The Witch’s Egg
Cartoonist: Donya Todd
Publisher: Avery Hill Publishing / $19.99
October 2025
Lightning and rainbows. The Witch’s Egg is a story of love and demons, having sex with an angel, making a deal with a toad (and a snake, a hare, a crow…), hiding an egg from the prophecy of a worm. It is modern and it is ancient. Cute and alarmingly disturbing. Cluttered like a shrine with relics, icons of death and rebirth. Donya Todd’s comic is very weird.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A lonely witch (who is also a cat) years for daughters, summons and charms an insect angel forbidden from such things, and saves one egg from the cycle of cursed destruction the love affair set into motion. Or possibly re-initiated. The witch children of the egg, as well as their brother the worm, grow and change and make the world strange.
To love and have children is to perpetuate the curse (as well as postpone it), totally off limits, so bet your ass they carry on the family tradition and do it, continuing the folkloric hall of mirrors. Many on all sides share the same fate. The unstoppable reckoning foretold between angels and mortality shakes the Earth- some absolutely unhinged artwork there. Who survives? Who can tell? Happily ever after.
The Witch’s Egg echoes within itself. Mothers who want to protect their children no matter what are bound to a generational curse that they will give birth to doom. So, the witch hiding the egg from the destroying angel is treated with the same reverence as the demon who births the worm. Or is it the witch’s mother who births the worm, who is her brother, but also her dead lover’s child of prophecy? As I said, weird. Lovers, set against each other like life and death, and devoted to the same thing.
Todd’s style is another contradiction. Distinctly modern. Flat, cartoonish, and highly color-conscious, all in a muralist way. Buk Ulreich meets Paperrad. Rules adverse. Panels adverse. Sketchbook simplicity, in how free the art (brut) is, and sketchbook density, in how crowded each page is with ancillary but non-narrative drawings occupying all negative space everywhere.
The Witch’s Egg takes an onslaught of errata and frames it up like stained glass windows, like Shary Boyle’s occult comics in Kramer’s Ergot, Leo Fox’s Prokaryote Season, like the illustrated stories of yore. So, ancient also. Wild fresco scenes of skeleton kaiju spurting ichor more Tibetan than Tintoretto. Rainbows and monsters and multifigure madness like the mad monks used to do.
And like any great tome, it’s a bit hard to read. Todd’s devotion to making the book look like an occult illuminated manuscript means the unconventional lettering of a Ft. Thunder comic, haphazardly weaving through all manners of characters and imagery both related to the story and frolicking in the marginalia. To slow the pace of reading the text makes exploring all the flora and fauna ornamentation less of an aside and more a part of the reading experience.
In addition to Todd the cartoonist letting Todd the illustrator regularly take the wheel, the cheeky choice of having each fairy tale vignette crossing the Zones told in a different, limited color palette speaks to incorporating printmaking influences (also Ft. Thunderian), Todd the printer. A lot of not comic book choices make this comic very interesting. Connotation is layered upon connotation, beneath the already dense-with-meaning work, calling back to a broader history of literature.
Which, again, hard to read. Rather than reaching for commercial conditions of ease, the work itself as well as its lettering demands that you slow down and really pay attention to what you’re reading. It imbues the bizarre poetry of Todd’s voice with a weight- that the reader contributes, through their focus.
Also- I was enchanted by was how smart Todd is about art getting small. Some figures when rendered super tiny, their features dwindle down to dot eyes, dot nose, smile. The kind of Jennifer Xiao plush, Beck T comic vibe that drew me to Todd’s previous graphic novel, Buttertubs. Todd knows how to make a cute “little guy.”
But sometimes, particularly at the end when things are getting Biblical, the angels and witches battle and the worm king dissolves the world, small means just that. Characters get Shinkydinked, every detail intact but the person talking is the size of the speech bubble, part of a psychedelic cathedral dome mosaic depicting the Furby apocalypse.
The Angel, a kind of Michael DeForge Amabie-looking bird insect demon, knows what feelings are now. Now that she’s alive and not an angel anymore, she can’t stop feeling them. She’s shaking to pieces like Carol White in Safe, and a sweet Beat Happening album art cat in a witch hat for some reason doesn’t seem to be noticing.
The Witch plays Scheherazade, running from the inevitable. Striking deals within deals, creating stories within stories within stories, to cross over into safety, to stop the cycle and to perpetuate it. Spare a snake’s life (and sacrifice a stranger’s) so that one nest is undisturbed, another is reinstated to former glory with a glamour, and a mother and her egg may pass through the red gate. One down, three to go.
The worm king. I mean, you have to feel bad for the guy. Everyone else gets to have this cool story– adventures, lovers, the acquisition of magical artifacts, the frequent creation of place-holding doppelgängers so the greedy can emote and the innocent can be free- while he lies sleeping in his mother’s corpse. Waiting to rise and smother the world. Seems like a nice enough fella the few times he and the family do hook up, though. An undeniably cute baby. He didn’t ask to be the embodiment of a curse.
But not everyone gets everything they want in life. The layered duality of The Witch’s Egg makes itself felt again, now in the form of closure that comes in the grave. The telling of the story can make what is sad, singular, and final feel as beautiful and eternal as the sunset. Though they’re cursed, the stories of the babies of witch and angel are bound by love and sadness, both.
The Witch’s Egg is available from Avery Hill, or wherever finer comics and books are sold.
English (US) · 