Title: Wytches, Volume 1
Series Title: Wytches
Author: Scott Snyder
Artists: Jock, Matt Hollingsworth, & Clem Robins
Date Added: October 9, 2017
Date Started: July 8, 2018
Date Finished: July 15, 2018
Reading Duration: 7 days
Genre: Graphic Novel, Horror, Fantasy

Pages: 192
Publisher: Image Comics
Publication Date: October 8, 2014
Media: Paperback (Library)

Everything you thought you knew about witches is wrong. They are much darker, and they are much more horrifying. Wytches takes the mythology of witches to a far creepier, bone-chilling place than readers have dared venture before. When the Rooks family moves to the remote town of Litchfield, NH to escape a haunting trauma, they’re hopeful about starting over. But something evil is waiting for them in the woods just beyond town. Watching from the trees. Ancient…and hungry.

This was…okay.  I liked how the novel was cleverly bookended with everything occurring tying in with an incident in the beginning.  There was also an in-story comic that cleverly connected with the book’s plot, and the artwork is decent.

I liked the relationship Sailor had with Charlie, her father, but her character is not well developed.  She had a cool, quirky look, which may have been Snyder’s way of hinting why she’d been bullied, but no personality to fill that role.

Despite the fact her father Charlie says this is “her story,” it was largely more focused on him.  The flashbacks centered on Charlie, and the voice-overs were Charlie’s, so if this was Sailor’s story, she didn’t get much say in it.  While her father eventually became less of a douche about his daughter’s anxiety, he sure as hell didn’t help it along by forcing her to climb a derelict Ferris wheel at one point with only him berating her spurring Sailor on.  This could’ve been how the author showed Charlie’s character development, and this could just be my hangup due to my own past, as it was hard for me to read, but it still seemed pretty shitty.

I was disappointed in the “wytches” themselves and hoping for a bit more originality and complexity with the idea, but they were extremely one dimensional.  Sailor’s anxiety and paranoia is certainly validated, but huge swaths of the big reveal felt a bit trite.

I wasn’t going to continue the series until I realized this was the entire story lol.

2.5 stars.