyes and sees one of the wytches carrying off her baby. When her brother realizes that she looked, he is carried off as well. It’s a nice stinger, I suppose but aside from the wytches, it doesn’t seem to connect with the main story. I’ll probably read through some of the bonus materials a little later. The main portion seems to be Scott Snyder’s influence and process. I agree that the story was solid. I can’t say I was ever really scared, not sure if it’s the medium or the actual story. This really felt like a movie, though, and as a movie I think it could generate more tension in me. I do wonder if Snyder had planned to produce more, given that the trade is called vol. 1, and the 6-page story at the end feels somewhat like the Cray family intro from issue 1. |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| I missed that part somehow. If there were more, I'm not sure I would seek it out. I think Wytches falls solidly in the "other people are the real danger" category, and The Walking Dead shows that you can mine plenty of that, but I'm good with what I got. It seemed to do well for itself though so I'm sure there's an audience. |
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