Sunday Comics: Egg Story

Egg Story, by J. Marc Schmidt

Format: Single comics-form short story (longer than most things I stick with that term, but too short for me to call it a graphic novella)

Content Rating: G. Man, how often does that happen around here?

Plot: Egg Story is a story about eggs. The end.
Just kidding. Sort of. That's far from the end of it. One one level, it explores the life of eggs through the eyes of anthropomorphized eggs--most prominently a brother-and-sister pair named Feather and Five-Spots--starting right from their birth out of a hen, into a carton, at a supermarket and into someone's fridge. From there, things take a more fantastical turn as they decide to escape the fridge with the fellow eggs they've been packaged with (Shelly, Bumply, Connor, and Cloud). The life of an egg is one filled with shock and horror; they could be eaten or easily end up smashed on the floor if they're not careful. Most of the now-freed eggs are content to explore the house, learning things about both the human world and themselves, but Feather, unable to completely cope with the egg-related violence he's seen since he was laid, has higher aspirations.
He wants to become a ninja.

Thoughts: On the surface, Egg Story looks a lot simpler than it is. That's not to say it's a particularly deep story, merely that it has more depth than what the immediate premise and art style would suggest. It's my old friend minimalism again--Schmidt, especially artwise, does a lot with a little. Though they're all plain white eggs with similar, simple, cartoony facial features, he does an excellent job at distinguishing each egg from each other through minor but effective differences. Some, like Five-Spots and Connor, have more obvious ones, with the former having her namesake right there on her shell and the latter developing a distinguishing crack early on in the story, but even apart from these each egg makes a different set of facial expressions and has a different overall personality, ensuring telling them apart remains easy and making them feel like legit characters. I bought it, funnily enough, on accident (I had confused it with a collaborative comic I was looking for called Strange Eggs), but I don't regret my purchase. It's a cute, intriguing little tale with a lot of thought behind it, and I applaud seeing its kind of creativity and sense of whimsy in my comics.

[Holden Out.]