It’s Sail who’s the main focus of the story: a new girl at a new high school, where apparently everyone’s already heard the rumor that she killed a girl in her hometown and her parents moved to this new setting to put the past behind them. Set in rural Pennsylvania, in this first issue we meet the Rooks family: father Charles (bestselling writer/artist of the young adult graphic novel series The Night Arcade) mother Lucy (who’s been confined to a wheelchair after a hinted-at incident) and teenage daughter Sailor. But even if you’ve never heard the song, take heed of its warning, because in Image Comics’ Wytches #1, by writer Scott Snyder ( Batman, Swamp Thing) and artist Jock ( The Losers, Wolverine), it’s not picnicking teddy bears you have to watch out for, but something far more dangerous…

I did an aunt used to sing it to me before bedtime when I was five or six years old. As it stands, Wytches is a strong, symbol-heavy starting point for a new take on what lurks just beyond the shadows.Sure, that’s a verse from the early twentieth-century song “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” which you may have heard in your childhood. The book underplays teenage Sailor Rooks’s attempts to fit in at a new high school, but then that’s already well-worn territory for stories like this. Flashbacks of the Rook’s tragic past are spring-colored and bright, but the modern-day horrors are rendered with autumnal reds and browns. Sometimes Jock and Hollingsworth’s art can make things difficult to discern, but this always feels on-genre and intentional. Art from Jock (The Losers, Detective Comics) strikes the right balance between family drama and creepy underground monster chases, and the colors by Matt Hollingsworth (Hawkeye) make the scary scenes even scarier. Writer Snyder (Batman, The Wake) deftly weaves myths and folktales of New England witchcraft together with modern rural monster fiction. Wytches follows the Rook family as they move to a small town in the wake of several family tragedies, only to find something much worse in the New Hampshire woods.

This monster-fighter origin story masquerades as a damsel-in-distress tale.

Wytches issue 1