Strange Eggs

 Introduction

cover We at Nickelpig Media got our sullied little meat-grabbers on an advance copy of Strange Eggs, SLG Publishing's latest comic foray.   What greeted us inside this 48 page anthology were some of the best graphic stories we've seen in print.

When comic aficionados hear "anthology," Dark Horse's Sandman: Endless Nights inevitably comes to mind.   After all, it was one of the most successful comics in recent years.   But Chris Reilly, Ben Towle, and Steve Alhquist have put together an all-together different anthology.   One that doesn't get weighed down in excess.   One that walks the edge because it furthers the story, not because it's a sure bet for titillating teens.

Strange Eggs is a smart, well-crafted volume.   It contains over a dozen vignettes that vary in humor from cute to dark, and cover topics as innocuous as public access television, and as controversial as abortion.   We were thoroughly entertained from page one on.

The book debuts May 25th.   But in the meantime, we have a little treat for you.   I had the opportunity to talk with Chris, Ben, and Steve.   The following is our exchange:

 The Interview

Dave: Having read Issue #1 of Strange Eggs, I can honestly say it's the most memorable comic I've come across in recent years.   Thanks a bunch, guys, for taking the time to respond to our questions.
Chris: Well, thank you.   That's pretty much the response a creator waits his whole life to hear.

Dave: Could you pitch the premise of Strange Eggs to our readers?
Chris: Kip & Kelly Hatcher: a lonely brother and sister who get a Strange Egg delivered to them every week, by the dapper egg deliveryman, Roger Rogers.   The eggs hatch into problems that the kids need to solve.   Problems like aliens, dinosaurs, crazed ventriloquist dummies and several hobos.   Add into that mix, creators like Crab Scrambly, Roger Langridge, Tommy Kovac, Jennifer Feinberg & Todd Meister, Jamie Smart, Derf, Steve Ahlquist, Darron Laessig, Jon Adams, Dave Ray, Kerry Callen, Ben Towle, Joey Weiser, Ian Carney & Woodrow Phoenix, Jorge Santillan, Scott Saavedra and myself and you're not at least intrigued by this, you may want to check and make sure you still have a pulse.
Ben: It's kinda like Little House on the Prairie except there're more hobos, and also it's a comic book.

Dave: Why did you decide to publish Strange Eggs as an anthology?
Chris: I wanted to get stories from creators whose work I liked, who weren't known for doing anthologies.   I wanted it to be a book that I'd enjoy reading.   I'm also not a comic scene schmoozer, so most of the creators I know are at SLG.
Steve: Plus doing all the work ourselves seemed like a chore, like we'd actually have to sit upright in bed instead of calling other creators while still flat on our backs.
Ben: The basic concept Chris and Steve came up with was really well suited for the anthology treatment.   They created a great framework, with the kids Kip and Kelly as a constant, but with each delivered egg as an open-ended story element that each creator could meld into whatever he or she wanted to make it.

Dave: What was it like creating a book with an ensemble cast of writers and illustrators?   How much control did you exercise over their work?
Chris: None.   That was the deal.   I gave them the premise and they told whatever story they wanted with it.   A few people asked for advice and I gladly gave it, but it was one hundred percent up to the creators.   This doesn't apply to the four stories I wrote.   We have more creators on "More Strange Eggs" than the first book, so I'm only writing three stories this time.   One with Black Olive, another with Ben Towle and another with Punch and Judy co-creator, Darron Laessig.
Steve: As co-creator I'll be doing one story again. L

Dave: Political and religious subject matters emerge throughout the pages of Issue #1, and they work really well.   Were these 'airing of issues' intended from the beginning, and will they continue throughout the series?
Chris: Inevitably some creators are going to do that.   I doubt Derf is going to hand in a story about an elf and its cat.   The Story I wrote for Black Olive was written as a continuation of her Outlook:Grim series, so I wrote that in her style, so it's more whimsical and a lot less cynical than what I usually write.   I really loved writing that story for Olive.
Steve: It all depends on the individual creators, though.   Crab's going to tell the story Crab wants to tell.   Same with FSC, Roger Langridge, Ian & Woodrow, Jen Feinberg and Christopher.   This wouldn't work if I told them what to write, because these are very independent creators, not page slaves.
Ben: I'd like to think we got a good balance of 'issues' sorts of stories and just plain fun, silly stories.   That's part of what a good anthology should do - it hopefully should have a good "rhythm" to the stories in the book as different creators each tackle the same theme in different ways.

Dave: The comic is both whimsical and weighty.   Stories dealing with such topics as abortion and violence are balanced by stories poking fun at public access television and mankind's ignorance of science.   As editors, how hard is it to maintain that balance, and do you worry about swaying too far to either side?
Chris: It actually comes down to the diversity of the creators you invite along.   It would have been a horrible mistake to choose ten creators who focused on certain people's ignorance/denial of science (that's the story I'm going to get hate mail on) because the book would have come off as something with a one sided agenda, and been a preachy drag.   I guess the most common thread is that we like hobos.   It is fun to sneak in a story that focuses on the denial of scientific fact.   I don't like to poke fun at people, but if we're in North America, and I point out that water flows down the drain clockwise, and you tell me that your beliefs state as fact that it's flowing counter clockwise, I'll stick your head in a toilet and ask which way the water's gushing down your throat.
Steve: Jon Adam's story that deals with abortion is the most unsettling in the book.   It's a great story though, because he doesn't choose an obvious side, so it really makes you think.

Dave: Kip and Kelly possess wonderful qualities - innocence and naivety, as well as curiosity and intelligence - despite the lack of any real parental guidance.   However, on occasion they are prone to malicious thoughts and actions.   Do you think this is a reflection of the current generation, or pure fantasy?
Chris: No.   Kids are the same today as they were in 1950.   They just have different toys and problems.   They dress different, listen to different music, but a kid's a kid.   It's all about how they are raised and what they experience growing up.   All kids have a capacity to commit acts of evil through the naive innocence of youth.   A kid that burns ants with a magnifying glass, just to watch them burn, is doing something that would be considered sinister if they were thirty.   Most kids just view it as killing ugly bugs, and don't mean any harm or get perverse joy out of it.   It's not real to them.   I truly believe that when you get older, if you look at kids and complain about their crazy hair and loud music well, you either were never a kid, your parents sucked, or you're just jealous that you're not young anymore.   This is coming from someone in his mid thirties who has no kids.
Ben: I think those seemingly contradictory qualities of Kip and Kelly are what makes them interesting, and really what makes a lot of real kids their age very interesting.   It's an age where you're really learning what's right and what's wrong through your own actions, not necessarily through what people tell you is right and wrong.   It's definitely a great age for characters like Kip and Kelly who have a new situation to react to again and again in each story.
Steve: In my original notes for the characters I wanted Kip to be the emotional, irrational one who came at the problems from an intuitive place, and Kelly to be the logical one.   For example:
     Kelly: Maybe we should shoot the pteradactyl before it eats anyone else
     Kip: But it's a baby!

Dave: A television version of Strange Eggs was considered and developed for the Christian Learning Network, but that project never came to fruition.   Will Strange Eggs ever exist outside comic book form?
Chris: The rights to Strange Eggs have been passed onto me, Steve and Ben, and I'd love to see Strange Eggs on Adult Swim, or at Spike and Mike's, but I've had dreadful experiences with animation.   One project stolen from me, one returned.
Steve: The entire experience was a nightmare.   I got this call at 3AM from Atlanta with a producer trying to convince me that Kip and Kelly should be Pakastani, because there was a rising Pakastani population in London, and they couldn't work an overseas distribution deal unless they made the change.   At this point the producer didn't know that we had nothing to do with the show anymore, the CLN had stolen the concept already.

Dave: What will the future of mankind be like with Strange Eggs in it?   Where would you like to see Strange Eggs five years from now?
Chris: As a 400 page trade paperback on my bookshelf, and four seasons of DVD box sets.   I need to be rich, now that Congress has outlawed poverty.   I'm hoping they'll make it a mental illness next, so I can draw a psycho pension.
Ben: Much like Walmart's current policy, I envision offering anyone driving an RV overnight privileges at any comics store where Strange Eggs is sold.   Actually, I'd love to be putting together issues of Strange Eggs five years from now.   I think there're enough great comics creators in the world and enough open-ended concepts in the world for them to work off of for there to be plenty more Strange Eggs books.   We'll just keep putting these books together and see if we can keep getting them published.
Steve: The world will become a Utopia because of what we have wrought here.   A strange and terrible Utopia.

Dave: My mother works as a teacher's aide in a first grade classroom.   One day, a student came to her with what he thought was a lizard egg.   The class decided to incubate the egg and allow it to hatch.   Weeks later they discovered it was not an egg at all, but a carelessly misplaced breath mint.
Chris: How cool would it have been if it had hatched into some effervescent-mint-monster?
Ben: Man, that kinda sucks.  It's like the anti-Peter Pan - the kids truly believed, but got nothing for it.
Steve: A moldy mint is kind of cool.   Your mom should have replaced the mint with a lizard over a weekend and let the kids freak out Monday morning.   That would have been neat.   On the other hand, I really shouldn't be telling a teacher what to do.   Sorry Ma'am.

Dave: Do you have any personal egg-related stories to share with our readers?
Chris: There's this one where about two eggs named Five Spots and Feather who liberate themselves from the fridge, only to find that freedom isn't all shopping sprees and channel-surfing.   When one of their comrades cracks up, entertaining fantasies of becoming a soufflé and ending it all on the kitchen floor, the eggs try to find meaning in life.   For Feather, the answer is simple.   He becomes a ninja.   I guess that doesn't count, because it's a plagiarized paragraph from the press release for J. Marc Schmidt's "Egg Story."   J. Marc is doing a story for More Strange Eggs, though.   I don't really have any cool, real life egg stories.   I've soaked them in vinegar to turn them into the infamous "rubber eggs" and thrown them at people and had them thrown at me.   I have two pet frogs and one laid eggs in their little pond, and to my horror, when they hatched into pollywogs, mom and dad frog took turns eating them.   That's not weird though.   Frogs aren't known for solving Mensa puzzles.
Steve: I put myself through college working in various restaurants, and have probably cracked open more eggs for omelet and breakfast sandwiches than most.   I've seen eggs with double yokes, and once or twice a fertilized egg got through.   And I remember being really disturbed as a kid, looking through my cousin's porn collection, and seeing a picture of a woman laying an egg.   It really messed me up and confused me.   What does a ten year old Catholic know about sex?   Fortean Times, a magazine that deals with the weird and paranormal, does occasional articles on strange eggs.

Dave: Thanks again, guys.   We're all very excited about seeing Strange Eggs in stores.
Chris: Thank you, Dave.   It's been a pleasure.
Ben: Indeed, thanks much, Dave.
Steve: Me too.