DISCLAIMER: Spoilers for the plot of Wytches. Mature Themes and Content.
I don’t have any children and I probably never will. This is something I don’t really have strong feelings about. I’m not trying to have kids, but at the same time, I’m not trying to not have kids. There are times, however, that I wonder what I would be like as a parent. I would like to think that I would make a great parent. Make all the right decisions and raise the perfect child. But the world is a pretty frightening place and I’m not sure I would be able to prepare another human being for that.
I also know that I am far from perfect and the thought of me being the perfect parent is asinine. I’m impatient, unreliable, and at times can be very selfish. All qualities you don’t want to pass down to another person.
Sometimes parents go into raising a child with all of the best intentions, yet life throws things at them they didn’t expect. All they can do is the best they can and I think in a parent, that’s all you can ask for. Someone who did everything they could for their children. Like I said, the world is a scary place and there are things you can’t prepare another person for. Things you didn’t even know existed.
Sometimes there are Wytches.
The Rooks family are a family that have been hit with a series of horrible misfortunes. The mother, Lucy, was in a car wreck that caused her to lose her unborn child and left her paralyzed from the waist down. Sailor, the daughter, has been the victim of a vicious bully that is terrorizing her. Then there is the father, Charlie, who has handled these issues the only way he really knows how. Isolating himself from others and turning to alcohol.
One day, Sailor’s bully goes too far. She takes Sailor out to the woods and starts attacking her for something she claims Sailor posted online. Sailor decides at this point she has had enough and pulls a knife out on her attacker. But the bully is one step ahead and pulls out a gun. She then begins to demand that Sailor take off all of her clothes.
However, they are not alone. They both hear a noise deep in the woods. The girl hits Sailor in the head with the gun, thinking she brought someone with her. The bully goes to investigate and then is attacked. Sailor watches as these monstrous hands reach out of a tree and pull the girl into it. Sailor passes out and is discovered sometime later. Of course, no one believes her story.
The witches or “wytches” in this world are not like the type of witches we are used to seeing in media but they still have a lot of similarities. They live in the woods and seem to get their powers from feeding off of others. We even see in one scene that they have a cauldron that they cook their victims in. Of course Witch is a pretty broad term ranging from the spiritual, religious meaning to those of folklore and myth. However, the witches here are a new type of beast. They live deep inside the trees and while they maybe once could have been human, they appear here as terrifying monsters that evolved in the dark, wild forest. If I had to compare them to anything, they remind me of the creatures from the movie, The Descent. That is one of the things that make them so terrifying here. They appear as almost like a wild animal that cannot be reasoned with. Sure, they do make deals with human’s in the form of a “pledge” but you cannot sway them from what they are, “wild animals”.
While we are at it, I should probably mention what a pledge is. Say if you really wanted something or someone, you would make a pledge to the wytches of the woods. After the offering, they will grant you whatever it is that you desire. However the cost of the pledge is very high, usually meaning you have to offer the wytches someone you care about or that is close to you. We see in a flashback at the very beginning of the story a young boy who finds his mother stuck in a tree. When he asks why she is in there, she tells him that someone “pledged” her. The young boy then picks up a rock and smashes her in the face with it, saying; “pledged is pledged.”
Back in modern day, Charlie and Lucy move Sailor to a new town, hoping that a fresh start will be the thing that can help their family repair after all the horrible things they have been through. But, as we all know, you can’t hide from your problems. They always find you. Sailor starts seeing the creatures from the woods and it’s soon realized that someone has pledged her.
When you first start reading Wytches, you think all of their problems started with these tragic events. That before that, they were a happy family. But as the story progresses you find out that a lot of their issues started way before. Charlie wasn’t a distant alcoholic because of everything that was happening to his family. He was those things because before that, he didn’t know how to handle having a family.
Sailor had anxiety issues long before her bully ever came along. It may have been what made her such an easy target for the bully in the first place. We see in a series of flashbacks and even in some scenes in real time, that Charlie has no idea how to handle it. When he looks at his daughter he sees all the things he hated about himself when he was younger. He wants to “fix” her but he has no idea how. This often leads to him verbally lashing out at her.
With all of Charlie’s faults, we see that he is a good man. He wants to be a good father and husband. He wants to protect his family and do everything he can for them. At the same time, he is still very much attached to his past. He still lingers on to that time before he was a parent and did not have the burden of responsibility.
Charlie is a writer of children’s books and when they move into the new town, he is in the process of working on his next one. His book series follows a young boy, who while at an amusement park, gets lost in a house of mirrors. The boy then gets transported into a world where everything is opposite and there is no responsibility.
This story seems to mean a lot to Charlie as he has a tattoo of a Ferris wheel on his bicep. And we see in a flashback when he is on one of his drunken stints, he goes to an abandoned park and climbs up onto the Ferris wheel. Sitting up there, drunk with a bottle of liquor, Sailor finds him and begs him to come down and to come back home. He however, has a better idea and yells for her to climb up to him. He screams at her to not be such a coward and to face her fears. She gets angry and tries to climb up even higher than he is. However, she slips and almost falls to what would probably have been her death if her father wasn’t able to catch her. This seems to be a wake up call for him.
This constant struggle between Charlie and Sailor is really the core of the story. So far, I’ve pretty much focused on all the negative aspects of Charlie as a father but like I said, there is good there too. For one, they clearly love spending time together. He plays this game with Sailor where they make up fantasy stories of going out and killing monsters together. They play it in this sort of role-playing style and they always come up with comical and immature ways to kill the monsters.
Also, now that they are in a new town and trying to get a fresh start, we see Charlie is trying to turn his life around. Where at one point, his focus would be about himself, he is now thinking about his family over everything else. He doesn’t want to abandon them again, and while we see bits of his anger creep out here and there, he is trying to overcome it.
There is no secret that this is a personal story for Scott Snyder. After reading it, you can clearly see this was told from a man who was dealing with his own struggles of being a father. But even if you did read Wytches and still didn’t get that, Scott Snyder has been very verbal about how important this story is to him. You can find him in interviews saying as much. In an interview with Polygon, he had this to say:
“I love my family and my kids, I’ve always wanted that. But I think one of the things that can be very frustrating with parenting is that you’re still you, you still have the same ambitions, the same fears, and sometimes they come into conflict with that in ways that surprise you. Your capacity both for joy and your capacity for frustration reach new levels as a parent. So I wanted to do a book that was as raw or brutal when it came to that as possible."
- Scott Snyder
Not only that, at the end of almost every issue when the comic book was being released, there are a series of essays written by Snyder where he talks about his past and a lot of the inspirations he had for Wytches.
It’s here in these essays that we really see inside of Snyder’s head and where his thought process was in writing Wytches. He tells stories of his childhood and how him and his friend use to go “witch hunting” in the woods. He reflects on how he came to love horror and what horror means to him. He also goes into the difficulties of being a parent. The fear he has over his children and the impact that fear can have on children.
I am usually against the idea of an artist talking too much about the work of art itself. I do think there is a time and place for it, but at the same time, I think it should be up to us, the reader, to come to a conclusion as to what the work is about. But these essays, however, really add a sense of depth to Wytches and humanizes Snyder to where we can see him on our level. If you decide to read Wytches after reading this, I highly suggest that you also read those essays. They are at the end of the trade paperback of the book.
I want to make sure to give credit to the rest of the team. First thing we need to get out of the way is just how amazing Jock’s art is. I have no problem in saying that Jock is not only one of my favorite comic book artist working today, he’s one of my favorite comic book artist of all time. His ability to capture that rawness of the characters just through his art alone is amazing. At times he creates instances where it is almost like we are seeing a character between shots instead of the intended shot itself. I know that sounds confusing but it’s like when the camera goes off at the wrong time and your face is making some weird expression that no one was meant to see.
His pacing and storytelling is almost unmatched as well. He can create pages that don’t feel cluttered but tell you so much information at the same time. You get so lost in the world he creates that you forget that you are even reading a book, It all just flows out so naturally. Add that with Matt Hollingsworth’s murky colors that blend in and out of each other, and you truly have a horror comic that comes to life.
So, I have spent most of this talking about Sailor and Charlie because like I said, they are our main characters. This is their story. The one downside to this, however, is that we don’t get to spend too much time with Lucy, the mother. This is a shame, because everything that happens really is her experience just as much as it is theirs. She is the one that had the miscarriage. She is the one that loses the use of her legs. Then add to that she has a daughter that suffers from severe panic attacks and a husband who is a distant alcoholic.
The way the story handles covering her arc is kind of a let down too by making her the villain. You see, she is the one that pledged Sailor. We get a back story that her family long ago escaped the wytches and were able to hide from them for years. But Charlie’s depression and overall negative attitude attracted the wytches back to them. She feels the only escape is to offer Sailor as a pledge. She promises Charlie that after it happens that they will never remember Sailor existed. She is also given the use of her legs back too as payment for Sailor. She offers Charlie a way out of the pain they have gone through and a chance to start fresh.
We also learn that the whole town is aware of the wytches. It’s their dirty little secret. This is another issue I have with the story. Because the reveal comes off to paint the townspeople as evil. They don’t really fear the wytches, but instead use them for their own greed. While that idea is good in concept, it comes off as kind of cheap. Meaning that it takes away from the terror of the wytches themselves. Again, this fits the themes that Snyder mentions in those essays but I’m not sure that it pays off very well.
“Suddenly I wished I could go back to the kid fears. The tooth fairies and monsters. Because these NEW fears - fears concerning the evil that people do to one another - they are justified and potent and terrifying. And worse than this, there is no protecting your child from them.”
- Scott Snyder from “Who Would You Pledge? Issue 3”
Sometimes the less you know about an evil the more terrifying that evil is. To create a whole town that essentially doesn’t fear the wytches dampens the horror some. This doesn’t ruin the story by any means, I just wish it could have been handled a little differently. I also wish that Lucy wouldn’t have been used as a twist villain because it does nothing but hurt her character.
At the end of it all, Charlie doesn’t take the offer. He chooses his daughter’s life over his own happiness. He sacrifices himself and takes the townspeople and Lucy with him. Throughout the story we see him saying that he will not run away like he did before and do everything he can to save his daughter.
Wytches ends with a flashback of him at a signing release of his first book. He gives a speech saying that when he originally started the book it was about running away to happier times. Over time though, with the help of Sailor, he used it as a way to find his way back home. Back to his family and to accept how things have changed.
So, since I don’t have kids, what does Wytches mean to me? When I first decided I wanted to write about Wytches I originally wanted to show the complexity of parenthood and how an art-form was used to capture that. Because, that is very much what Wytches is. But that doesn’t relate to me in any way really. Yes, I can look at the story and think about my fears if I was to be a parent but that is me just viewing the story in a very vicarious way.
While writing this and rereading the story a handful of times, I realized what the story really meant to me and why I was drawn to it. I was, or I guess am, Charlie. I have found myself at times running away from what is in front of me searching what used to be. All the while depending on alcohol to fill the void of what I thought I was missing.
Charlie lived in a state of yearning for the past. Afraid of his own daughter and the problems she has to deal with created a future of uncertainty for him. His life was no longer simple and he had others that depended on him, but he didn’t want to lose those things he had before. That freedom to be careless and selfish. With the help of his daughter he realizes that it’s okay to be human. To have those fears and wants. In a way, with some sacrifice, you can still have both worlds. Sailor never wanted him to be the perfect father, she just wanted to be with her dad. That love and bond shows Charlie that the future can always hold a glimmer of hope for things to be better. That their future together has all of the potential to be better than the past he had.
Nostalgia at times can be a very good thing. It can be comforting to reflect on the things we once had or used to enjoy. But Nostalgia can also be very poisonous in high dosages. Not only does it skew the way you remember things, it skews your current perspective of the world. It paints the world as a scary and violent place. A place of uncertainty, because our futures are very uncertain. We never know what is going to happen tomorrow. But the past, it’s always there. We know how everything turned out.
I have seen a lot of people I care about get lost in nostalgia just like I have before. Seen them suffer longing for a time they can never get back. No, you will never get those times back. But I think it should be all of our goals for tomorrow to be a day we can look back on later and be nostalgic for.
Michael Williams
This is a fantastic first essay. I’ve never read Wytches, but I’m really intrigued. I love the way you describe the art in it. I can visualize it even without the photos.
I would love to see you cover some of my faves like Sleeper, Lost Girls (good luck with that one) and Face.
Anyways, great essay and I look forward to reading more from you!