Wytches #6 - Image Comics

WYTCHES No. 6, May 2015

It is genuinely rare that a comic will contain so shocking and surprising a narrative that it requires an immediate second reading, simply in order to allow the bibliophile’s brain to comprehend and accept what they’ve just perused. Issue Six of “Wytches” is arguably capable of having just this affect though and in many ways makes Scott Snyder’s stated belief that this title “was going to be a dark one” a considerable understatement.

Weighing in with a hefty thirty-two pages, this edition’s storyline immediately throws Charlie Rooks and his daughter ‘straight in at the deep end’ as they tentatively but determinedly scour the seemingly endless tunnels of the title’s flesh-eating wytches for a way back to the ‘safety’ of the surface. Such a terrifying, scare-a-minute trek through the claustrophobically dark maze-like underground warren is perturbingly pulse-pounding and it is hard to imagine a more chillingly creepy beginning to a book than the opening third of this series’ concluding instalment.

However the dread felt as the magazine’s main protagonists encounter the necromancers truly hideous cannibal elders is as nothing when compared to the sense of sheer stark horror conveyed by the American author once the couple are actually attacked by the carnivorous ghouls and make a hair-raising dash up the tangled insides of a tree in order to escape the bulbous-eyed monsters. Such frantic fast-paced action is disappointingly over after just four pages. But for a short while at least, the New Yorker’s narrative is actually scary enough to stop all but the most-hardened of horror fans from taking a breath.

Having already raised the adrenalin-levels of this comic’s 34,259 strong audience, Snyder then manages to stun and astound them even further by revealing that Sailor was pledged to the grey-skinned monstrosities living in the wood by her very own mother, Lucy, just so the wheelchair bound invalid could walk again. The cold-hearted calculating killer has even ‘already packed her daughter’s things together’ so that when her offspring is devoured both parents can “just… burn the box” and “won’t even remember she [Sailor] existed.”

Numbed by such deplorable selfish treachery and choked by the pitiful look within the young girl’s tearful eyes as she begins to comprehend her mother’s betrayal, what follows next is the very best in heart-rending melodrama as the father chooses his ‘little girl’s life’ over that of a having “another chance” with his “healed” wife, and sacrifices himself to the “chit chit” gnashing teeth and claws of the demonic wytches; “Calling all monsters! I’m coming for you! Because I’m Charlie Rooks! Proud father of the greatest slayer of mythological beasts of all time!!”

Story: Scott Snyder, Art: Jock, and Colors: Matt Hollingsworth