The Enchanted Dagger

In messing around with the saturation levels I discovered this great greenish hue around our ghostly aura.  Lets se how it looks up on the tablet.  I really liked how it looked on our super scary skeleton arm…does it work for the other panels?  I had considered saving the hand for the back cover but the inside cover looked very dull with out it…so we wrap up the issue here…almost a full page of art, no less.  Ben Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon snake makes an appearance as Great City’s skeletons emerge ready for calamity.  The Enchanted Dagger is as timely as ever, no?

Tomorrow I’m going to whip up the back cover and then Issue 6 will be in the books, thank god!  My first priority on the day after is to set up the page templates for Issues 7, 8 & 9.  I’m going to save most of the writing/thumbnails for the springtime…I’m hoping to write an issue a month in April, May and June since I have such a hard time making artwork while I’m working the day job.  Writing, on the other hand i can actually do while I’m working.  Since day job requires little thought at this point i can mull over page structure and salient points to good effect so that when I do sit down to type it out it comes out easy.  There’s also a possibility that I could have enough money saved up to take off next fall and winter and work exclusively on comics!

We’ll see how the thumbnailing goes in the spring.  I’d like to have the art pretty well thought out so I can get right into production in the fall.   This is going to be a challenging couple of books as i really want to up my game when it comes to the drawing, especially  the action (of which there will be more) and of the buildings and cityscape of Great City itself…especially prominent in Issue 8.   To get in the groove I’m going to spend most of the rest of the winter working on good old drawing on paper!

I’ve been stocking up on fancy pen nibs, bristol board, a light table….even a new drawing table!   I’ve amassed everything Akihito Yoshitomi would need to make a great comic!  Just in the last few days I realized that the time might be right to bust out another project that I’ve had on the back burner for a long while but which I think about a lot.  It’s one of those “must do” projects you carry around with you.  This one has always been intended to be a brush and nib and ink sort of comic.  So my thinking about the next couple months has shifted a bit.  Maybe I’ll find that his new project works and I’ll decide to go for it!  I’m inclined to think that it will have a degree of market potential as it features a familiar protagonist….

Quickly, I’m also going to try get a very small print run special edition of some of Issue 6 into the printer before the end of the month to take advantage of a discount.  It’ll be the first 11 pages, plus the old Golden Age EDag story with the green zentai suit.  I might send it out to publishers just for the sake of it.

I’ll also be getting started on our next Golden Age Redux, of course, which will start posting in a couple weeks!  Who’s it gonna be?!?

One last thought… As I was trying to make the skeleton hand scary, I briefly toyed with giving it the white supremacist “okay” hand sign.  It’s right there, as you can see, but I decided against it simply because I didn’t want something that despicable in my comic book.