My 1987 DIRTY PAIR pitch portfolio, pt.2: Inked story pages!

Behold, as promised a while back, more of my artwork for the 1987 Dirty Pair proposal that my late friend Toren Smith and I pitched to Studio Nue, the company owned by DP creator and award-winning SF author Haruka Takachiho, in the hopes of doing an original American comics miniseries based on the characters.

This time around, here's the inked first half of a short sample story I wrote and drew for the pitch; the discerning eye of the long-term DP reader might notice a few plot similarities to the published one-shot Dirty Pair: Start the Violence.

A few words on the pages:

Glasses Dude was descended from a sketch of Shaggy(!) from a grim 'n' gritty, post-apocalyptic version of Scooby Doo that I worked up as a joke back in the Kubert School. "Grim Shaggy" was later worked up into a bad-guy character design for my defunct cyberpunk project Livewire (also from the K-School era); later still, his look kinda-sorta morphed into Kevin J. Sleet from Dirty Pair: Sim Hell.

For the record, you're seeing all those thin white lines around the edges of the screentone because, go figure, the tone's plastic film has shrunken with age over the last three decades.

Also, enjoy my crappy-ass brush inking on the characters, folks! Sadly, I wouldn't wise up and go "all-pentip, all the time" until issue #2 of DP: A Plague of Angels—which immediately supercharged my work.  (Someday down the road, I'll have to unleash my long-simmering jeremiad about the manifold follies of brush inking here.) 

Cranked out this portfolio's artwork in the summer before starting 3rd year at the Kubert School; as you'll see with next week's mostly uninked pages, I just plain ran outta worktime before driving down to scenic Dover, New Jersey to start the school year.

Folks, enjoy the famous, oft-ripped-off crater from Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira vol.2 in the background of this page.

Note that, when I largely recycled this scene for Start the Violence, I sensibly switched to Kei being the missile-launcher enthusiast instead of Y**i.

Note also that, as a letterer, I was almost 30 years ahead of my time with those hideous, awkward, absurdly overlong word-balloon tails. Nice! Believe it or not, modern professional American comics letterers constantly slather pages with similar "needle tails" nowadays. (Ouch.) At least 1987 Me had the excuse of being young and ignorant...

Anyhoo!

At this time, the DP proposal was simultaneously being pitched to animation studio Sunrise, as this iteration of the Lovely Angels was (mostly) based on the 1986 TV anime series. As I'll later address, the additional costs of doing an adaptation of the anime would've been prohibitive, so I wound up having to work up my own version of Kei and Y**i, which really turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

I'd love to get into more detail about how the pitch came about, but I just don't have the time right now. Writing lengthy commentaries has proven to be a shockingly time-consuming aspect of Patreon posting, and one that I can't indulge as I need every g-d minute of worktime available to get Empowered vol. 12 underway. 

NEXT THURSDAY: We complete serialization of the portfolio's DP comic. Yay!

TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON: More Vintage Con Sketches, looks like, though I suspect I might've posted these puppies already. Let's find out together, shall we?