Steve Foxe and Piotr Kowalski have teamed up for the must-read creature feature comic book series, All Eight Eyes! With colors from Brad Simpson and letters from Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, All Eight Eyes "takes readers back to the forgotten corners of post-9/11 New York City, where 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’s most vulnerable residents."
With the first (of four) issues hitting comic book shops on April 19th from Dark Horse Comics, I caught up with Steve Foxe, who told me all about the origins of this new series, Vin Spencer, and some of his favorite creature features:
Are you someone who is uneasy or terrified around spiders? What inspired you to write this story?
STEVE FOXE: Thankfully, I have zero personal fear of spiders. I have an irrational fear of centipedes (even typing the word makes my skin crawl) and living in NYC for over a decade made me pretty tired of cockroaches, but spiders are a-okay in my book—I even have one tattooed on me.
What inspired this book, besides the fact that lots of other people are very afraid of our eight-legged friends, was walking aimlessly around New York City and seeing how many buildings and storefronts seemed to stay almost…suspiciously empty. I lived in the same area of Queens for about six years, and there were homes I never once saw someone enter or leave. It got me thinking about what could be hiding in the overlooked corners of New York and other large cities, and what those hidden things could want with humans…
At the start of the story, Vin Spencer is in a pretty rough spot. What can you tell our readers about Vin and his journey?
SF: Vin is influenced by an archetype I saw a lot when I first moved to the city: the young person from the Midwest who arrives with big dreams and soon meets harsh reality. He came to New York to go to film school and be a trendy young person but realized fast that keeping up with the drug-fueled party scene can derail those plans. He’s been the wild child for the first time in his life, but it’s left him in a state of flux, where he’s dropped out of school and can’t imagine going back to the shitty life he escaped, but also has no clear path forward, either. So when he stumbles across something horrible by chance, he’s got to decide if he can turn back from it or if he’s got nothing to lose by leaning in.
You've teamed up with Piotr Kowalski, who does an excellent job of creating these creatures and conveying the grit of this city and story. Can you talk about your process working with him on bringing this comic book series to life?
SF: Way back when I first thought up the earliest version of ALL EIGHT EYES, Piotr was top of my wishlist for collaborators because he’s got such an eye for detail and realism. He also never skimps on backgrounds, which is a trait you find a lot more often in European comics than in American comics, where backgrounds are often just suggestions to keep the story moving panel to panel. There’s a time and place for that, and knowing how to strike that balance is key to staying sane as a sequential artist, but the setting itself was always a big part of AEE.
My gripe with a lot of horror stories, particularly in comics, is that they tend to tip over into supernatural or sci-fi action and lose that one foot in the real world that makes something scary or disturbing. There’s plenty of room on the shelves for comics about people leaping through the air fighting giant monsters, but the goal of AEE was always to stay grounded and stay frightening.
Piotr’s ability to render lived-in cities was essential to making Vin and Reynolds’ early-2000s NYC feel real. And the more real the setting and characters feel, the more real their fear and danger will feel once they start getting torn limb from limb by giant, anatomically correct arachnids. And the rest of the team only adds to that: Brad Simpson’s colors and Hass Otsmane-Elhaou’s letters marry with Piotr’s art to create a really gorgeous, grimy vision.
All Eight Eyes reads like a homage to the best creature features while doing its own thing. What are some of your favorite creature features?
SF: The elephant (or shark) in the room will always be Jaws, right? Few creature-features hold up like Jaws. But I have a ton of affection for the 1950s nuclear-paranoia trend with Them! and The Giant Gila Monster and the like, which were some of my earliest experiences with frightening films of any sort. I would say All Eight Eyes draws most directly on the ‘80s boom, though, with movies like Alligator and The Nest. We’re doing our best to update that sensibility, but the animal-terror movies of the ‘80s often get written off as just copying Jaws even though a lot of them have their own brands of terror and gruesomeness and social commentary to explore.
How many issues are planned for All Eight Eyes? Can you give our readers a little tease of what's to come?
SF: All Eight Eyes is a complete story in four issues, including “journal entries” in the back of each from our more weathered spider hunter, Reynolds. It’s certainly a world we could return to—maybe I could even confront my centipede fear if we get to do more—but Piotr, Brad, Hass, and I are delivering a full tale of terror across these four issues, with just about every angle on creeping, crawling horror we could devise.
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"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 drifters 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)!"
To learn more, visit Dark Horse Comics: https://www.darkhorse.com/Comics/3010-694/All-Eight-Eyes-1
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