Ei8ht #1 Review: Lacking

Characters with amnesia are as old as story telling itself. We as an audience have grown so familiar with its tropes that it has become easy to figure out what is going happen before it happens in the story. “Ei8ht” by Rafael Albuquerque and Mike Johnson with Albuquerque doing the art is one of those stories and it is as dull as is to be expected.

Joshua finds himself in a strange land and suffering from amnesia. All he’s able to remember is his name and some details about his mission briefing. He soon finds out this strange lands has a ton of dangers he never expected.

This premise is about as cliché as they come. There are a ton of stories like this, especially in anime. Of course, as with any story, strong plotting and characterization usually save the story. Here we have yet to see it. After the first issue the story can be summed up as “meh.”

Everything about the story is underwhelming. The characters aren’t that interesting, the writing doesn’t stand out and the plot is not that exciting or engaging. The comic has yet to give the reader a reason to care about it.

The art is also nothing special. The only colors this comic has are blue, black, white and red with a hint of yellow. This obviously an aesthetic style to give the comic character, but it’s so unremarkable that the comic would’ve been better in black and white. The character designs also fall flat. Their designs look like any other stranger in a strange land story.

“Ei8ht” is an underwhelming comic with mediocre everything. The story has very little redeeming qualities, the art is lacking and it all feels empty. The next issue has a lot of work to do in order to gain the interest of readers.