The Enchanted Dagger

Oh its been too long again… but this week I happened to redux 2 pages of Kalthar!  Aided by an adjustment to the pen size…I’ve been using an extra fine 3 pixel nib to pick out every nuance but realized that a 5 pixel nib covers more territory.  Two pages in two days!  much better…  and sufficiently reduxed enough, i think.

March was otherwise a bit of a slump from the comic book production point of view, though things ended up going okay with the inking and the coloring of that last block of Edag issue 7 in the wintertime.  But then a major stall out….

I think I’m at the point of issue 7 where the only way to get thru the book is to start posting pages here online again and working thru it page by page.  some pages are closer to finished than others.  I feel pretty tapped out on my Adobe illustrator 10… this one may rely more on photoshop in the end!

And all that means it’s time to finish up Kalthar for good.  I have three more pages of Robert Pious art left and then 2 Irv Novick drawn stories.  I’m finishing Kalthar and getting it off the table!

I also need to get Issue 4, 5 and 6 to the printer.   When I start publishing the last Kalthar pages i’ll finish the detailing on those issues and get them out.  I’ll have 15 pages worth of Kalthar to get that EDag tedium done with, too.

That will get two big chores out of the way.  My brain is a bit clogged so that will help it.  too bad, I was really looking forward working on That PHM 20 pager this fall…will try to fit it in…car work at the day job, maybe…. anyway… i think Kalthar/EDagPrinter is a good near term approach.

Just my luck to draw up two pages of Kalthar:Redux on April Fools Day, 2024!  Too bad about Ed Piskor.  Was he hopped up on adderal or something?  His mind must have really been spinning to go to such an unfortunate extreme.  My sense of those two guys was that they were working too hard.  I don’t need an episode of Cartoonist Kayfabe every fucking day.  twice a month maybe.  To bad for Rugg.  bad tweet.  I bet at some point he has thought about making a comic about all of it.  I keep thinking about the Chris Rock routine when he called Will Smith a bitch highlighting all the reasons that Will Smith is a bitch. I’m sure all those Manga-ka that Piskor idolized were on amphetamines half the time, too…

Seems to me that the Piskor family should use some of Ed’s money to file some wrongful death civil suits.  Some great villains in this story!  For a minute there I thought, woooow what if this really was a hoax.. like a Romeo and Juliet thing, and Piskor and his family had sprung it, and were about to reveal that Ed was alive and that cancel culture can fuck off when word comes down that Molly D is dead by her own hand!  She was secretly, tragically in love with Ed and was only trying to get his attention!!  She wanted to visit western PA!  And conniving Molly P, her so called friend, had orchestrated the whole thing out of jealousy!…  But that was too dark and I began to suspect myself… so I gave it a comedic spin.  My comic has a happy ending.  Loves labour is not lost and after a comedy of errors, Ed and his Mollys emerge unscathed, a comic book power thrupple with many children living happily ever after and making comics.  They get so rich they buy up Kentuck Knob.  I’m sure that was what Piskor was shooting for… would that have been so bad?