3 out of 5

I’ll wait for you to clear the vomit from your bib for the ol’ ‘number in the name’ shtick, though to – ahem – Ei8ht’s credit, the symbol (and the different ways it could be interpreted) does actually seem to figure into the story, so we should maybe give it a pass as a rare example of it actually being clever.

Over at Image we have ‘Drifter,’ a ‘stranger in a strange land’ tale which has been building its mysteries astonishingly organically, creating mood and characterization as much through suggestion – between the lines, between the panels – as through the actual dialogue and art.  At ‘Dark Horse’ we’re getting Ei8ht, which is what I would consider a forced mystery: here’s a story; now forceably remove key points via the lead’s memory loss.  It also has the slight gimmicky feel of its color palette, which spares no time in giving you the rundown on the inside cover of issue one: past is green, present is purple, future is blue, meld is something else entirely.  Oh, also, all the characters are colored in a lighter blue, so either that will be some reveal down the road (they’re from a less-future future!) or – what I’m suspecting and dreading – it was just a choice of a satisfactory medium that would work okay with all of the other colors.  I shouldn’t judge it by that, but it seemed a little silly from the outset to call out the colors and then have a wishy-washy color hanging out in your foreground all the time.  Why not… gray?  Dunno.  Bloop bloop, Eight, ball’s in your court.

However, again, for the most part, Eight feels justified in its gimmick, as the announcement of it removes any need for the story to use it as a twist or to over-explain it.  Albuquerque / Johnson similarly wisely choose to keep the ‘meld’ setting a known unknown, meaning those that wind up there – which our lead does, crash-landed from his mission, the details of which, temporarily forgotten, will return to him at key plot point – those that wind up there understand that it’s some kind of middle-ground in time, and this is a valid springboard for world-building, as you now have those who were born in the meld, and a society that would develop out of such a time-plucked mish-mash.  Alas, one gimmick roadblock removed, the creators dress up their forced mystery ineffectively by adding fake tropes on top of it: an enforcer named ‘Spear,’ for example.  Why is he named Spear?  Because when we’re developing a world from the top down, we come up with cool names and concepts and justify them later.  It is in this same manner that many characters speak, dropping exposition and explanations to rather too obviously underline or highlight things.  The story hangs on to some good momentum for its first couple of issues, but with some key characters established, issue three moves forward with these trope-isms and starts to whip out its “what is the meld?” twists in a manner that – kicking this horse – only highlights the forced mystery.  Amnesia tales or withheld information are all fair game, but it’s a balance such that the audience wants to play along and Eight doesn’t seem to have the strong backbone to support that.

Art-wise, Albuquerque has a nice and readable Sean Murphy-esque sketch style that gives a nice energy to static and action sequences, and the mono-colored backgrounds actually work in this style’s favor of it not being too eyebrow-raising that the backgrounds are generally just a single set-piece.  Thus the sketchiness doesn’t get lost in a panel of sketchiness, and the bold colors take up the slack of background details.  Nate Piekos’ lettering also feels very raw here, in a good way.  Nate’s work normally blends in acceptably, to me, nothing fancy, but Johnson’s script gives him enough room to work without over-crowding and the character voices come through loud and clear.

Eight sidesteps a lot of easy criticisms regarding it’s general structure, but with those set aside, it still reads like an average comic overall.