Steve Foxe and Piotr Kowalski launch new four-issue series, All Eight Eyes today, featuring animal horror and a hidden world right under our noses. If you’re fearful of spiders, you may want to skip this one as the multi-legged creepy crawlies get big and dangerous here.
All Eight Eyes #1 opens with a down-on-his-luck average guy who got kicked out of his apartment. He finds himself wandering a park at night and overhears something. It’s a dude fighting a dog-sized spider. Yikes. Soon he’s running for his life, from the spider and maybe from the man beating it with a hammer, and suddenly finds himself in an underground dwelling. But wait, he’s in New York City?
So begins Foxe and Kowalski’s exploration of a threat right under our noses. As first issues go, we get a good sense of the spider hunter character and the main protagonist, but an even better sense of the threat of spiders throughout history. In a great two-page montage, we see spiders have been attacking humans for centuries, but it has been hidden from us.
Art by Kowalski has an illustrative style with lots of detail and pen marks. Colors by Brad Simpson do well to capture the time and place of each scene. There’s a high level of detail in backgrounds and clothing that adds a layer of realism to it all. Surprisingly, the spiders aren’t stylized or monstrous so much as just big. They look accurate and well-drawn.
The opening panel.
Credit: Dark Horse
Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou are great, as always. I particularly like how he tucks word balloons connecting tales behind a hand or cell phone, for example. It creates a different relationship between dialogue and visuals. The opening page is a good example of how Hassan mixes things up for a given panel or page, like a word balloon tail that zigzags before slamming into a door. In another example, the weariness of our protagonist is on display in another scene thanks to the shape of the word ballon tails.
Aside from the spiders being quite large and dangerous on some scale, I still didn’t feel like they were dangerous enough in this story. The scope of the threat isn’t quite clear enough, and instead, this issue spends most of its time getting its everyman protagonist on board to join a spider hunter. I’m curious to see where this goes, but I’m not quite hooked yet.
Tucked away in the back of the issue are interesting notebook pages from a diary. The person writing it is trying to figure out what they can about spiders, and there are some interesting facts thrown in. It’s clear Foxe did his homework on spiders for this story, and these extras help add realism to farfetched ideas. He calls out why spiders aren’t huge, for instance, but the fact that they exist in this story despite this information makes them all the scarier.
All Eight Eyes #1 is a good start to a miniseries that takes spiders and elevates them to the main villain of a horror adventure story. It feels unique and new while offering an adventure right underneath our noses.
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