During lazy summer days as a young kid, I used to collect bugs in large glass mason jars and, after incorporating some grass, small sticks and pebbles to make them feel more at home, watch as they’d try to navigate their confines and each other.
Within hours, it seemed that their searching for freedom’s expanse ended in bitter warfare with each other and dead insects would soon line the bottoms of the jar.
Earwigs, ants, crickets, lady bugs, potato bugs. They’d always end up legs-up.
Often, it was the more mercurial spider that remained alive. Perched atop a diagonal stick wedged between the sides of the glass enclosure, contentedly wrapping its silken web around a prone millipede and voraciously chomping down on its prey with powerful mandibles.
Sure, looking back, it feels like the activity was something entirely cruel and unnecessary. But really, not so unusual, I think. Collecting bugs was something that all kids did – and still do. It’s a bit of a rite of passage, isn’t it? Still, it makes me wonder if the experience might have also been the genesis for my fascination of spiders, my love of the 1990 comedy/horror film Arachnophobia, and my slight but healthy, fear of the eight-legged bugs.
Sometimes, when a more supernatural mood strikes me, I wonder if the spiders know what I used to do to their ancestors, all those years ago. And what if those thumbnail sized arachnids were bigger? Much bigger.
That latter question is the premise for a new four-issue horror comic book series, out today!
All Eight Eyes #1 is written by the Eisner Award-nominated Steve Foxe (Razorblades: The Horror Magazine), frighteningly illustrated by Piotr Kowalski (Bloodborne) and published by Dark Horse Comics. Billed as a cross between both Jaws and Arachnophobia, which is a brilliantly horrific cross by any stretch of the imagination, All Eight Eyes brings the scale scenario to all-to-vivid life.
In All Eight Eyes, Vin Spencer is a college dropout and a big city floater, living the life of drugs and parties and making ends meet any which way he can. But a chance encounter late one night, and a scene of absolute terror, opens his world to a truly horrific war against eight-legged beasts that stalk the city.
Here in our oversized, city-scape mason jars, there are monsters that prey upon us. And someone’s got to fight them back.
Put your more unnatural pastimes away, make the run to your local comic book shop today and pick up the brilliant fun horror that is All Eight Eyes #1!
You can catch a sneak peek at the first issue of All Eight Eyes when we first highlighted the comic book series here or again right here, care of publisher Dark Horse Comics.
