DF Interview: Dan Watters brings three-chord songs and big bloody action in ‘Home Sick Pilots’

By Byron Brewer

In the summer of 1994, a haunted house walks across California. Inside is Ami, lead singer of a high school punk band, who's been missing for weeks. How did she get there, and what do these ghosts want? Expect Power Rangers meets The Shining (yes, really), expect the unexpected.

The team behind Limbo – Dan Watters (Lucifer, Coffin Bound) and Caspar Wijngaard (Star Wars, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt) – launch a brand-new ongoing series, Home Sick Pilots. DF wanted to bring you the full 411, so we sat down with scribe Dan Watters.

Dynamic Forces: Dan, this just might be the weirdest interview we’ve done. The series is described as Power Rangers meets The Shining? I cannot wait to get into this! So tell readers what inspired this new ongoing. And can you explain the title: Home Sick Pilots?

Dan Watters: There are a whole load of conception points for any book like this, I think. But one that springs to mind is being a few drinks down with Aditya Bidikar, letterer on the book and most of my other creator-owned work, on a beach in Goa. In a time when travel was an actual thing. We were talking about the work I was doing, at the time primarily Lucifer and the first arc of Coffin Bound. Some deep, dark twisty stuff, leaning into the operatics and theatrics of comics. Things I’m really interested in, but Bidi said he’d love to see what a ‘pop song’ book would look like from me – something fun and fast and maybe a touch lighter. That really set the wheels turning for me.

Turns out, I don’t think I have much of a pop song in my heart, but I have a fair bit of bubblegum punk rock. This book is far more of a boot to the face, hey-ho-let’s-go sort of affair than most of my work. It wears its manga and horror influences somewhat on its sleeve and is full of ghosts with strange powers and haunted mechanisms. Caspar and I developed everything together, and he has an insane mind for this kind of very 90s monstrousness. The book is just outright fun as a result.

Home Sick Pilots is the name of the band at the heart of the book: Ami, Rip and Buzz. While trying to find somewhere to throw a squat gig, they get entangled with a haunted house. The book was inspired by the idea of the haunted house as an entity, as a container of ghosts, which I think is also a pretty good description of a person. If you look at The Shining, the Overlook Hotel has its own personality, it’s made up of its ghosts, but it feels like an entity unto itself. So when we started thinking down that route, of the house as a person… well, we thought, why the hell shouldn’t it get up and walk? Which led us to the idea of mechs, which both Caspar and I love. We never looked back from there.

DF: Give us an extended pitch for this book.

Dan Watters: It’s an age-old tale, a classic girl-meets-haunted-house yarn…

When Ami finds that she feels a synergy with the Old James House, she wants to help it. A haunted house without no ghosts is nothing much at all, and its ghosts have been lost or stolen over the years. They’ve forgotten what they are and where they’ve come from… and they’re dangerous. So if Ami’s going to bring them back to the house, it’s going to need to lend her some power. But the more she takes from it – the closer she gets to it – the more a part of it she’ll become. The less herself.

And more and more we might wonder whether the house can really be trusted. Whether it feels the same way that Ami does – or if it’s a far more destructive force than even she understands.

Basically, we’re hunting out a lot of very cool ghosts with different abilities that Ami’s going to have to try and take down, while trying to maintain some sort of humanity, and maybe – just maybe – surviving to play three-chord songs with her friends again.

DF: Tell us about Ami as a character, and about her situation? No spoilers, of course.

Dan Watters: Ami is a girl with some really dark stuff in her past. She’s been through an awful load of crap, and milled through the foster system – and she’s ended up finding a tentative place for herself in the punk scene.

It’s all this that leads her to pretty much fall in love with a haunted house. She realizes they’re the same – they feel alone and broken and haunted, and she wants to help it bring it. But she doesn’t want to get her friends hurt – she doesn’t really trust in that way. So she ends up isolating herself more and more while being sent out by the house for its ghosts – all these dead people haunting objects that have been stolen from it, all manifesting in different ways. All these horrors she must confront – quite literally – and come to peace with in order to bring them home.

DF: Who are some of the other characters in the book? Will we meet Ami’s band?

Dan Watters: Absolutely. The first issue in particular is based around the rivalry between Home Sick Pilots and another band, the Nuclear Bastards, and we’ll get to know everyone… everyone who survives. This is a horror book, after all, not everyone will. Everyone is fair game.

A lot of the characters in the book are rooted in the town’s punk scene, which is also something I wanted to write about. My own experience of the scene is that it’s this fascinatingly fractured place. I once heard punk described as people who’ve decided to fail in the most beautiful way they can, and I like that descriptor even if it doesn’t always hold true, because punk as a concept is far too mercurial.

It’s a scene that prides itself on its sense of community, but you’re also far more likely to get in a fight, because you’re always in the proximity of someone who’s bought a little too into the studs and hair dye and tough guy hardcore music. Regardless, it’s a place where you’re accepted even if you’re a bit of a nightmare. To me this really made sense with the idea of ghosts in the haunted house. Lost, washed up things, huddled together in the dark.

DF: Talk about this haunted house that walks across California in Summer 1994. Is this mood or literal?

Dan Watters: Oh, it’s very literal. Our first story arc is the story of exactly how that happens. If you ask me, ghosts are products of trauma—which is why they’re so damn hard to get rid of. I think the idea that they can be exorcised is probably more harmful than not. Trauma doesn’t go away just because we confront it. But we can learn to live with it. We can learn to walk with it.

DF: Ghost details please?

Dan Watters: Haha! I don’t want to spoil too much, as we have a lot of plans for our ghosts. But I will say that our ghosts are very physical, and have a tendency to get attached – some of them meld with people, or haunt them in ways that change them – which is part of what makes them so damn dangerous. So expect a lot of ghost fights –  alas, most of these spirits aren’t interested in letting Ami off with the odd jump scare.

DF: Discuss your collaboration with artist Caspar Wijngaard. How does it feel being reunited with your Limbo co-creator?

Dan Watters: Caspar and I have been looking for the right time and project to reconnect on pretty much since Limbo ended. We talked for ages about doing a second book in the world of Limbo, and Home Sick Pilots actually started out that way – but to be honest, once we landed on the central conceit of this we were far more interested in that than in tying it to our old work. Which I now think is entirely the right way to go. We’re making this book because we’re excited about this book, not our old work.

Whenever I do books with Image I want them to be entirely unique to the team. I think it’s fair to say my books with Caspar have a very different tone than Coffin Bound, which is me and DaNi. I don’t think anyone else could make the books I make with Caspar, and neither of us could make them alone. Caspar also has one of the most imaginative minds of anyone I know, and an encyclopedic knowledge of 80s and 90s horror. You can see so much joy in his designs for the ghosts, monsters and organic mechs of this book.

DF: Dan, what other projects in which you are involved can you tell readers about?

Dan Watters: The second volume of Coffin Bound came out on December 2^nd from Image Comics. It’s a book I’m exceedingly proud of. DaNi and I always wanted Coffin Bound to feel like a series of standalone novels. Our first book was the story of a woman who found out an unstoppable assassin is put on her tail, and what she chose to do with the time left to her. Our second book is the story of a woman who sets a horde of unstoppable assassins on her own tail – and her faith that God will see her through, even if He won’t save her life. We’re approaching the idea of death from different angles, and the last two issues are my favorite we’ve ever done. DaNi, colorist Brad Simpson, and letter Aditya Bidikar really pushed things to the next level, and I think their love and care really shows in the work.

I also have issue #1 of The Picture of Everything Else with Kishore Mohan and Aditya, coming December 14^th through Vault. It’s our take on the story of Dorian Gray, a period horror set in Paris at the dawn of the 20^th Century, rendered in beautiful watercolors and acrylics by Kishore. We’re exploring the anxieties at the beginning of a new age, when culture seems to be hurtling past us at an unmanageable speed. We’re also exploring people being torn apart by paintings, so there’s also that.

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Dan Watters for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions. Home Sick Pilots #1 from Image Comics is in stores now!

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