Ami is being stalked by a haunted house. The good news is that the house in question is under the ocean. The bad news is that there’s at least one ghost who just does NOT want to stay down there with the rest of them. Ami’s just trying to relax at a concert when duty calls in Home Sick Pilots #8. Writer Dan Watters continues exploring the afterlife in the 1990s in a story brought to the page by artist Caspar Wijngaard. Ghost stories have been around forever. Watters echoes traditional ghost stories in a style that fuses quite nicely with the superhero genre.

Ami is trying to ignore the ghost who are anchored into her. They’re off the coast, so she’s able to breathe a little bit easier. And since the ocean floor isn’t a naturally tenable position for a house (haunted or otherwise), it’s only a temporary fix. Ami is going to find herself confronted by the ghost of a kid who wants to show her a monster he’s made. The monsters he used to make were so harmless expressions of imagination. Then the kid died. And now Ami has to deal with something altogether more menacing.   

Watters is working quite capably with the basic anatomy of the ghost story. The fusion between ghost story and superhuman narratives is delightful in the tale of Ami. The young woman explores the power granted her from a fusion with the haunted house. She’s struggling to assert herself from the ghosts of the past in a narrative that Watters echoes into history. The larger implications of this seem a bit strained, but the central story works very well as Ami tries her best to babysit a dead kid and keep him from doing serious harm to many other people. 

Wijngaard’s ability to being anime-inspired horror-fantasy action to the page holds a great deal of power in a story that involves a huge group of people at night and a massive monster generated by a little kid in a manga mask. The color is gorgeous. Anger from one of the ensemble comes in the form of mystical armor of deep red. The chaos of a concert filters in with splashes of garish pastels. Night and monsters clash against the page in a mixture of day-glow magentas and blues. The purity of the colors is visually electrifying in a way most comics would tend to shy away from for fear over overpowering the story. 

Things continue to fall apart beautifully in a series that seems to know exactly where the lines are and exactly how far it can go before it crosses any of them. The story is just familiar enough that it feels comfortable without being so familiar as to feel overly derivative. The color and chaos of the visuals are just powerful enough to feel overwhelming without desensitizing the reader to the story. It’s all balanced so well. The challenge is to keep it balanced as the complexity of the story intensifies. 

Grade: B+