365 Reasons to Love Comics #256

Alright, so the site’s spam filter has been eating all the comments I’ve tried to make, but it shan’t stop me from posting Reasons! Or linking to the archive. Take that.

Today’s Reason to Love Comics is a fantastic and moving graphic novel that you’ve probably never read and may not even have heard of. Trust me, though– you need to get this one.

9/13/07

256. Egg Story

This week’s secret motif is “eggs,” apparently. I’ll try not to fall into punnery.

J. Marc Schmidt’s Egg Story is a tiny little graphic novel– literally, it’s about 64 pages, and the size of a DVD case. It’ll set you back four dollars. They’ll be four of the best dollars you’ve ever spent. I’ve written about Egg Story before, at the previous version of the blog. I’m sure no one actually read that review, and it’s far enough in the past that you would have forgotten about it by now anyway.

My sound byte for that review was “Egg Story is so relentlessly charming and wonderful that even my 84-year old grandmother liked it!” Well, she’s 86 now, and I bet she still likes it. It’s one of those comics that anyone can enjoy.

The plot concerns a cast of eggs, with names like Feather, Five-Spots, Cloud, and Connor, who are whisked away from their hen mother and sold in a supermarket. They break free from the fridge and start living life. It’s a coming of age story (or “coming of egg”), of sorts. The little guys enjoy the highs of life, and suffer through the lows. It’s a tale rife with love, death, fear, joy, sadness, humor, loss, credit card theft, job hunting, and more. It’s life in a nutshell– or, more appropriately, an eggshell.

It’s also a story of transformation, intentional and unintentional, physical and mental. One of the eggs undergoes a destructive mental illness, two of them fall in love, and our lead egg, Feather, in one of the greatest “epiphany moments” in all of comics literature, decides to become a ninja.

The book is darn funny at times, and tear-inducing at others. Heart-achingly beautiful, it’s truly a little hidden comics gem. Schmidt’s cartooning is simple but effective, and his eggs are filled with emotion (and protein) through the use of but a few lines. The art brings across the wit, heart, and soul of the story. It’s great work.

Also? Ninja action!

These are the most human characters you may ever see in comics– and they’re eggs. You’ll never want to eat an egg again after reading this. In the old review, I called it “a charming slice-of-life tale about eggs trying to find their place in the world… It shows the cruelties of the world, but also the wonders.” Plus– I can’t stress this enough– ninjas. I am astonished that no major movie studio has picked this up for a CGI family movie. It’d make a perfect adaptation.

The official Egg Story site is here. I’ve also discovered, thanks to J. Marc Schmidt’s website, that he’s got a new graphic novel due out next month. Entitled Eating Steve, it seems to be a zombie romance of some sort. I can’t wait.