witch’s egg
Cartoonist: Donya Todd
Publisher: Avery Hill Publishing / $19.99
October 2025
Lightning and rainbow. The Witch’s Egg is a story of love and the devil, having sex with an angel, making a deal with a toad (and a snake, a rabbit, a crow…), and hiding an egg from a worm’s prophecy. It is both modern and ancient. It’s cute and surprisingly disturbing. Relics that symbolize death and rebirth are scattered around like a shrine. Donya Todd’s comics are very strange.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A lonely witch (who is also a cat) summons and enchants an insect angel, who has been forbidden to do such things for her daughters for years, and rescues an egg from the cursed cycle of destruction that their love began. Or it may be restarted. The Egg Witch’s children and their sibling, the Worm, grow, change, and make the world strange.
To love a child and have one is to perpetuate a curse (and postpone it) and is completely off-limits, so they gamble and do it in order to carry on their family tradition and continue the hall of mirrors of folklore. Many on all sides share the same fate. An unstoppable reckoning foretold between angels and mortals shakes the earth – and there lies a work of art that is completely unaffected. Who will survive? Who can say? I wish you many years of happiness.
The witch’s egg echoes within itself. Mothers who want to protect their children at all costs are bound by a generational curse that is doomed to bear them. Therefore, the witch who hid the egg from the destroying angel is treated with the same respect as the devil who gave birth to the worm. Or could it be the witch’s mother who gave birth to the worm, who is both her brother and the prophesied child of her dead lover? Like I said, weird. Lovers, like life and death, are opposed to each other and devoted to the same thing.
Todd’s style is also contradictory. Obviously modern. Flat, cartoonish, and very color conscious, all done in a mural-like manner. Book Ulreich and Paperrad meet. The rules are unfavorable. The panel is at a disadvantage. The simplicity of the sketchbook, how free the art (brut) is, and the density of the sketchbook, how much negative space is taken up everywhere with supplementary but non-narrative drawings on each page.
“Witch’s Egg” takes in a flurry of errata and frames it like a stained glass window. Like the illustrated stories of old, like Shari Boyle’s occult comics in Kramer’s Ergot and Leo Fox’s The Prokaryotic Seasons. So, ancient times too. The wild frescoed scene in which a skeletal monster spews ichhol looks more Tibetan than Tintoretto. Rainbows and monsters and the madness of multiple characters like the mad monks used to do.
And like all great books, it’s a little difficult to read. Todd’s eagerness to make the book look like an occult illuminated manuscript means Fort Martin’s unconventional lettering. Thunder comics haphazardly weave together all sorts of characters and images that relate to or play around with the story. Slowing down the pace of reading the text makes exploring all the flora and fauna decorations part of the reading experience rather than an aside.
In addition to having Todd the cartoonist regularly at the wheel, the cheeky choice to tell each fairy tale scene across the zone in a different, limited color palette speaks to the influence of printmaking (also Fort Sanderian). There are a lot of non-comic book options, which makes this comic very interesting. Connotations are layered on top of works already packed with meaning, evoking broader literary history.
This is also difficult to read. Rather than arriving at commercially easy terms, the work itself and its characters demand that you slow down and pay serious attention to what you’re reading. It imbues the strange poetry of Todd’s voice with weight, and expresses that weight through the reader’s focus.
I was also fascinated by how smart Todd was about downsizing his art. When some people are rendered very small, their features are reduced to dot eyes, dot noses, and smiles. The Beck T. comic vibe that drew me to Todd’s previous graphic novel Buttertubs, like Jennifer Hsiao’s stuffed animals. Todd knows how to make cute “little guys”.
But sometimes, especially in the end when things get Biblical and angels and witches fight and the Worm King melts the world, the little things mean just that. The characters are syncedinked, with every detail intact, but the one speaking is the size of a speech bubble and part of a psychedelic cathedral dome mosaic depicting the Furby apocalypse.
Angel, Michael DeForge’s kind of Amabie-like bird-insect demon, knows how to feel right now. She can’t stop their feelings because she’s alive and no longer an angel. She’s shaking to songs like Carol White’s on Safe, but the adorable Beat Happening album art cat in a witch’s hat doesn’t seem to notice.
The witch plays Scheherazade and runs away from the inevitable. Closing deals within deals, creating stories within stories, crossing to safety, stopping the cycle, and perpetuating it. By sparing the snake’s life (and at the cost of the stranger’s life), one nest is left undisturbed, another is restored to its former glory, and the mother and her eggs are allowed to pass through the red gate. One down, three to go.
King of insects. That is, you must have bad feelings towards the man. While he sleeps in his mother’s corpse, everyone else learns of this cool story of adventures, lovers, the acquisition of magical artifacts, and the frequent creation of doppelgangers to hold the place so that the greedy can express their feelings and the innocent can go free. Waiting to rise up and cover the world. But he seems like a nice enough guy from the few times he and his family have met. She’s definitely a cute baby. He did not want to become the embodiment of the curse.
However, not everyone can get everything they want in life. The multi-layered dual nature of “The Witch’s Egg” can once again be felt in the form of a graveyard ending. Storytelling can make sad, singular, and final events feel as beautiful and eternal as a sunset. The story of a witch and her angel babies, despite being cursed, is bound by love and sadness.
The Witch’s Egg is available at Avery Hill or wherever better comics and books are sold.
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