She Could Fly is back with it’s second arc, The Lost Pilot. It was the best comic series I covered last year, and I’m pumped to get back into it.
The series picks up two semesters of in-patient care from where it left off, showing Luna’s meeting with three different mental health professionals. She describes a recurring dream she has where she’s walking on a stone bridge over lava. It narrows as she progresses. No matter how hard she tries, she eventually falls in but, “it doesn’t [burn] her. [She] turn[s] into glass. Like — perfect beautiful glass” instead. It’s the kind of creepy imagery that series artist Martín Morazzo excelled at in the first arc. It’s on full display throughout the issues. As always, Luna’s anxieties are the center of the story and that artwork really brings them out.
That type of imagery is also front in center in the series namesakes, James Tates poem “The Lost Pilot.” It would be difficult to find a more perfect pairing than this series and the poem that writer Christopher Cantwell chose to name it after.
What’s even better is that Cantwell acknowledges that the kind of shootout that ended the first arc takes a real toll on the survivors. Luna’s having nightmares about it and so are her parents, who’re also in therapy. Few stories do the kind of heavy lifting with trauma that Cantwell and Morazzo are doing in She Could Fly and those portrayals matter.
Where the first arc eased the readers in, introducing another set of characters in each of the first three issues, The Lost Pilot throws its audience in the deep end. Every character who survived the first series gets at least a page in the book, but the cast is huge. At times, The Lost Pilot #1 can be hard to follow because the there are so many side characters — Bill, Verna, Dana, Kido, Mayura, and Luna’s parents — and some scenes break in the middle of a page. It doesn’t help that the last issue dropped in October, five months ago.
Despite the overstuffed cast, the series is rolling. Luna Brewster is a fully-realized character, and one that I want to keep reading.
Dark Horse will release She Could Fly #4 on Wednesday, April 10th, 2019.
Wicked Rating – 7/10
See Our Previous Coverage Here: Issue 1 / Issue 2 / Issue 3 / Issue 4
