#IReadsYou Review: HOME SICK PILOTS #4

HOME SICK PILOTS #4
IMAGE COMICS – @ImageComics

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

STORY: Dan Watters
ART: Caspar Wijngaard
COLORS: Caspar Wijngaard
LETTERS: Aditya Bidikar
DESIGN: Tom Muller
COVER: Caspar Wijngaard
VARIANT COVER ARTIST: Jamie McKelvie
28pp, Colors, 3.99 U.S. (March 2021)

Rated “M/Mature”

Home Sick Pilots created by Dan Watters and Caspar Wijngaard

Home Sick Pilots is a comic book series created by writer Dan Watters and artist Caspar Wijngaard, the creative team of the comic book, Limbo.  Home Sick Pilots focuses on a group of teens and a haunted house with an evil mind of its own.  Letterer Aditya Bidikar and designer Tom Muller complete the series' creative team.

Home Sick Pilots opens in Santa Manos, California, July 18, 1994.  A haunted house known as “the old James house” walks across California, and inside is Ami, the lead singer of the high school punk band, “Home Sick Pilots.”  Ami has been missing for weeks, so how did she get in the old James house?  It has ghosts, and Ami has to find them.  But can Ami be found … and helped?

As Home Sick Pilots #4 opens, the Home Sick Pilots are reunited – kind of.  The ghosts and entities are watching Ami's actions ever closer, as she continues to capture the ghosts that must be returned to the old James House.  Who else knows about the ghosts and what can that knowledge gain?

Now, Ami finds herself battling haunted video tape from a possessed video cassette, and it can connect to VHS machines.  Elsewhere, the house armors Buzz and sends him to rescue Ami, but when new entities arrive, Ami understands that whatever honeymoon she has with this house is over.

THE LOWDOWN:  At some point in the run up to the debut of Home Sick Pilots, the series was described as being a blend of author Shirley Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959); the comic book series, Paper Girls, and Power Rangers.  I am not familiar with Paper Girls, but I am familiar with the Jackson novel via the 1963 and 1999 film adaptations, and I have watched some episodes of Power Rangers.

I am starting to see those connections, but I don't want to do a disservice to Home Sick Pilots.  It is both a unique creature and creation.  Dan Watters' script moves between mysterious and weird and exciting and scary, and he always offers something new.  Caspar Wijngaard's art and colors present this constant flow of new imagination in electrifying and sometimes breathless storytelling.

So, I will keep heartily recommending Home Sick Pilots.  Hopefully, dear readers, you won't get left too far behind, although it will be fun playing catch-up.

I READS YOU RECOMMENDS:  Fans of offbeat and imaginative supernatural comic books will want to fly with the Home Sick Pilots.

9 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


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