Deus Ex Toilet Seat in Home Sick Pilots #11

The Old James House might turn out to be Ami’s only hope, but it’s still missing a piece. And if anyone’s going to survive, that final ghost must be found. Home Sick Pilots returns for a new set with issue #11, written by Dan Watters, drawn by Caspar Wijngaard, lettered by Aditya Bidikar and designed by Tom Muller for Image.

Dan Grote: Hey, Forrest, what do you think about Sting and The Police?

Forrest Hollingsworth: ACAB. Sorry, what was the question?

Dan: ‘Member how Sting used to talk about how he and his wife would have eight-hour tantric lovemaking sessions? I feel like there was a tantric element to waiting for this comic to return, with its promise of a giant robot-on-giant house fight. Now that I’ve read it, I feel I need a cigarette. And I don’t even smoke!

Forrest: I’m more of a Shaggy and Sting’s 44/876 aficionado, but that’s good for smoking something, too!

Dan: Can’t get mad at Mr. Boombastic, that’s for true.

Forrest: Look, what we’re both saying is when you get down to it, this is a comic for Sting fans, and like Sting’s career itself, I think it has some real high highs and some real low lows. Should we get into it?

Let Me Explain

Dan: As much as this issue is heavy on action, it’s also heavy on exposition. After two wordless pages start the story, a lot of space between punches is dedicated to not only reacclimating readers to this world but adding to its technical manual, so to speak. We get the deepest explanation yet of how the ghosts of the Old James House function as a gestalt entity/depression metaphor to power the house (along with a reprise of the double-page spread from the first issue). Does the art candy hide the taste of the word vegetables well enough, or can you still see all the asparagus tips sticking out of that mound of marshmallows and sweet potatoes?

Forrest: I’m glad we’re starting here because while I enjoyed the general direction of this issue, I … mostly did not enjoy reading it. I can see the asparagus.

Dan: And now all I can think about is how bad our pee’s gonna smell later.

Forrest: If I had to pin it on any one thing, I think what made this issue feel so arduous is the lack of dialogic diversity. Why does Ami’s internal monolog read the same as her dialogue? Why is Meg channeling the same flowery stuff? There’s the implication that the ghosts are, at least in Meg’s case, kind of speaking for them, but I still can’t abide by the waxing poetic about nuclear wars and “America Incarnate” as being anything even approaching natural for teenagers in crisis.

Everything that was previously more nuanced and subtextual is just painfully wrought here, I can’t make sense of why the narrative suddenly started to trust the reader so much less.

Dan: Every Home Sick Pilot comic could be someone’s first, maybe? That’s about the strongest explanation I can give there, the ol’ Shooter philosophy. Otherwise, I think we’re good on Watters’ treatise on nuclear testing and the rotting soul of America. It’s starting to sound like Morrissey’s “America Is Not the World.” And I don’t think any of us here wants to sound like Morrissey in 2022.

Anyway, please, please, please let me get what I want: More Wijngaard art.

Christmas Has Come … Late?

Dan: Circling back to all that good-good art candy, Wijngaard gives us a lot to like. The reprise of the house spread — warped to show how things have changed since the beginning, how Ami has come to serve as its brain/conscience and how Buzz and Rip are almost just as clueless about its true nature as when they first entered it — is perhaps the strongest callback to the first issue in a comic full of them. I’ve got other fave art stuff, but I wanna hear from you, Forrest. What Wijngaard wonders won you over?

Forrest: By far the coolest imagery in the issue is Ami and the James House moving in sync, her piloting it in the foreground, its hulking, creaking body doing the work in the background. It’s the first time we’ve really seen the act of piloting, and you can see why Wijngaard and Watters were so eager to explain that the book is, in fact, a tokusatsu.

The arms race escalation of newer, sleaker, faster mechs in the genre is usually compelling, but the idea that older ones, ones with stored age, anger and kinetic potential, can keep up is really novel and narratively resonant.

Same with the ground level, partially obfuscatory haziness of the the frames of the respective suits in the rubble, just the red glow of their internal machinations giving any color. The scale is immense.

Dan: Speaking of red, Wijngaard lights this comic up like a Christmas tree. Reddish-pinks and greens are everywhere, exemplifying the radiation that is part of the Nuclear Bastard’s back story, the blood covering Meg, the nightmare energy pouring from the James House and the sickly color of the sky as these two forces collide. There’s so much good storytelling in Wijngaard’s use of color, it’s another reason it’s a shame Watters chose to muck it up with excess prose. That said, I’ve a feeling it won’t be our last shot at a good house/mech fight.

Forrest: Also, stray observation, but Meg has a kind of motorcycle mount in the head of the Nuclear Bastard, and that’s just cool as hell.

Good Vs. Meg

Dan: OK, time to pause for brand recognition. I don’t think the good-and-evil binary applies to the central conflict here, but I do think we’ve reached the point where we can comfortably, if not happily, say that Meg has turned evil, yeah? She’s killed System Disrupt, she’s killed the people who’ve tried to stop her on her way to the James House, she’s absorbed their ghosts into the Nuclear Bastard like she’s topping off at Wawa. What started as the victim of trauma has become a supervillain origin story.

Forrest: Dan, you know I’m team Meg till I die, but I did think Ami was surprisingly quick to absolve her of any responsibility. There’s Ami’s line that “It’s not her. Not really. The ghosts are in control,” but I found that to be weirdly juxtaposed with Meg’s assertion that what happened in the first issue (her bandmates dying) happened explicitly because Ami was already in sync with Old James, thus laying some amount of responsibility at Ami’s feet. The two seem morally and narratively incompatible.

The problem is I’m not sure if that’s the intent, being that the Old James House and the Nuclear Bastard are both working off a fair amount of skeletons in their respective closets (and deserts?), or if it’s a case of the story trying to have its cake and eat it too with framing Ami as being relatable and forgiving and Meg not returning the favor. It’s really not helped by the aforementioned floweriness of everything.

Sheesh this is a real downer. I need to take a seat. Oop — looks like someone already did!

Dan: AHHHHHHHH I see what you did there! OK, let’s talk about the glowing toilet seat in the room, because A) I love it, and B) I think it speaks to a logic puzzle in this issue. Do you think Watters and Wijngaard planned the toilet seat — which was in fact missing and commented on in issue #1 — to be the seventh ghost needed to repower the James House from the beginning, or is it something they worked out as they started planning this arc?

Forrest: Lucky number seven, right? I think there was always a plan for another ghost, and the toilet seat bit fits the general grimy aesthetic and scatalogical humor of a lot of punk subcultures well enough that I’d believe it specifically was the plan from the beginning. It’s a nice bit of levity either way. Do you think they were going for a “seat of power” thing?

Dan: As MacGuffins go, it’s a good one. But I ask because there’s one thing gnawing at me about the explanation for how the James House ghosts work together. So when Ami and the others first enter the house, none of the objects within it are there. The lamp, the clock, even the horseshoe — they all come later in the first arc. But the house, from jump, exhibits some abilities. I’m thinking specifically of the wardrobe ghost’s power to create liminal spaces and warp the house. That’s how the Bastards died. I might be missing something, I might be overthinking it, but how can the house work like that if the pieces aren’t there to make it work?

Forrest: It’s like some of this stuff is more than natural, right? Almost supernatural …

Dan: Yeah, but like, ghosts have rules. AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE RULES?!

Donny: I am the walrus.

Cool Miscellany, Bro

Now that they have a fetch quest, I hope Buzz and Rip get to finally do some cool stuff rather than act as support/skeptic. They’re due.
Y’know, since we’re going after a toilet seat now, it behooves me to ask: Do ghosts poop?

Dan Grote

Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief 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 Winston Wisdom.