The Enchanted Dagger

I”ll write a little bit about the procedure, in case you were interested.  I’ve made a few mentions of my decision to make our breath-taking introduction to the underground world a little less astonishing by not making it a 2 page spread and that the reasoning was that it would take up space needed to keep the current issue at a satisfying 32 pages, which is a pretty good length for a single issue.  Adding that extra page to make it a 2 page spread while keeping all of the plot points would have necessitated adding an additional 3 pages, as each page is printed on a sheet of paper with 2 pages per side, folded, comicbook.  (you could always add some letter pages and writings and ads, of course…

So I would have added another page of Roger and the ladies walking through the underground world, around page 18 or so, which would have been fine.  The 3rd page would have become part of Roger’s rescue of SugarKane and of Torchy and Roger fighting their way to the Troglodyte temple.  This is the only part of the story that I feel suffered for not having that extra space.  Compositionally, Page 23 (the one where Torchy caps the Trog Priest) would have been much better served by having its bottom half depict an above angle view looking down at Roger fighting to get to SugarKane.  Then, our new page 24 could have begun with the current Page 23 bottom panels showing Roger rescuing poor Sugar and finishing with the aforementioned Troglodyte battle footage stuff.

I really wanted the shot of Roger and Company climbing the temple to be positioned at the top of the page, so I had to cram the action of Sugar’s rescue into those bottom panels on 23.

The rest of the book worked out well plot wise.  I had exactly enough material to get to 32 pages, so I regrettably settled for that crammed page 23.

At some point I’ll try to collect the whole shebang into one graphic novel sized collection, at which point the page length won’t be as much of a factor as with a single issues.  So these pages may show up down the road!