The Enchanted Dagger

OMG!  Two weeks without a post!  Can this messed up world get any worse?  I’m sure you must have thought I’d given up (and who could blame me?) but no.  The delay, which I think is the longest since i started the whole shebang, was 100% lousy day job related.  My spring labor gig was going good at first.  Due to the coronavirus, they had us working in the evenings which was great because I could wake up and put a couple hours in at the drawing board.  I had hoped to get through the first eleven pages without an interruption, but we eventually went back to the nine to five grind.  Two months in at 6 days a week I’m just too tired to come home an concentrate on drawing.  15 minutes in front of a computer screen and I start to get woozy.

Luckily there’s only a few weeks left, at which point I should be able to get back to a regular schedule pretty quick…for a little while anyway.  Since all my lead time is used up, my original Enchanted Dagger story will have to go on hiatus for a while I work on the last 3 issues.  My intention is to write the last three issues all at once and give it the full Dave Gibbons treatment and plot out detailed thumbnails.  I’ve stuck to my creative process stubbornly throughout the project, but its inefficient and there are redundancies…so I may change things up.  I’ll probably ditch the coloring in Adobe illustrator, for one.  I’d also like to get back to doing more of the drawing (and maybe the inking) the old fashioned way.  But we’ll see.   Hopefully the change will do me some good.  I think some of my drafting skills have begun to regress, as my weak fabric folds in the politician suits on this page will attest.

Being in the final period now, my determination to finish has never been higher…but at the same time I feel like the universe is calling out to me to get started on the next project.  So I may spend some time working on it as well…possibly by giving it the Dave Gibbons treatment too, so i can hit the ground running once EDag is done.  I’ll keep the new project under wraps for now except to say that we’ll be putting the golden age behind us….

In case you’re worried about what life would be like without these weekly posts…Don’t!  As soon as Issue 8 wraps up I’m going to keep the weekly routine going with another one of my Golden Age refurbishments!  This time I’ll be cobbling together the complete adventures of one of our old time heroes from the story.  I’ll keep which one a secret for now.  Hero X has about 48 pages worth of material…so after a year we’ll have a nice comic book.

Finally, I’ll be posting another of my contributions to the Magic Bullet, DC’s comic newspaper is a week or two to fill the time. I hoping we’ll be back by the fourth.

Whoops!  Almost forgot!  One reason i ran out of time on the current pages is that I finally got Issue 3 off to the printer.  It took a lot of revision but it was worth it…the proof looks pretty good…definitely some improvement from the first two issues!