Home Sick Pilots #13 // Review
The final ghost is trapped. It’s been more or less alone for so very, very long. It’s about to make contact, though. It senses someone who doesn’t know what it is. That’s about to change in Home Sick Pilots #13. Writer Dan Watters reaches through the weirdness for a big climactic kaiju-like battle between a haunted house and a weaponized ghost construct. The battle and the moody drama that surrounds it are vividly rendered for the page by Caspar Wijngaard. The visual impact of the story hits much stronger than the plot or the dialogue in another somewhat stunning issue of the ’90s-based action horror-drama.
There’s a guard who has been keeping an eye on the door to the last ghost. It’s been ready to defend the door to its prison for its own kind of eternity. When called upon to step down by a powerful spectral force, it simply disintegrates. One might expect a bit more of a challenge. The challenge in question lies on the other side of the door, where the final ghost rests. She’s been long abandoned. She’s understandably upset. There are a group of people who have come to release her in hopes that she might help them save the world. They might get more than they are expecting.
Watters’ weird mash-up of grunge band drama, supernatural horror, and anime sci-fi action hits a respectably powerful note in its thirteenth issue as an abandoned drummer, and the final ghost of a haunted house come together in a communion somewhere near the edge of sanity. Watters weaves a traditional haunted house ghost story around something much more compelling. It’s been kind of an uneven journey thus far. At times, Watters has been trying to do too many things to be successful with any one genre. Watters manages an appealing balance in the 13th issue between the drummer and the last ghost.
Watters has an admirable respect for the artist. Wijngaard is given a tremendous amount of conceptual room in which to move around on the page. So much of the story rests in the visuals, which are summoned to the page with the perfect impact to fuse the multiple genres of the series into a single, coherent nightmare in day-glow magentas and pastel purples. A physical impact echoes into the emotions on the Watters’ pages. The thirteenth issue builds on the usual paranormal drama and spectral action with a unique connection between a living soul and a ghost that strikes the page with beautiful balance.
The rhythm of the series hasn’t always worked to the advantage of individual issues. Watters and Wijngaard have kept a firm perspective on the larger picture, which would generally lend itself to a more satisfying format in trade paperback. Every now and then, though, there’s an issue of Home Sick Pilots which feels perfectly at home in a single issue format. The thirteenth is one of those issues.
