Future Egg.
Created by Matthew Simmonds.
The Story - ‘Future Egg’ is a brash and precocious student with some unusual friends and instructors. He is prone to talking about himself and , shall we call it, flowering up his own ‘Spectacular’ personality traits and abilities.
This is an anthology that follows the antics of Egg and his compatriots.
‘An Alien, A Robot, A Homo Sapient and a freakin’ Egg!’
They get into some pretty bizarre adventures.
The Review - Matt sent this to me after a recent post I made suggesting we (and me) need more honest and constructive reviews. He was the first to stand up and I really appreciate the review copy he sent.
There’s no doubt that the creator is having fun with this comic. It uses non-stop snarky comebacks as a source of much of the comedy. There is a genuinely strange and inventive imagination on show here. It has a quality of the absurd and abstract about it’s flights of fancy. Like the scribbling of a hilarious mad man this is the comic that you might find in the cell of a notorious serial killer after he’s been moved from general population to High Security.
The narrative through line is actually hard to trace and maybe that’s the point but I did find it hard to follow. It is absolutely all over the place to a point where I am convinced this was done with a purpose.
There are pages that I found a slog to get through and suffer from being overwritten and with unnecessary repetition. Some honing down and slicing off the unneeded verbals would do this a favour. Some of the comedy conversations are a little too tightly packed onto the pages and a reader could do with some breathing room.
The art has a DIY feel to it that does significantly improve as the issue continues. Matt makes use of some full page/floating head splash pages that play with the format of the art that work well. If I chose my favourite page it would be towards the end of the volume (page 27 on my PDF version) that consists of a wordless battle/fight scene. It reminded me of a 1980s punk rock zine or maybe Lord Horror? (That shows my age!) This particular page shows some stylistic flair and I’d happily read a whole Zine utilising this technique.
The comic is hand lettered and would benefit from more practise in that particular discipline or finding the right font on a digital lettering site that didn’t break up the DIY/Craziness tinged approach.
In summary I would say that this is an creator who is pushing forward and improving. He has an experimental approach which I applaud but could do with some sharpening of the tools required. I applaud this as a worthy try and will be interested to see where he goes next.
You can find Matt at https://mattsimmonscomics.bigcartel.com/ and follow him on Twitter @SheriffFreak
Many thanks for reading.
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