Home Sick Pilots #7 // Review
Ami and Buzz have been on the run. This is perfectly okay and nothing to be ashamed of. People run away from a lot of things. Not everyone is on the run from a 100-ton haunted house, though. So Ami and Buzz are a little unique in that respect as they drift through Homesick Pilots #7. Writer Dan Watters and artist Caspar Wijngaard take a moody breather from all of the weird intensity of recent events in the series to explore the nature of the relationship between Ami and Buzz. Delicate, largely unspoken drama mixes with creepy horror around the edges of an exciting issue.
Three months. Ami and Buzz have been drifters for three months. They've been able to trust each other. They've been close. And they've been through a lot. The haunted house that they've been trying to avoid is out there. And it's looking for them. And maybe it might find them. And maybe love is really the only way that Ami and Buzz are going to be able to avoid the house, but feelings are complicated on either side of the veil between the living and the dead. Ami and Buzz are alive, but how much longer can they survive on the road?
Watters has a delicate grasp of the intricate emotional lives of Buzz and Ami. Interpersonal romantic drama is a very tricky thing to explore in any narrative. There tends to be a lot of heavily rendered dialogue that doesn't sound terribly organic. Watters carefully constructs a deep emotional life for two characters who would prefer not to talk about their feelings. That's a hall of an accomplishment in and of itself. Drawing the emotional concerns of a haunted house into matters only makes the whole situation more breathtakingly weird...which, of course, it always IS for young adults just trying to "figure it out" the way Ami and Buzz are. Watters delivers a haunting surrealistic amplification coming-of-age in the 1990s.
Wijngaard is impressively reserved with the visual reality of two people on the road. A series that has delved into some pretty fantastic and horrifying realities settles in on the listless restlessness of a couple of drifters. The complexity of emotion between Ami and Buzz resonates through the page in still and silent moments that couldn't possibly be more mundane...and yet there's a power to the unspoken emotion that feels every bit as intense as a man wrapped up in liquid ghost metal battling an evil cassette tape. When the supernatural is conjured to the page by Wijngaard, it's not any more intense... it's just a different kind of intensity.
This issue shows a genuine interest in modulating mood, mode, and tone between issues that should serve the series well in the long run. Watters and Wijngaard point the pages in the direction of a chapter that allows the supernatural end of this supernatural horror to rest along the edges of the narrative. Characters are given a bit of a breather before the next chapter.
