Egg Story

By J. Marc Schmidt
Published by SLG (my printing is 2010, but the original is indeterminately older)

Well fuck my cock, Egg Story is the sweetest most adorable thing ever. In sixty-one itsy-bitsy pages, Schmidt encapsulates all the tumult, tragedy, impulsivity, exuberance, and raw emotion of adolescence (human and egg).  I guess that doesn’t sound entirely sweet and adorable.  So okay fine, Egg Story has its moments of bitter heartbreak.  And loss and death and suicide and madness and murder and disappointment.  But in a sweet and adorable way.  And there’s a ninja egg!

So first comes the chicken who lays a few eggs – sister Five-spots, brother Wonky, and brother Feather.  Then one of them fucking dies.  Remaining two get packaged with Bumply, Cloud, Shelly, and Connor, and the half-dozen get bought by a woman and stuck in her fridge.  Then one of them fucking dies.  Remaining five get up to some righteous pre-teen hijinks.  Then two more eggs fucking die!  Lots more shit happens. You should check it out yourself.

Schmidt’s perfectly complementary spidery lines are as delicate and brittle as the shells they depict & create a thick sense of tension -- fucking be careful, you could break at any time!!  And Schmidt evokes a whole lotta emotion with those skinny little strokes.  It’s pretty amazing how immediately his endearing eggs can be.  I mean, I eat eggs.  But I wouldn’t eat these ones.

Also I totally appreciate how Schmidt veers away from schmaltz.  His script is cute but cutting.  There aren’t many human characters, but they’re all adult, and they’re almost all kinda awful.  The farmer’s cruel mostly because we feel bad for the egglings, but the woman and her dude, they’re just nasty.  Our eggs at least are searching for some sort of meaning in their fragile existences.   Not the he and she -- all they fucking do is insult each other, callous fucks!  I dunno what that means.  Adults are bad?  That’s not it.  But kids are good.

And so is this!

P.S. It took ridiculous restraint for me to eggsclude constant Egghead puns in this post.