Home Sick Pilots #12 // Review
There’s a haunted house battling a giant robot on the west coast. (Really.) People are glued to their screens watching it worldwide, but no one is getting involved. The military is there, but they’re only watching passively from their big, expensive tanks...partially because they don’t know what the hell to do but mostly because they’re only posing a threat to each other as things get weird in Home Sick Pilots #12. Writer Dan Watters dives into stranger, darker territory with the latest issue of the supernatural action-horror series that is stylishly conjured for page and panel by artist Caspar Wijngaard.
Somewhere on the other side of everything, there’s a man guarding a toilet seat. He’s armed with a rifle. His orders to guard the toilet seat come from a man with a dog. To make matters a bit more strange, the thing is glowing a bright pink. It’s haunted. It might be one of the most powerful artifacts from the Old James House. There are those looking to secure it for themselves. There’s no telling what’s going to happen when they get where they’re going, and there’s little telling what’s going to happen if they manage to secure the toilet seat.
Watters focuses most of the script on a conversation between friends on a journey. They’re wandering through subterranean darkness. One of them is wearing powered armor running on ghost energy. The other isn’t. One is doing better than the other. Watters does a good job with the dialogue, but the world beyond it never comes into clear enough focus for the 12th issue of the series to come across as much more than a really cool, bizarre dream. The interpersonal drama that’s flowing through much of the installment feels way too caught up in itself to engage the reader on a satisfying level. Watters saves the issue a bit with a bit of intriguing backstory that hits in the second half of the chapter.
The contrast between bloody pinks and deep turquoise force the color to come across way ahead of the rest of the visual reality of the story. The hell of the horror DOES settle in around the edges of the color in a way that asserts itself quite powerfully. The power of the ghost magic has developed its own visual consciousness in and around Wijngaard’s work. What he’s putting to the page feels distinct. It would be really nice if it was driving a story that had a bit more of a coherent pulse to it.
It’s always kind of tricky to judge a work in progress...particularly of the pacing of the plot don’ exactly lend itself to neatly-defined chapters. Watters and Wijngaard are clearly working with a plot structure that doesn’t always neatly fall between the two covers of a monthly comic book. There is a HELL of a lot going on in the story that might work better in the larger volumes of collected editions. That being said, it has been a lot of fun watching it progress every month.
