It's a Hardback Life

(This was a buddy read with Grim. Thanks for giving me the chance to do my first buddy read ever!)

There comes a time in your life when, if you have children, you can no longer remember what it was like not to have them. I can only speak for myself, but I think being a parent made this comic about ten times more terrifying than it would have been otherwise. It’s scary stuff either way, but a parent’s fears are particularly relevant to me. There is a moment when Charlie Rook, the family patriarch, talks about what it is like to have children:

And it’s true. You worry constantly, even when it’s just a low thrum underneath your daily routine. But how much worse is it when, like Charlie, you watch your child fall victim to forces out of your control? Sailor Rook, Charlie’s walking, talking “vital organ,” suffers from severe anxiety and depression, so her parents have a double fear for both her mental health and her physical wellbeing. Both are frequently endangered in this story—sometimes by outside forces, but sometimes by her parents as well.

After a traumatic incident with a homicidal bully, the Rooks decide to cut and run, starting fresh in a new place. But if horror stories have taught me anything, it’s that moving to a small town for a fresh start is just the worst plan ever. You can’t run from what’s chasing you, and the things chasing Sailor are particularly good at getting what they want...

Scott Snyder, with help from Jock’s visceral art and Matt Hollingsworth’s phenomenal coloring, makes the wytches themselves something straight out of our most primordial nightmares. If their horrifying physical forms weren’t scary enough, their ability to use the absolute worst in humans to their advantage may be even more frightening. They offer things so great—cures for diseases, prolonged life, love spells—that humans will hand over anything, even their loved ones, with little compunction. It would be easy to say that the humans are the real monsters, but frankly the humans and the wytches both prove to be equally disgusting. Even the few humans that seem not unremittingly evil are usually rotten under the surface.

The overall story can seem a little rushed, but when you get down to it the momentum becomes crucial to the increasing tension. I could wish for a little more buildup to the reveal near the end, but it still works. At first glance, this story seems to be about Sailor, but I think it’s really about Charlie. This isn’t a teenage girl fighting something only she sees or understands; it’s a father trying desperately to save his child, knowing he has let her down in the past but doing anything to make it right. Wytches is essentially a fairy tale, in the darkest, oldest sense of the tradition, the kind that came before we started giving them morals and happy endings.