The Eye Collector #1 // Review
It was May 18th, 1969. (A Sunday.) Charlie Brown and Snoopy headed off for the moon. Snoopy went really, really close to the moon’s surface while Charlie Brown stayed a safe distance away. The first color TV broadcasts from the moon. It was the Apollo 10: a perfectly uneventful trip that set-up for the July 20th Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong taking one small step and all of that. But what if it wasn’t uneventful? What if something inexplicable happened? This is precisely what writer Jonathan Ball and artist Lyndon Radschenka explore in The Eye Collector #1. A promising 12-issue sci-fi horror series opens its eyes.
Something goes wrong. They’re spinning. There’s something there that’s asking the astronaut if they still have gods. It’s got big eyes and teeth. (Lots of teeth. They look like they’re all canines.) It’s a big (evidently carnivorous) intelligence that left Earth long ago. And now that it’s been visited by people, it’s evidently thinking that it might want to head back to Earth to say hello. A long time ago, it’s list for humans checked off as null...but now the harvester of eyes is setting its sights on a return to Earth.
Could the Apollo 10 mission awakened a big beholder beast-like alien intelligence that had encountered humans at some point in the distant past? Ancient alien theorists say...well it doesn’t really matter what they say. Because it’s a strange, little story that is going to get weirder the further it goes into its 12-issue run. Ball does a pretty good job of capturing the imagination with a narrative that mixes science with pulpy sci-fi horror that are held together with a thin and wispy cartilage of poetry.
The visuals seem like a weird collage of different elements from technical drawings to grainy photographs to...to whatever the hell the bug-eyed alien monster is. It all collides into the page at the same time in a way that feels like a particularly silly variation on what Kubrick was doing towards the end of 2001. It’s fun trippy stuff that leans a bit heavily on the greens and black and whites, delivering kind of a sickly dreamlike fugue to the page.
It’s not a bad experience on the whole. The letters to the reader at the end of the issue suggest that the whole thing is. going to be quite experimental. Artistic experiments don’t always yield promising results, but it’s nice to see a team of three people diving into something like this that’s already been finished by the time the first issue has even been released. Given the fact that the first issue is hitting the page the way it is it’s difficult to tell quite exactly where it is that it’s all going to be going. If this thing gets to Earth in 1969, it could run into a lot of weird directions. But the first issue? The first issue’s weird fun.
