The Enchanted Dagger

Now, as I mentioned earlier, upon my initial downloading of all these Kalthar pages from the Digital Comics Museum, I had noticed that there was more than one artist working on the book along the way.  Kalthar is generally credited to Lin Streeter and I naturally assumed that the bulk of the stories would feature his work, but I didn’t really give it much thought until I opened up page 7, the first page of Kalthar’s second adventure.  One look at this page and it seemed pretty clear that it was a different artist at work.  Gone was Kalthar’s leopard skin speedo, replaced with a red diaper and sash.  Also gone were the straight shadow lines Streeter would put on the fore arms and lower legs of many of his characters.  The story is clearly credited to Harry Shorten, but one couldn’t miss the slightly blurred letters in the lower left corner of panel one.  What do they spell? (I initially mistook it for “E.S.P.” and so kept it as such here for the purposes of our narrative).  A mystery had emerged!  Who was E.S.P. and how was I gonna find out?

And find out I would!  Our detective story will conclude next week!

Art production is slow, as it always is this time of year.  I am keeping up with Kalthar pages.  It’s a little more time consuming as my tendency towards detailing has emerged.  What I really need is an intern to foist the Golden Age Redux work load on!  Otherwise, writing on Issue 7 is coming along but slowly.  My idea of writing issues 7, 8 & 9 during this spring seems downright laughable at the moment!  But I will be ready to get started drawing as soon as the spring season is over.   Honestly, I think I’d actually be able to do all the things I plan on doing if I didn’t have to work in fits and starts like this.  Akihito doesn’t have to go be a seasonal laborer for half the year.  He gets up, goes on his walk to the park, picks up his Chai Latte or whatever, and it’s back to the drawing board, every frickin’ day.

On a more positive note, I want to give a shout out to my friends at Flashback Comics who I visited last week after a long pandemic absence.  They have always been supportive of The Enchanted Dagger and I greatly appreciate their encouragement.  I’m sure they’re as amazed as I am that I’ve taken this thing this far!