LAYOUTS FROM AN OLD SF-ADJACENT PROJECT: Chapter 5, pt. 5!

[Here's a link to our previous installment in this series.]

So, yeahp, I'm serializing my insanely tight layout pages for the 2005 Marvel miniseries Iron Man: Hypervelocity, the first issue of which I wrote and laid out long before an artist had been chosen;  of course, the great Brian Denham wound up tackling the art for the project, but I had already rolled with these time-consuming roughs out of, I dunno, sheer perfectionism and unhinged micro-managing.

Either that, or these layouts represented the sum total of artwork I actually wanted to produce for this project. As I've noted here before, cranking out finished artwork is the bane of my g-d existence as an artist; I like (or even occasionally love) drawing loose, relatively spontaneous comic pages like this, but bog down toute suite upon having to painstakingly render my usual tight and precise completed artwork.

Even though we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of Hypervelocity's creation, I am loath to publicly acknowledge to non-Patrons that I'm serializing these layouts here, hence the "Old SF-Adjacent Project" monicker.

Anyhoo, here's the Hypervelocity #5 page we left off with, as Tony Stark 2.0 was seemingly destroyed by cybervillainess "Absynthe" in digital space, only for her to belatedly realize a discordant note:

And now, the conclusion of issue #5:

That image of the Iron Man armor on a swing still cracks me up, gotta say.

 Yeahp, few things I like better than crosscutting between action scenes and non-action scenes, folks.

Behold, a hinted-at. kinda-sorta origin for Absynthe! (More clarification to follow in the next issue, IIRC.)

Not a fan of grid-based comics layouts in general, but dang if they aren't very useful for high-panel-count pages like this one.

But wait, another sudden reversal!

In our next installment in a few weeks, we kick off the miniseries' high-speed climax in Hypervelocity issue #6, which was far and away my favorite part of the entire project. Yay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?