In the summer of 1994, a haunted house walks across California. Inside is Ami, lead singer of a high school punk band who’s been missing for weeks. How did she get there, and what do these ghosts want? Expect three-chord songs and big bloody action that’s Power Rangers meets The Shining. It’s Home Sick Pilots #1 from Dan Watters, Caspar Wijngaard, Aditya Bidikar and Tom Muller.
Dan Grote: Y’know, I’ve been an editor and writer at this site for almost half a year now, and this is the first time I’ve done one of these conversational-type reviews? But I’m glad I’m finally getting around to it, and I’m happy it’s this book, which I was excited for as soon as I read it described as “Power Rangers meets The Shining.” And I don’t even like Power Rangers! Anyway, now I get to make like the AIPT Comics Podcast’s David Brooke and introduce my copilot on this journey, Forrest Hollingsworth!
Forrest Hollingsworth: Hellllllllll-o! My name is Forrest With Two Rs (That plays better in audio, I promise), and I’ve lived in at least one haunted house, which I think qualifies me to join you on this journey? I’m glad to be joining you with bona fides or not, to tell the truth.
DG: Yeah, I’ma need a little more info on that “I’ve lived in at least one haunted house” bit.
FH: Oh! So we lived in a house built in the ‘20s with a very deep, unfinished basement. I frequently tripped going up and down the stairs, and both my roommates and I would hear a voice saying “be careful” that we slowly understood to be less of genuine care and more a phantasmal taunt.
DG: Holy crap. Where’s a band of always-filming reality-show ghost bros when you need them? Anyhoo, what did you think of this book generally?
FH: Oh yeah, comics! This is a good, satisfying one with a lot of narrative and visual elements to balance that I think mostly succeeds in interesting, generationally and genre-driven evocative ways.
DG: I mean, it’s a house full of ghosts that walks like a mech piloted by an angry teenage girl. If that description isn’t enough to sell you on this book, I dunno, man, you might be a ghost yourself because you’re dead inside.
‘We Should Throw a Gig in the House that Kills People’
DG: OK, full disclosure — I’m old. I was a teenager when the kids in this book were teenagers, in 1994. When he was on WMQ&A, I asked Dan Watters what kind of music he was into in 1994, and he told me he was 3 then and I damn near had my first heart attack. Regardless, the music of that era — Soundgarden, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Hootie and the Blowfish (Yeah, I said it, fight me) had a lasting impact on me, so already I’ve got a connection to these California gutter punks. Although I wasn’t roaming the streets and sneaking into shows in abandoned bowling alleys when I was their age. Too busy reading “The Phalanx Covenant” and playing Final Fantasy VI for the first time. What about you, Forrest, does the era in which this book is set hold any special significance for you?
FH: I was born in ’93 …
DG: GOD-DAMMIT! Sorry, go ahead, continue.
FH: … so I don’t have the same kind of immediate nostalgia for the very specific cultural references Watters is making (despite NIN and Guided by Voices being my favorite bands), but I have enough approximate awareness of them to say their inclusion here works. Ami, as our central character, is relatable and indicative of that unmistakably ’90s teenage angst in a way that is entirely appreciable and approachable, at the very least. I also like the balance of that immediate angst and the diary-like narration bits which strike at the teenage façade. To say nothing of how cool backward baseball hats, plaid skirts, denim and smokes are just, kinda, universally.
‘I’m Just Saying, We Put a D-Beat on the Breakdown’
DG: If we’re keeping with the Power Rangers comparisons, does that make the Nuclear Bastards Bulk and Skull? Seriously, though, I love the interplay between the Home Sick Pilots and their rival band, the Nuclear Bastards. They each have their hyper-aggressive bonehead (Rip vs. Robbie), their more level-headed member (Meg and Buzz), etc. The scene where Robbie stabs Rip because Rip gets caught up in a conversation about his missing bandmate Ami instead of focusing on the fact that Robbie is trying to rob him is hilarious. What about you, Forrest, do you have a favorite character in this gang?
FH: I’m not terribly versed in Power Rangers, so I’m kind of in the position of nodding politely and saying, “Oh, yeah!” the way you do when you’re at a concert — maybe even a Nuclear Bastards show — and can’t actually hear the person talking to you. But I can say that as a kid who grew up very much embedded in my local punk and burnout scene, the character beats, depictions and tensions here ring very true, down to Ami sobbing and imagining that too real suburban conflict outside of her house before making for the central haunt. My early vote for best character goes to Meg, Robbie’s dejected and yet surprisingly chill lackey, though.
DG: I can already see the “Meg deserves better” and “Justice for Meg” hashtags trending on Twitter. Hopefully with Robbie out of the way, Meg gets to front her own kickass all-girl band a la L7.
‘Like a Magic Circle’
DG: This is my first time looking at art by Caspar Wijngaard, and I gotta say, the guy’s a genius. His colors are amazing. There’s a page where nothing happens, it’s just four panels of night passing over a creepy house, but the blues and purples that wash over everything make it so beautiful you forget the plot isn’t advancing for a moment. I also really dig the two-page splash where the two rival bands are making their way through the house and meet in the middle. It takes a couple passes before you figure out how to read it (especially with my digital copy where the splash is broken up in two), but it’s worth it to take your time and really soak it all in. In a way it’s like one of those Marvel cross sections of Avengers Mansion or whatever where they show where Jarvis sleeps. What did you think of the art, Forrest?
FH: I think there are very few artists today that work in the kind of heavily stylized and yet visually dense way that Wijngaard does, and it’s especially effective here. Trading in highly detailed panels of wood splintering, foundations breaking and bodies breaking that are evocative of contemporary Daniel Danger’s work, Caspar gives real people and the weird unwieldy magic surrounding them equal weight with nice pops of purple, blue, yellow and more for callouts. It mirrors the narrative in a satisfying way, too, as that two-page spread you called out is structured in a way that it evokes the dollhouse Ami supposedly killed her mother over. I’m more than excited to see more of it, especially as the stakes ramp.
Cool miscellany, bro
- “SubPop wannabe” is such a hyperspecific 1994 diss. I love it.
- Hey! The SubPop store in the Seattle-Tacoma airport is like, surprisingly cool despite the obvious odds an airport store has with the focuses of genre and punk writ large.
- The entire artistic direction, and specifically the coloring, of the book just screams “bisexual rights,” and I know at least one of us is very here for that.
- I’m making assumptions based off the cover, but issue #2 looks like it’s gonna give us this book’s Rita Repulsa, and I can dig it.
- Fans of Wijngaard’s work here should absolutely check out Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, a new seminal work as far as I’m concerned.
- The rural punk scene is especially unique, in that the weirdest concert venue I’ve ever been to is a barn that actively had goats, cows and chickens passing through it as opposed to the actually cool bowling alley here.
- I bet goats are good at moshing.
Dan Grote is the editor and publisher of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Paul Winston Wisdom.
Forrest is an experimental AI that writes and podcasts about comic books and wrestling coming to your area soon.
