Comic Review | Home Sick Pilots Issue # 1

Who said mecha’s dead? It’s undead in a new punk haunted house mecha from Image Comics.

Home Sick Pilots by Dan Watters (writer) and Caspar Wijngaard (illustrator) follows a high school punk band named Home Sick Pilots. One night, they watch a rival band and decide they can pull off an even sicker gig. The lead singer Ami gets a bright idea. What if they held a show in a notoriously creepy haunted house? … Only what they find inside is more than they bargained for.

First off, I've really got to praise Wijngaard's coloring and artwork is work here. Overall, I can best describe the art style as atmospherically goth with a splash of neon punk. Just looking at the pages makes me feel like Nicolas Cage in Color out of Space, going, “The color, the color …" It's almost otherworldy and adds to the story feeling like a surreal nightmare.

The opening sequence alone is enough to hook you in. It’s absolutely haunting. We just see the house shifting and rearranging itself to form a humanoid figure.

However, while the artwork is what first drew me to this comic, it's the innovative premise and compelling characters are what make me want to stick around.

I've got to say, this feels like a horror comic with a heart. In Issue #1, we see the beginnings of thematic parallels between an abandoned house that needs fixing up and three teenage misfits who are rough around the edges themselves.

The house is sentient and essentially acts as its own character as well. In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, Watters explains, “The haunted house is the human head. It’s a container full of traumas and horrors and broken bits and pieces, and we muddle through it the very best we can. This book is about what happens when the ghosts escape the house — and how we can let them destroy us, or learn to walk with them.

Overall, this is a really creative genre-bender and I'm curious to see if the band members learn how to walk with their ghosts ... or be dragged under by them.

Thank you, Image Comics, for providing me with a review copy!

Comic Details:

Publication Date: December 9, 2020
Publisher: Image Comics
Diamond ID: OCT200017
Age Rating: M

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