Review by Frank Plowright

When Dee’s parents separated she moved some distance away with her father who became a policeman elsewhere, while her twin sister Beth remained with their mother. Now Beth has disappeared and Dee and her father have moved back to the house where she grew up, and she’s back at the school she left several years previously. At school there’s the awkwardness of meeting her sister’s boyfriend, and a teacher is concerned about a company wanting to run a pipeline through protected land. What at first seems a mystery and journey of discovery gradually takes a strange turn.

As seen on the sample art, there’s an inconsistency about the way Tara O’Connor presents Dee. It’s never stated how long Beth has been missing, but from the way the story’s told it seems a relatively recent occurrence, so one might imagine Dee wouldn’t be greatly up for discussing the merits of Terminator films. In fact are Terminator films from the 1980s and 1990s even on the radar of current teens? While Dee is seen to be upset, other moments of triviality don’t ring true.

O’Connor is stronger when portraying the fractious relationship between Dee’s parents, where arguments and insults can manifest from nothing. However, while allowing for his also being under stress, on occasion her father comes across as a borderline bully with his behaviour, and it begs the question of why Dee stayed with him. Far better is the manifestation of strangeness halfway through, and Dee’s relationship with it.

Strong art carries Fly by Night through all its turns. O’Connor supplies a variety of different people who’re easily distinguished and whose personalities are clear from the way they’re drawn. The passionate Eloise Ruby stands out, but the entire cast is well characterised visually, and several good moments are O’Connor wordlessly exploring Dee’s grief. The backgrounds and scenery are kept simple, ensuring the focus is on the cast.

Two different plot threads are introduced from the start, and O’Connor has them running parallel throughout, but they’re never convincingly pulled together. While the ecological plot is just part of the story to begin with, it descends into preaching in mirroring a real event, and the switches to the more spiritual plot of Beth’s disappearance become jarring. The eventual revelation about Beth works well, especially in connection with later events, but the eventual revelation about another character is forced and lacks previous foundation.

There’s plenty to entertain in Fly by Night, but also the feeling that it might have been better.