Writer: Steve Foxe / Penciller: Piotr Kowalski / Colour Artist: Brad Simpson / Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou / Editors: Daniel Chabon, Chuck Howitt-Lease, Misha Gehr / Collects: All Eight Eyes #1-#4 / Dark Horse Comics / TP
Buy the original issues of this series.
Review by Paul Dunne
5th January 2024 (Released: 29th November 2023)
The Pitch: 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. Collects issues #1-4 and features pinups by James Stokoe, Martin Simmonds, David Romero, and Trevor Henderson, along with a bonus sketchbook section.
I should preface this by saying I hate Spiders. How did a creature like this even evolve? I loathe their hairy bodies and their alien appearance, I hate all eight legs and all eight eyes. I confess they made me a murderer. Yes, I've killed a few...
That's what the little gits get for being smaller than me.
But what if... what if...
They were BIGGER!? What then?
Foxe and Kowalkski have created, hands down, one of the best concepts I've seen in a while. Partly because it's so simple, and partly because it's so rooted in pulpy horror comics and nuclear menace monster movies of the fifties, although I dare say Foxe has watched the seventies William Shatner classic Kingdom of the Spiders on late-night TV at least once! The book goes to the heart of very primal reaction we have arachnids and insects... Something we know and have always known deep down inside: One day they will overrun us.
Monster movie trappings aside, Foxe and Kowalski do have something to say. Ultimately, setting this in post 9/11 New York speaks to the life-changing events that came seemingly out of the blue for so many, and distills it down to a single person on a smaller scale. 9/11 shook our worldview and the discovery that giant spiders are running around NYC does the same for Vin. He starts the book as a drugged-out party boy and is soon woken from his slumber when he meets 'Reynolds', a homeless man taking a baseball bat to a spider the size of a Bully XL dog. Shaken from his long-time drug and booze-fuelled stupor and also now homeless thanks to his inability to pay rent because of his addictions, Vin finds himself with nowhere to turn but Reynolds and his mission. So in addition to a fun, scary narrative about giant spiders, you'll also get a lesson in how we ignore the homeless at our peril. It might be an easy point to reach for, but how we treat the little guy is important, and not just in stories. Empowerment fantasies have always been part of comics, best personified in another comic you may have read about a spider that bites a teenager, but this is about how the ruling class stamps on an entire nation of people who were already low on hope. There's the feeling of someone shaking you, saying 'Don't step on these people!', but in the same way we don't think about the spiders we kill, how much thought do we give to lives being destroyed out there on our streets?
And imagine that writ large the way it is in the US, where the actual death toll of the homeless is a lot higher than it is here in the UK. There's a wake-up call sounding somewhere in this book. Add to this the gentrification that is commonplace in society and one of the key factors in the rates of homelessness increasing, personified here by a greedy official offering land to developers on the down low to further his future political aspirations, and you have a comic that becomes about something. Looking beyond those elements you also see that setting this in post-9/11 New York allows Foxe to address the grief that became part of the air there. We've felt things like this here in London, too, but never on such a large scale. There's a muting of joy that falls over cities post-terrorism mixed with a lingering fear that it could all happen again. The book taps into that.
I know, I know. At least point you must be shouting 'But Paul, isn't this book just about Giant Spiders?! I want my comics to be fun!' and you're right, this is a book about giant spiders. So does it deliver on that? Is it fun? Hell, yes! The Spider sequences are genuinely nasty. Although there's always the air of improbability in giant bug stories, thanks to what we know about exoskeletons and the muscles needed to lift them. But as you read the book, you are in it, in the thick of it, repulsed by the smell, fighting the nausea, the fear of those skittering legs, trying to will the blood in your body to pump to your arms and lift that baseball bat, pummel that thorax and smash that eight-eyed bastard! All Eight Eyes is one of the few books in recent memory to create a purely visceral reaction. You feel it as much as read it. You get excited and nervous for Vin and Reynolds. Vin in particular is an interesting character. He's a soft boy who has to transform, not into a tough guy, because that would be simplistic and insulting, but into someone who has to have compassion for people who might otherwise be invisible. It's a great journey, especially when you take into account just how much Foxe and Koslowski are jamming into these four issues.
Foxe's writing is excellent. I've never read his superhero work, but I'm willing to bet he brings intellect and heart to it, the way he does here. He's written a layered piece of work that speaks to important subjects whilst maintaining the dress code of kick-ass monster comics. You feel for the characters and the multitudes they contain. Whatever book has Foxe's name on it next, I'm picking up, no questions asked! Koslowski's art is terrific. There's an appropriately spindly feel to his art that makes it alive and the movement in the panels pop with energy, without falling back on manga influences that you see in so many books now. He seems to have reached back in time and found the spirit of some of those older EC artists, who toiled away on Eerie and books like it to inhabit his body, so he can bring the textured pulp back to life. Brad Simpson's colours are a gift here. He creates the glow of street lamps and the things hiding in the dark just beyond their glare and gives the goopy, green spooge that leaks from beaten spider's bodies their due, making it as gross and creepy as it should be. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou's letters do wonders in getting across Vin's and Reynold's disparate voices, really helping to sell them as real people with real lives that neither of them is ready for. Go get this book. Buy one for you and one for a friend because I want a volume two. There's a myth that we swallow eight spiders a year while sleeping. How many people can spiders eat?
You can buy the original issues for this series here. All Eight Eyes is available in trade paperback from your local comic shop now.
