The Enchanted Dagger

Gee wiz, sorry to leave the last page of Kalthar vs the Leopard Men hanging out there for so long!  It must have been driving you nuts.   But here it is anyway.  After getting nothing done during the holiday season, as usual, I’m enjoying my usual winter break from day job and bearing down on issue 7.  I was only able to get through the first 5 or so pages during the fall, but have had a pretty good run of inking a good block of painfully detailed pages so far this month.  I think I’ll be able to get a 1o page chunk ready to color by the end of January.  Coloring should be a go for February.  Then I’ll be able to plot out and start working on the last stretch of pages in March before the Spring work season starts.  Due to some car issues, I decide to stay at my day job thru last fall,  crippling production, but may roll the dice for the later half of the summer and rely on gig driving for cash instead of 9 to 5 and crank out the last pages of Issue #7 next fall.

I’ve been meaning to print up the test prints for Issue 4 for a while now but I’ve been stuck on some redraws.  Then it suddenly occurred to me the other day that Issues 5&6 were in pretty good shape.  Hey, Greg!  why don’t you go ahead and print up Issues 5&6!  that would be very satisfying, wouldn’t it?  Yes, it would.  Good thinking, Greg.  I’ll try to get that done this winter, too (Hans, I lost your mailing address…)

I also remembered the other day that I have a great halfway finished comic project in my desk drawer.  Its a 48 page comic I wrote and drew up just before I started work on EDag and I can honestly say that it’s probably one of my best works.  I’ll tell you about it.  In high school I read a short story that I really enjoyed called “Lenningan Versus the Ants” about a plantation owner who has to defend his land against a swarm of army ants.  I always wanted to use this story as the basis for a comic.  Not long after finishing my first efforts with the golden age characters (Tales of the Irreal & the Moon Man short) I realized that the precursor to Marvel, Timely Comics, also had a cast of zany old comic characters which I hadn’t been exposed to in my research of golden age Characters in the public domain like Roger and Kalthar.  I was immediately inspired by one character in particular and before I could think better of it I was off to the races.  Production began in Dec 2013 with the writing, and by the end of February I had 48 pages draw up!  And I’m not talking about sketches…this was a full blown, readable blue line comic.  It was the hardest I’ve ever pressed to get through a work and I loved how it turned out.  Now, when I started working on it, I knew that using the Timely characters were Marvel property and I wouldn’t be able to use my guy outright.  Comics being comics, it would be easy enough to just change his name and alter his costume color and bingo, there’s the comic.   I do have a perfectly suitable alternate character (arguably better, actually) but I had become so partial to the original character that I wanted to keep him!  So its been stuck in development hell…  (at the time, I also felt that I needed a little more seasoning in the inking/coloring department and put it on the back burner…seasoning which Edag has now afforded).

I’ve always been a little shaky about the Enchanted Dagger, subjectively… I don’t think its your typical fair and I could see people not going for it even though its a decent comic.  Putting it out there as my initial public offering makes me a little nervous (this website doesn’t count in my mind…I’m using it to keep myself on task more than anything).  No such reservations with my Alien Ant story!  I think people will go for this one no problem.  So I’m thinking that I’ll bite the bullet and finish it after issue 7 and make it my first crowdfund campaign and prime the pump a little for Roger & Company.

Okay, I think that’s 2 months worth of writing.  Final note… I’m going to try to do a daily wind down panel of Kalthar every night so we can get back to semi regular posting here (so many balls bouncing around in my head). Thanks so much for reading.