Home Sick Pilots #5 // Review
Ami has to walk with ghosts to defeat a haunted house and a VHS tape monster. (It’s the early 1990s.) There’s a big, supernatural showdown coming as Ami confronts a menacing power of gargantuan size in Home Sick Pilots #5. Writer Dan Watters wraps up his initial 4-issue arc in another issue drawn by Caspar Wijngaard. The drama is big. The action is bigger. The color is...kind of overwhelming as the opening run of the new series draws to a satisfying close. The action may seem a bit too big to always feel completely intelligible, but it’s slick and stylish fun.
Ami had told a demon that she and he were the same. She was wrong. She knows that now. And now she’s got to get back in touch with her band even if it kills her. It doesn’t; she shows up in a fetal position covered in blood. (Not hers.) Now she’s got to deal with a ghost animating an entire haunted house. And then there’s this VHS monster. Ami has the energy within her to balance the ghosts and return her little section of the world to some kind of normal. With any luck, she can do so without hurting anyone else.
Watters gracefully crowds the fifth issue of the series with a great deal of story while still managing the pacing in such a way as to make plenty of room for huge forces to collide at the issue’s end. The flow of action feels a bit disconnected, but the overall cascade of events is enjoyable enough. Ami feels suitably heroic as she confronts overwhelmingly powerful paranormal forces. The power of the afterlife has its own signature in Watters’ early ’90s supernatural crunch-fest. What he’s putting on the page may be derivative of a WHOLE bunch of other dark fantasy, but he’s doing it in a way that has a pulse all its own.
Wijngaard draws an unassuming alt-girl punk feel charmingly heroic as she stands in the way of large forces. The animated haunted house LOOKS like an entire house that’s come to life, and the distinct look of the VHS monster continues to have a very appealing visual fingerprint, but the biggest thing in the whole issue is the color. Wijngaard’s purple-blue hues give the issue a blacklight magic. The color in this issue is practically its own character as forces clash at the end of the opening arc.
Ami is a full-blown superhero at the end of the fifth issue. The unique weirdness of the first five issues of the series may be complicated by the traditional superhero feel to the hero. Still, there’s plenty of room for occult strangeness around the edges of the panel. The big climax to the first arc feels satisfying, though. Ami really feels like she’s developed into something special in the first five issues. If Watters and Wijngaard can hold onto that, Homesick Pilots could become something truly unique in the months to come.
