Ten sleeps till Xmas

I know this is the second time we've had Xmas here this year but there was a bit of catching up to do, as I explained at the time and anyway, why the hell not?!

If you haven't been following along then the last row of panels may be a bit bewildering. Each relates to a story arc from the weekly strips that I just kind of abandoned a few weeks ago. So all these guys are just stuck hanging in their little fictional scenarios until I go back in and rescue them; from hanging suspended in mid-air over a pair of comely mermaids after being dragged through the afterlife; sitting on a rocky hill in the Cambrian; and hanging on every word of a glowing messiah.

In which we find ourselves inside the creepy house

OK. I'm sorry. I kind of hinted that we wouldn't get drawn into this little world and he we are talking about Mother's abscesses again. We don't know much about what goes on in here; the curtains are old and threadbare and there doesn't seem to be any furniture and I really don't want to form a mental image of Mother and Princess Mitzi. With that in mind you might be relieved to hear that the Eggmen will be taking a little break for a while. I'm tired and I need to claw back some time from somewhere to work on some things that are bigger and more ambitious.

I will definitely still be dropping in from time to time with the odd Eggmen strip here and there but I can't commit to anything regular till the new year. To those 2 or 3 of you who have been regular readers, I say a huge thanks for your attention. If you're at all interested in what happens here next you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed.

And there's always the weekly and daily archives.

A question of motivations

More old stuff

Here's an old one from the Bad Religion corner of the archive. At the time, I was totally taken by the idea of the "prosperity gospel" and how it struck me as such a perfect example of how humans can seem to ingeniously warp the seed of a religious idea into a perverse travesty that conveniently supports their own self-interest.

In that light it seemed reasonable that, if you could actually fit a camel through the eye of a needle, it really would be easy for a rich man to get to heaven.

To the bus stop!

To the office!

From the vault

I think this was about the third strip I ever drew- back when their world was a blank slate and nothing related to anything else. Weird to see how much they changed when I wasn't looking.

I'll be here with a new one on Monday.

A test of commitment

And here I was promising I'd get less wordy.

A dark little corner opens...maybe

Mmm. Not sure I really want to go through this window. These guys kind of wrote themselves into the story when I wasn't paying attention; I don't think I want to enter their world at all, let alone meet "Mother". I'm tempted to try and ignore them, get on with focussing on other characters and hope they just go away but they might explode out of here in some Freudian psychobomb instead. We'll see.

A pregnant pause...

And this is where we leave these guys for the forseeable future. It might seem slightly cruel to just leave them dangling interminably but they'd be having a hard time of it anyway. You can find out how they got to this point by looking here.

So, no more weeklies for a while but there will be something new and different popping up to take their place soon.

Work. Again.

...and Norman's mission to get to the reality of global warming will continue next week. He's still on the case.

Not pulse-pounding adventure!

God - what am I doing?! One thing that can really make me glaze over (and I know I'm not alone) is comic strips where the characters just stand around talking to each other all the time. And here am I filling these 4 little panels with far too many words. And you can't even see who he's talking to! Never mind. Next time there will be pulse-pounding, senses-shattering action. Maybe.

Now what?

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be winding up the weekly strips for a while. I've really enjoyed doing them but, if I don't free up some time to start work on some other things, I'm gonna go nuts. I've agonised over this for a while and something has to give way. These were what got me started on cartooning a couple of years ago and I'm going to miss doing them. In my wildest fantasies I imagine that someone else out there might miss them too.
I will bring them back eventually - there's still a ton of ideas I have for them - and I'll probably throw the occasional one in when the mood strikes.
In the meantime, I'll still be doing the shorter strips - at least 2 and maybe 3 per week - and the long-promised "other stuff".
So this is the end of the "Great Trilobite Saga" for now, last week was the end of the Messiah storyline and next week will wrap up the Hereafter story for a while.
If you're not sure what the hell I'm talking about, you can read them all here, here and here.
I'll be back on Monday.

..and then you reveal the secret weapon

It's simple - you start with a list

And Lucy sayeth unto Charlie Brown...

Look! A woman!

And life drifts slowly by...

Sorry this is up late - it is still Monday but not for much longer.

Hooray for fiction!

And it's Wednesday already

Yay.

Done. Back on Wednesday.

Nearly there

I'm almost caught up. Kind of. I'm putting my head down for a while today and will have a new strip up by the end of the day. In the meantime, here's another old one from the archive.

Total cop-out

Sorry to say I can't post a new weekly today - I've been a bit bogged down working on a freelance job and it chewed up all my Eggmen time for this latter part of the week. So, instead, here's an old one from the archives. This is the one that started the whole 'heaven' story arc which you can see the rest of here.

Pfflfft?

Couldn't for the life of me think of a decent onomatopoeia for a fart when I was doing this. I'm assuming the fact that it's coming out of his pants gets the message across. I'll try and be a bit more high-minded next week. It's all degenerated to dicks and farts. Oh dear.

A Job Description

Head on over...

I haven't posted the Friday strip here this week. It's ever-so-slightly on the vulgar and profane side and I didn't just want to whack it up here in your face, as it were. So, if you'd like a peek head over to eggmencomics.com. That's also where everything is archived.

I am slowly winding this blog up but, in the meantime, I'll be back on Monday.

A quick lie down

I owe everyone a small apology and some big thanks.

The apology is for being so consistently all over the place. I think all the wandering narratives might just be part and parcel of the whole Eggmen thing but, looking back over some of the recent strips, I had this dawning horror that the whole thing was a bit of a visual mess as well. I’ve never really bothered to sit down and draw up model sheets for any of the characters or places in this little universe, preferring instead to create the whole thing straight ahead and organically. All good in theory but the result might be a bit disconcerting if you’re ploughing through a story arc in one of the galleries.

The big thanks are for those of you who are prepared to bear with me because I’m totally making it up as I go. From one strip to the next I’ll think of a slightly better way of rendering something or I’ll just forget what I did last time. I promise to try and be consistent where I can but I’m really making all my mistakes in public. It’s sometimes a bit of a relief to think that only a couple of people read this thing.

And all the above is really just a flimsy knee-jerk defence for anyone who might suddenly wonder why the hell I painted the house black in today’s strip.

Things that go well together...

The view from on high

You can find out what the hell is going on here by clicking on the tags to call up previous episodes. Or, even better, go over to the new site and look for "Rampaging through the hereafter" in the archive of weeklies.

Work. Shit.

I've tweaked my routine a bit to (hopefully) keep things a bit more interesting. I'll still be posting the same number of strips per week but one of these 4-panel numbers will appear every Monday and Wednesday and a big, full-page one will go up on Friday (a day earlier if you're in the Americas).

Still agonising

Not having spoken to a French person for a long time I'd forgotten about this little cultural mismatch. But apparently the French will typically give you a long and detailed answer to what we wishy-washy Anglo types assume is a rhetorical question. We think they're long-winded and rude and they think we're insincere. Lingua Franca on Radio National had a nice little segment on just this a few weeks back.

Chin-ups are a bit hard

What did he say?

Banishing demons is harder than it looks

Know thyself

Happy Xmas 2003!

This one was done for a fond old acquaintance who I ran into a few years ago. It was around Christmas at the time and she challenged me to do her a Christmas cartoon. It took me 6 years or something like that to come good on my promise but, finally, here it is. Doesn't seem like it was worth waiting 6 years for somehow.

I got totally stuck on the last row of panels at one point so I fell back on that old, tried-and-true plot device of having your protagonists explode for no good reason.

I'm always running chronically late for Xmas - like it'll all of a sudden be Xmas Eve and I'll realise I haven't bought any presents and have no money to buy any. I never seem to learn. So, in the spirit of getting my shit together this year, here's the spirit of Christmas, 3 months early (not 6 years late).

Today is the first day of the rest of your life

Nothing like a good substitute

Social paralysis

Believing is seeing (again)

All maudlin in the early morning

By Thursday I should be back to being weird, creepy and vaguely depressing. I always thought my comics were light and fun but I seem to be in a club of one there.

In the long, dark night

Why me?

Determination...kind of.

New site

I've now officially gotten around to getting a new EGGMEN website up and running. It's linked over on the right-hand side or you can just go to www.eggmencomics.com

You'll find everything archived and, as promised, you can click through some of those seemingly random and nonsensical story lines. They're probably still random and nonsensical but now, at least, you can see how they unfold.

I'll be sticking to the same update schedule of a 'daily' every Monday and Thursday and a weekly every Thursday.

I'd be curious to know what you all think.

Good parenting

When metaphors blow up in your face

The vortex deepens

Getting fitter by the minute

Hippy

This is an old one I dug out of the bottom drawer a while ago. I'd never used it because I just couldn't bear the original monologue. So I'd whited it all out and left it. For a long time. That's why they have the dark eyelids I used to do. Looking at it now, I think I rather prefer the dark eyelids - they seem more expressive somehow, especially when they're narrowed into malevolent slits.
I think the layout is an experiment that probably doesn't work too well in hindsight but I like the lotus.

So fired up