Ei8ht #1

Welcome to the Meld, an inhospitable dimension in time where Joshua, a chrononaut, finds himself trapped. With no memory or feedback from the team of scientists that sent him, he can’t count on anything but his heart and a stranger’s voice to guide him to his destiny.

Writer(s):

Rafael Albuquerque

Mike Johnson

Artist:

Rafael Albuquerque

Publisher:

Dark Horse

Hey you – stop reading now. No don't worry about me, the review will be here to read after you've finished reading Ei8ht #1, I promise. But for now, if you read this issue before you read anything else, you'll enjoy it more.

Look, you can even buy it here now. So just go and do it already!...

...Have you finished? Good. Do you get why I wanted you to read it before carrying on? If you're sneaky or were just unwilling to trust me when I said you needed to read the comic, well I suppose you've missed the most interesting part of Ei8ht, which is all about discovery. Ei8ht is a time travel story, with a great twist – our main character is aware he travelled through time, but beyond that his memories are vague and insubstantial.

The first half of this issue takes us along with Joshua as he tries to make sense of the scraps of memory his has. We get an actual sense of him beginning to piece together fragments of his memory, from flashes of the recent past that fade into swirls of colour.  You can really tell an artist wrote this, as the script and art work together almost seamlessly, with Albuquerque's hardbitten style working lending some grit to an otherwise quite rather odd tale.

The colour choices feel perfect too – everything feels off just slightly, which accentuated the strangeness of 'The Meld', a so far unexplained area which features everything from punk warriors to dinosaur riding knights. Rafael's gift as a visual storyteller is to be able to convey the essence of someone's personality in their stance alone. It means that even characters that would come across as fierce, can to have hidden depths that express their humanity, whilst the villains' of the piece are truly terrifying and seem to dominate a page. All of this you can pick up from one panel, which the rest of the panels reinforce. One panel. Fuck me, that's good.

As with all time travel stories there seems to be some sort of trickery at play as a couple off things happen which suggest we may not be experiencing the whole story.

Ei8ht left me confused, intrigued and just wanting to know where it all goes next. Isn't that why we most of us started reading comics in the first place?

Cover image courtesy of Dark Horse.

Ei8ht #1 is available from Dark Horse.

Geek-o-Rama received a copy of this book for the purpose of this review. All thoughts, comments and opinions are those of the individual reviewer.