Home Sick Pilots #4 // Review
Ami’s not dead. She IS being attacked by something sinister she found in an old video store. Buzz is going to try to save her. He’s got a ghost backing him-up, so there’s a good chance that she might survive, but since this is the fourth issue of Home Sick Pilots, even survival is a bit of a pyrrhic victory. Writer Dan Watters continues as a pleasantly disorienting tale of the mid-’90s paranormal that is vividly fused to the page by artist Caspar Wijngaard. The visuals are particularly potent this issue, firmly rooted as they are in an aesthetic that feels right at home in the late 20th century.
It was a place called Dead End Video. That’s where Ami ran into the thing. It was a video rental place. It had a VHS shell for a head and a long strip of videotape forming its body. She said hello. It attacked her with a couple of daggers. Now she’s in real danger. The good news is that her friend Buzz is looking to help her get rid of the VHS monster. Buzz is melded with a ghost that he’s wearing like armor. It might be enough to save her.
Beyond the specifics, there isn’t all that much in Watters’ story that feels compelling, but the story is more than stylish enough to make a very sharp impression. Watters has dreamed-up sharply visual combat for this issue. Supernatural fisticuffs can be fun, but they can also be dull as hell—the visuals for the combat that inhabits this particular issue hit with a particular fingerprint. A mecha-looking ghost warrior is attacked by animated ribbons of videotape. Anyone who has pulled one of those big cassettes out of plastic paperboard is getting the distinct smell that would go along with that combat as ghost and monster embrace.
Wijngaard’s visuals are luminous. The reds and ghostly blues and purples wrap around the spectral action with deliciously hazy optic ozone. Watters sets Wijngaard up for a dramatically cinematic supernatural combat amidst palm trees and city lights at night. Wijgnaard mixes some stunning colors with the visual percussion of two supernatural forces clashing. Wijngaard has done an excellent job with the indie-pop music milieu of the series. Past issues in the series had the feel of echoing punky mid-’90s grunge. This one feels like some kind of visual techno-metal that occasionally dips into a ravey EDM sort of a feel.
Much like his work on Coffinbound, Watters’ scripting for Home Sick Pilots has leaned heavily into the art to tell the story. There’s a tremendous amount of trust in the artist to deliver the bulk of what’s going on that’s paid-off quite well in Watters’ work. Watters’ approach has been impressive. Give the artist the freedom to work on the visuals without too much dialogue, and you just might end up with something beautiful.
