I’ve been really getting into monster movies and comics lately. Universal horror movies, kaiju movies, cheesy B movies from the 1950’s, it’s all fascinating. Maybe it’s because we like to image what it’s like on a lower rung in the food chain, or maybe it’s because on some deep and primal level we like to think the human race needs to be taken down a peg and we deserve to be killed and eaten like cattle, but you can’t deny that monster films have staying power.
Now that this particularly depressing revelation is out of the way, let’s take a look at a new creature feature comic: “All Eight Eyes”.
Written by Steve FoxeCover by: Piotr Kowalski and Brad Simpson
Illustrated by Piotr Kowalski
Colored by Brad Simpson
Lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
In the forgotten corners of post-9/11 New York City, skittering shapes in the darkness prey on the people society leaves behind. College dropout Vin Spencer floats through life in a drug-and-party-fueled haze, until one terrible night sweeps him into a drifter’s reckless war against the giant eight-legged horrors stalking the city.
Jaws meets Arachnophobia in a new vision of creature-feature terror from Eisner-nominated writer Steve Foxe (Razorblades: The Horror Magazine) and dread-inspiring artist Piotr Kowalski (Bloodborne)!
Vic is not having a good time. He just got kicked out of his crummy New York apartment because he wasn’t able to pay rent, his roommate won’t help him out, and going home isn’t an option because he doesn’t want to move back to Ohio and talk to his jerk of a stepfather. To make matters worse, he stumbled across a man named Reynolds beating something to death in Central Park with a hammer. The good news is that Reynolds isn’t a serial killer and has no reason to kill Vic.
The bad news is that the thing that Reynolds was actually killing was a giant spider the size of a large dog. It turns out there’s a hidden world just out of reach for regular humans and that world is home to a massive war between hoards of people eating spiders and the humans that hunt them.
“All Eight Eyes” #1 is written by Stephen Foxe, who has taken a solid yet simple horror premise and turned it into a fantastic piece of character art and accomplishes something that is incredibly difficult in American horror stories: making cities look and feel isolated and creepy. Vic and Reynolds are fantastically written characters with Vic being an all too relatable young adult with family issues and Reynolds playing the grizzled old veteran who is a bit too tired for his current line of work and a bit too jaded and jumpy to be around regular people. It’s an incredibly well set up riff on the classic “old gun takes new blood under their wing” dynamic that allows Foxe to do some fantastic world building that never feels forced and draws the reader into a hidden world just beneath our own that is filled with dark and hungry creatures that crave human flesh and will make you feel genuinely uneasy when you’re walking down an empty city street at night. There’s even a Boston terrier dog named Possum who is adorable and has a ton of personality, even though he never says a thing.
While the character work is virtually flawless in “All Eight Eyes” #1 and the world building is great, it does have a glaring problem. The big one is that while Reynolds is quick to point out that these giant spiders have existed for ages and continue to exist because humanity just doesn’t want to see them, it’s an explanation that just doesn’t feel that believable. Granted, there’s some pretty solid commentary about the spiders only eating people who have fallen through the cracks of society and won’t be missed, but it’s still a problem that feels like something that humanity would have liked to take care of pretty early on in our history. Maybe it’s something that will be addressed in future issues, but for now it’s the only real problem in an otherwise great book.
Continued belowThe artwork for “All Eight Eyes” #1 is provided by Piotr Kowalski, and there’s no other way to put it, it is a gorgeous looking book. Kowalski has a realistic, hyper detailed style that uses a combination of thin character lines and heavy shadows to make the environments feel rugged and lived in. This has the additional effect of making the characters feel tactile, dirty, and gritty. It all comes together in an art style that really showcases how dark, isolating, and gritty a city like New York can really be, which lends itself towards a feeling of unease and suspense for the reader with a minimum of dialogue.
And then there are the spiders.
Now, spiders are terrifying enough on their own. The nature of their very biology with their jaws and multiple sets of eyes makes them something that is easy to be afraid of, despite the fact that they eat mosquitos and are therefore better for humanity over all, but that’s just my personal bias speaking. However, Kowalski does a fantastic job of rendering each giant spider in fantastic, creepy detail. The best part is that the art doesn’t just take the lazy route and relegate the monsters to one species of spider, there are multiple types of spiders on display and while an actual arachnologist would be better suited to point out the differences between each species, it’s still an incredibly effective way to ramp up the horror and creepiness of the book.
“All Eight Eyes” #1 is a fun, interesting, and genuinely creepy creature feature that knows how to create a genuinely unsettling threat and blend character and world building in a way that feels flawless and unforced, and while it does have some things it will have to explain in future issues, it’s a heck of a great start.
Final Verdict: 8.2- While there are few niggles over some worldbuilding minutiae, it’s still a gorgeous and legitimately scary creature story with gorgeous artwork and great characters.
