The Enchanted Dagger

Page 2!  And we’re back to what became our regular schedule for much of the EDag webcomic run, Monday night at midnight.  Today I cleaned up page 3 and as I expected it was just about finished after a good days work which is encouraging.  Hopefully that will prove to be the case for most of these pages in the first half of the comic, until I get to page 13 which i anticipate might need a couple days.  It still has some flaws but i can live with it.  As i touched on last week, I was able to learn a lot from my last print out of issues 4-6, in which I experimented with a few different comic book effects like breaking the panel barriers, etc.  One notable was how much of a pain it was to deal with full bleed pages.  Despite my best efforts to keep every thing pertinent within the “live area” of the page,  the printer’s template was not satisfied and we had to go back and forth a few time to get everything right.  No big deal, but I’m going to curtail it quite a bit for this issue.  This page had both full bleed elements and blacked out panel borders…and it does look better without those flourishes.  As I’m typing I’m realizing that I have a big 3 page st piece coming up that has blacked out panel borders… i didn’t like how it worked in issue 7… but this spread has something of a non-linear narrative structure so it might work.  I’ll keep it black for the web, probably….

I need to go back and work on that sky in the last panel… a similar sky appears on page 3 which I have a bit closer…. a Nightmare & Sleepy cameo!  Nightmare and sleepy are two of my favorite Golden Age characters.  You might remember them from Tales of the Irreal #1, featured in the archive above.  I can’t believe no one has done something with them (or maybe they have by now I should check).  In my golden age mash up Great City universe, N&S and the MoonMan, etc live in the generation after Roger and company… EDag got it’s start as a story about Americas first generation folk heroes.  The echos of that story made it into issue 6, when Roger visited Kit Carson & Sacajawea at the circus, if you’ll recall.  I think Johnny Appleseed was one of their side-kicks.  I kept the story in that nebulous early 20th century time frame, for some reason….