The Enchanted Dagger

Stogie And Cigarillo are golden age gangsters who appeared in 1944’s All Top Comics, a Fox features syndicate publication, if memory serves.   Cigarillo’s original name was Cheeroot, a mini stogie as it were,  but since I already had a Chamroot, I decided to change it a bit.  For that matter, Cigarillo’s appearance doesn’t actually reference the original material, so I guess I should say he’s loosely based on ol’ Cheeroot.

Since I’m ruminating on the old stories I’ll mention something else.  I might have mentioned before that discovering The Enchanted Dagger provided me with an odd inspiration.  I had a few story threads which i had been developing, and our Roger Boy inexplicably tied them together.  It was almost effortless.  Within weeks of starting work on what I’d intended to be a short story I had enough ideas for a full series/graphic novel.  Though I had misgivings, I felt weirdly compelled to continue working on it.  At the time I had only read one of the 4 original EDag comic stories from 1941, the one with his bizarre-o red outfit, and I actually had the story pretty well planned out before I tracked down the other 3 stories.  When I finally got around to it I discovered that there were strange parallels between the original stories and the book I was working on.  The most notable was that one of the stories centered on the exhuming of bodies from a graveyard for diabolical purposes, not dissimilar to the events which have unfolded over the past few pages of our book!  Surely it’s a coincidence, but it only added to the strange feeling that my take on The Enchanted Dagger was emanating from the ether… that it “wanted” to be.  It made me identify with that idea that the creative person, the creative brain, is only a vessel through which the creative “mind” does it’s business.

Speaking of the original stories.  Part of my duty as artistic champion of The Enchanted Dagger legacy is to retouch/refurbish those original stories.  The first three are going to appear as back up features is issues #5, 6 & 7.  That leaves one story, so I’ll be publishing the fourth original EDag story (the one with the red costume!) here once we finish up with Issue #4.  This is the first EDag story I encountered, so it will give you the chance to scratch your head in wonder at why I thought it would be a good idea to devote my life energy to giving Roger a reincarnation.  Unseen Forces!