The Enchanted Dagger – Yankee Comics Classics #4
Our Golden Age flashback continues. This week’s page features some impressive latisimus dorsi muscles and a very jaunty leg kick-run. I feel obliged to mention the withering take down in panel 4, “your head needs this”. Great stuff! The Enchanted Dagger was pretty weird, for sure, and there was a touch of…how should I put it…wrongness to him. Everything about this character just felt wrong to me. His name, his outfit, his magic knife’s powers…when viewed from the context of today’s contemporary comic book world he felt even wronger. This had a great appeal, especially from the perspective of writing a short story, which was what this Graphic Novel Series was supposed to be….but I won’t flog a dead horse.
It’s not that the Edag was intrinsically kookier than the other Golden Age heroes. A lot of these characters were truly zany. George Tuska, the Edag’s creator, got his start working for a guy named Harry “A” Chesler. He organized what may very well have been the original comics bullpen for the purpose of making original comic stories to would be publishers…a comics bundler if you will. Picture a bunch of guys hanging out in an office suite in NYC, whipping out gems like “your head needs this!” Leg Kick! It must have been a pretty good time. For all the time it’s taking me to make my version of the character, I cant imaging that it took Tuska more than a work week to draw up his Edag stories, if that. I’m sure they were just churning ’em out, on the lark that one of them would stick in the popular culture. They didn’t!
It is definitely “wrong”. Comics like these definitely inspired Bob Burden’s Mystery Men Comics.
I never read Mystery Men but I think they showed up in some Flaming Carrots that I’ve enjoyed. His art has that “primitive” quality. Burden is a real humorist vs the early EDag and the like, which I see as just goofy.