Egg Sisters Again
This time, a webcomic
When I drew the initial panels for this story over a decade ago, I had a specific vision in mind. I was mired in deadlines and I wanted a project that felt free to me; something that would allow me to tell a story in a stream-of-consciousness way without any editorial oversight. I started painting Egg Sisters as a webcomic and planned to post it on Tumblr. (I had so many tumblrs.) I began with the idea of two sisters pining for a cat and I devised two rules for myself:
NO REFERENCE IMAGES: use your imagination
NO OUTLINES: make it up as you go along
Suffice it to say, I lost the thread. I painted four strips in a rare moment of extended downtime between jobs and vowed to return to Egg Sisters whenever I had time. But I never did return to it. Not to this version of it anyway.
I couldn’t seem to make time for it and that fact slowly eroded the initial concept for this story as a vehicle for super free creative exploration. I decided I probably needed a book deal and a deadline to prioritize it, which would require a story outline and effectively turn the project into a graphic novel. I balked at the idea of a graphic novel - too laborious - and I pitched it to my editor as a chapter book. I wondered if the super short but somewhat sophisticated chapter book I was writing had an audience and thought about simplifying the language and turning it into a very long picture book, etc. etc.
We talk a lot in my family about “overhandling the meat.” It’s a gross expression that means, essentially, overworking a creative thing until you’ve wrung all the juice and energy out of it. I think it’s safe to say that I have overhandled Egg Sisters. It’s sad, I guess.
On the other hand, I’ve used this story as a vehicle to explore a lot of mediums and approaches and that’s cool. I keep coming back to it and trying again in spite of myself. Maybe the role of Egg Sisters isn’t super free creative exploration. Maybe it’s just a thing to get lost in and then utterly abandon every three years or so. I’m open to the possibility that working feverishly on some art thing in a kind of mania only to decide, a week later, that it’s not worth my time might be “part of my process.”
Last fall I was drawing with my kid and drew this angry little butterfly:
I drew it with a .38 muji pen. I love those pens.
A few days later I turned it into a comic, incorporating and expanding on the language of Du Iz Tak? And, once again, I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to draw a stream-of-consciousness web comic without any editorial oversight??
I started a Patreon to post this comic, which is kind of a Du Iz Tak? / Egg Sisters mashup. I used mostly muji pens but switched to procreate at the end. As with all things Egg Sisters, I worked on this comic obsessively for a while and then lost steam. But here it is for posterity. It may or may not make sense.
Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Carson
P.S. I’m told most people look at Substack on their phones but this will be easier to read on a laptop. 🙂
Although it’s abandoned (for now 😈), the webcomic format was a fun read. I’m also in the habit of overworking things; I haven’t decided if it’s part of my process yet. In any case, I’d sure love to see a graphic novel from you some day!