By Brian Novicki
Scott Snyder gravitates toward telling horror stories and Wytches might be his best yet. In books
like The Wake and American Vampire Snyder has dual goals with
the story (a sci-fi second half and a journey through American history,
respectively). So far, Wytches has a
focus to its horror that those other books lack.
Wytches #2 unfortunately
doesn’t give many answers about the mysterious beings in the woods, but it does
ratchet up the creep out factor significantly. Each of the three storylines
being followed starts out mundane: a father building a bannister chair, a
mother adjusting to work after being disabled, and a girl swimming in gym
class. Slowly but surely each character begins to be unsettled for various
reasons, and you along with them, until each one gets a chilling “To Be
Continued” moment.
This wouldn’t work at all without Jock’s art and Matt Hollingsworth’s
colors. Jock’s jagged, jerky style does an excellent job of keeping you off
guard. Whenever the woods are in panel I had to check closely to see if it was
just trees or if a wytch was lurking in the shadows. Hollingsworth perfectly
times color transitions between warm greens and yellows for everyday life to
the reds and purples of the more supernatural panels. We get our best look at
the wytches so far toward the end of the issue, and their design was genuinely
disturbing to me, in the best way.
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