Spider Men, Spider Men

To my partner Danica: do not read this comic, or this post.

You Read These With Your Eyes! (April 19th, 2023)

A quick feature about selling stories, featuring the week’s newest reads.

This week, we’re talking about a book that hits you in the guts, and refuses to relent. The kind of book that reminds you why you love this medium.

I do not say this lightly.

I don’t fuck around with recommendations. You start fucking around with recommendations, you’ll find yourself hard pressed to get people to connect with anything you put in their hands. As a retailer, that is absolute death.

In my younger days, at the shop I worked at, the owner would gladly put his stamp of approval on anything he had too much stock of during any given week. He had stopped reading almost everything after I had come on board, so it was all just a tactic to move product her over ordered.

A bit into my tenure there, he began to get frustrated that people didn’t seem to take his recommendations seriously. It became a big, crystallizing moment for me as a baby shop worker, and has carried through to me as a shop owner.

Don’t ever put your stamp on a book you don’t know anything about. And don’t recommend things blindly, if you don’t know they will connect.

Let’s get to the guts, shall we?

MINI-SERIES | All Eight Eyes #1 (Dark Horse Comics)

by Steve Foxe, Piotr Kowalski, Brad Simpson, & Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

This book shouldn’t have to go as hard as it does.

I will fully admit, I am an absolute sucker for books that viscerally and incisively display the shortcomings in our society, but disguise them as creatures. Tynion is probably at the peak of this form. Their sometime-associate, Steve Foxe is coming in at a close second.

THE PITCH | All Eight Eyes is a horror story that lays bare some harsh realities. The story follows a queer protagonist who is clearly trying to land as a human being - but because their existence puts them in an “other” category, they find themselves struggling.

Between having a lack of familial support and a lack of general wealth and privilege, our protagonist finds themselves on the sidelines of life. There, they befriend an unhoused person who opens them up to a world filled with hidden monsters - giant spider creatures that have infested the world and pull at its threads.

The creatures function as blunt objects, giving us creeping, relentless horror as a stand in for the terror that our lack of compassion and safety nets for those who live on the margins receive.

The art by Piotr Kowalski is pitch perfect. Not quite my cup of tea when I first encountered them, I’ve grown to love their diligent line work and fantastic talent at “acting”. The characters within the pages live their emotions within their very bones, intent written all over every pose and facial expression.

This recommendation is a short one, because I don’t want to give much more away, but this is a book you absolutely have to seek out. By far my favourite of the week.

That does it for today’s post. I’d make a promise about what’s to come next, but things keep shifting wildly in the industry, so we’ll see.

Talk with you soon.

-B.