DISTRESSED DAMSELS: "Rose & Lily vs. Troops," pt.3!

Following up on an earlier post, here are more pages from a commissioned Dirty Pair comic story in proto-Empowered format, created back in 2003 during a time when I assumed that I wouldn't be drawing comics professionally any more, due to my disenchantment with struggling through conventionally penciled and inked comic pages.

In retrospect, I clearly still wanted to draw as well as write comics at this time, but not via the slow, grinding, miserably tedious work process I had largely abandoned; only a year or two later, I would belatedly figure out that I could, in fact, publish comics in this pencil-based "tight layouts" format, and Empowered would result.

So this final, quite lengthy damsel-in-distress commission wound up being this close to a real Dirty Pair story, as it included many more of the "techy" elements from my actual DP continuity than most of these DiD pieces, yet still featured the rather unlikely situations, heightened cheesecake levels, and distinct costuming—that is, the high-heeled boots—of a damsel-y DP scenario or simulation.

However, this story also wound up being weirdly gritty and distinctly unpleasant, as poor Kei and Y—nay, Rose & Lily—not only start out the comic having had their butts kicked in a failed mission pitting them against a bunch of nameless, geared-up "Troops," but spend the rest of the pages struggling desperately against these frequently cruel if not outright sadistic goons. In fact, I'm going to skip an upcoming section of the story in which the a-hole bad guys take matters way too far (though they do pay a dear price for stepping over the line, which you will see).

A few words on the unpleasantness:

An action scene, of sorts! Something along these lines posing a high degree of difficulty for the Angels might've been worth considering in the actual series.

In fact, I considered doing a fight scene along these lines with Ninjette in Empowered, but never quite got around to doing so. In the last panel, I should prolly clarify that the Troop fella just got ShokSticked in the nards, as another friend of mine who saw these pages mistakenly thought that he'd taken a g-d light saber hit to the same area. Ouch!

Gotta say, Y**i/ Lily expressing fear and vulnerability in her thought balloons was an odd touch for this often-way-too-gritty story (not to mention stammering in her internal monologue once again), but I'm not opposed to the approach as a whole, given that I take a dim view of action heroines (and heroes, for that matter) who are perfectly, Action-Smirkily confident in their invulnerable Plot Armor as they breeze unconcerned through hordes of hapless foes.

NEXT TIME ON "ROSE & LILY VS. TROOPS": I'll explain what happened in the unfortunate pages we're about to skip over before jumping right back into another action scene of LIly turning those ol' tables on the bad guys.

LATER TODAY ON THIS HERE PATREON FOR THE $10 & $20 PATRON TIERS: Going up this afternoon will be the Exclusive Monthly Bonus Post for the Biggest Spenders of the top tiers, which looks like it'll be another Empowered vol.12 sneak peek, assuming my g-d flaky-ass DSL allows me to put up the g-d content. (This post alone has consumed 45 minutes while I'm waiting for said DSL to reconnect, alas.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, but something will be going up on Wednesday, folks.