Review: EI8HT #1

Oh sure, anybody can travel back in time but Joshua is also equipped with a device that enables him to communicate back to the future. Pretty cool, except he can’t remember anything when his ship crash lands. It’s a spooky desert terrain that’s not ringing any bells for our hero.

And, truth be told, Joshua isn’t much of a hero. So begins an intriguing new comic. “EI8HT,” story by Rafael Albuquerque and Mike Johnson, is one of those quirky lean and mean adventures that’s a lot of fun to sit back and take in.

Artist Rafael Albuquerque (American Vampire) has that slicin’ and dicin’ style of his. His faces are like masterful pumpkin creations with a strategic slit here for a mouth and two sharp marks there for eyes. The same with backgrounds and assorted backdrop, all direct and razor-sharp. I like the way he draws dinosaurs too.

There are definitely plenty of dinosaurs where Joshua has crash landed. Writer Mike Johnson (Supergirl) gives us a tight script with a neatly stretched out premise: This is what happens when a sadsack is enlisted into a clandestine time travel experiment and is lost in some other dimension not too far from The Twilight Zone. In this case, this no man’s land is known as The Meld and it’s supposed to be a place where past, present, and future converge.

Do you want to know why this comic is entitled, “EI8HT”? Well, you can read the preview pages at Dark Horse Comics. I’m guessing there’s more meaning behind that. It does make for an awesome looking logo. I’m guessing we’ll deal with infinity later on. For now, it has to do with memory and it looks like this story is going to have a lot of fun with that theme.

Like the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, a lot of the enjoyment comes from just taking in the scene. I think that’s exactly what we’ve got here and we’re in good hands.

EI8HT #1 is available as of February 11, 2015. For more details, visit our friends at Dark Horse Comics right here.