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.

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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