All Eight Eyes #4 // Review
Vin is thinking way too small. He’s looking for giant spiders in all the wrong places. He DID manage to slam one that wasn’t too much smaller than the aluminum bat he hit it with, but he’s looking for HUGE arachnids in Manhattan. The old man suggests that the only places something like that could live in New York aren’t readily accessible to kids and vagrants. The two hunters are going to have to get creative in the big finale of All Eight Eyes #4. Writer Steve Foxe continues a fun and occasionally funny metropolitan horror with artist Piotr Kowalski and colorist Brad Simpson.
It’s close to 1:00 am on Wednesday morning outside the closed subway station. The security guard tells them that he’s got a pair of keys. “You get caught, I’m telling the cops you mugged me.” Fair enough. They’re not exactly breaking into the place, but they’re not exactly supposed to be there, either. And if they find what they’re looking for, they’re in a whole lot more danger than trespassing. It’s one thing to find a monster. It’s another thing entirely to actually slay it. Vin may be in over his head, but he’s not going to rest until he finds this thing.
Foxe launches Vin and company in a direction that feels like remarkably intrepid heroism. Heroes can be loners and addicts. They can harbor all kinds of inner darkness. It’s not often that a couple of heroes take the form of some obsessed kid and a homeless guy in New York. Foxe takes the traditional feel of heroic action horror and twists it a bit into something that might linger a bit beyond its time on the comics page. Not everything is completely mutated, though. The overall plot structure of traditional horror is solid enough to be familiar in Foxe’s script. Everything is there in the end, from the gory death to the twisted fate of the vile human villain who is completely unaware of the monster’s existence until it’s too late.
Kowalski’s art is gritty and scratchy. All the detail makes for a believably grimy Manhattan as the heroes dive into a dingy subway to confront the monster. To his credit, Kowalski takes the concept of a giant spider in a New York City subway quite seriously. It’s the type of thing that would have been a cheesy 1950s monster movie, but Kowalski gives it real menace, aided as he is by the capable coloring of Simpson.
The story comes to a close without completely shutting the book on giant insects in New York. Theoretically, Vin and company could return for another brush with chitinous horror in a future series. It might be somewhat satisfying to see the hero dealing with a more complicated threat now that he’s had one major victory behind him. It might be difficult to find something that would deviate enough from the first series to warrant a sequel, but there’s great potential for great horror in the insect world.
