The Enchanted Dagger

Here’s another odd one…of course they’re all a little odd I suppose.  This one could have used some revision in the penciling stage.  By the time I got to this page I was sick to death of the Chalmers Foundation Gala and its attendees so I really had to muscle through.  I just realized I also forgot to put the ball room floor in the top panel.  Oh well, I’ll get around to it in time for the printer.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned that making the tiles and wallpapers, while not difficult unto themselves to render, take up a ton of computing power, so it slows up everything exponentially.  Like when I zoom in to do a detail, it takes a few seconds for the computer to reconstruct the composition.  Very irritating.  And if I sit there for a while working, the lag time of each pen stroke becomes more delayed.  More sophisticated comic artists would shake their heads in pity.

To make this page even odder, it also has bad poetry!  Hopefully I was able to thread the needle of poetry that is intentionally bad while also trying to be ironically bad.

On the bright side, I got back to the drawing board last week, the final 4 pages of issue #4 (25-28).  With the exception of the cover to issue #4 and my well documented ordeal with pages 6&7, I hadn’t started work on any new pages in almost 6 months!  I still had weekly touch ups on the weekly pages posting, so it still felt like I’ve been working.  Luckily I seem to have benefited from the hiatus and things came together easily.  I’m hoping things proceed smoothly as I finally get started on the fun, circus themed issue #5.  Issue #4 has taken waaay to long to finish, but I haven’t had the luxury of affording it my singular focus.