Home Sick Pilots ‘Volume 1: Teenage Haunts’ Graphic Novel

Home Sick Pilots: ‘Volume 1: Teenage Haunts’ is a graphic novel from the creative team of Dan Watters and Caspar Wijngaard.

The story follows three foster kids who start a band in SoCal in 1994. Then one of them enters a haunted house and establishes a rapport with it.

The book design of ‘Volume 1’ carefully crafts a mood, setting up for the rhythms of the comic to follow. Caspar Wijngaard’s page layouts, combined with Steve Wands’ lettering, add to the storytelling of the comic. Through visual elements like central images of trees with hanged bodies, negative space skull-like images, and a page of solid black, the reader is drawn into an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue.

Dan Watters’ writing gives very little in the way of explicit details, and so the reader’s feelings become their primary way of navigating the story.

This is a key component of cosmic horror, where the reader is usually denied understanding. As the story progresses, the reader is presented with visual motifs, color associations, and echoes in page layouts.

These elements help to build a feeling of unease and dread as the story moves towards its conclusion.