The Enchanted Dagger

This one would have appeared in last spring’s Magic Bullet Special Coronavirus Edition, but it was never printed, of course.  I was really struggling to come up with something for to project when Covid happened… so that made things a little more topical.  I had been wanting to experiment with some Mayan hieroglyphs for a while, idea being that i could combine some of the structural principles of the glyphs with my Big Comic Style.  Mayan Glyphs are very interesting.  In a nut shell they have elements of pictographs and consonant structures which can be combined and artistically morphed by the scribe to represent the words and concepts, sort of like the way that graffiti artists turn words into dramatic abstractions.   What i came up with here is a far cry from any thing as interesting as that, but maybe its sort of a statement of intent… that arranging of drawings and establishing a language of ideograms of some sort could lend to a compelling approach to comic making….add that to my original fractal approach Big Comic Style and I might be on to something, someday…

Still, I do like how the piece turned out for what it is.  One of the fun parts of participating with the Magic Bullet is exploring the tolerances of the newsprint printing.  This one I went ahead and worked in full color with no black at all, having learned from (Magic Bullet #4, last week’s post) that mixing K with your CMY makes for a muddy mess.  I was really looking forward to seeing how it translated!  Maybe It’ll still get printed someday after all.  The subject matter is a  real hodgepodge…. a mix of mayan funeral glyph with a tragic Aztec poem, which I loved, and then the plague references from western culture, Hieronymus Bosch, Contagion and 12 Monkeys…..a pangolin…WTF!!!  These images are not the best, but I think they barely manage to connect the theme together into an understandable statement.  Plague and collapse, cheery stuff!  I’m almost glad I didn’t have time do develop it into anything more.  The title is what the Glyphs mean, a point I hoped to stress by including the small row of glyphs at the bottom of the page.  For me the highlight is that Aztec poem…what a lament!

I’ve got one more page to share for our Magic Bullet re-posts, then we’ll be on to Kalthar.  I spent a week at the grind stone and got the first 6 pages touched up… so I think things will be steady for the rest of 2021.