DIRTY PAIR: FATAL BUT NOT SERIOUS design sketches, pt.1

Behold, some design sketches for issue #1 of my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious. (For the record, the title comes from a line in a P.J. O'Rourke piece, which went something like this: "What ails Poland is, as the Poles say, fatal but not serious.")

The opening issue was split between scenes of a 2141 talk show discussing the DP's cultural impact and a hardware-intensive action scene; alas, I seem to have more designs from the former sequence than the latter.

A few words:

Cory Emerson was, of course, the reporter from two miniseries back, Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels, having moved on to a new job as a talk show host. (25 years later, I can't recall much about "the Jane Whitney experience" mentioned in the notes.)

This character was a Lucien-program genetic upgrade like Kei and Y**i, but annoyed by the superficial stereotypes of engineered hawtness that the Dp represent.

Expressing a complex pro-DP opinion was the "paracultural pundit" above, whose verbose and obnoxiously learned patter was fairly straightforwardly based on real-life author and then-frequent talk show guest Camille Paglia. In fact, I think I based part of Rachel's pro-DP rant—comparing Kei and Y**i to heroines from Spenser's The Faerie Queen—on riffs from Paglia's book Sexual Personae.

The "reversing part" bit is a cheap stunt from manga and anime, in that her hairstyle's asymmetrical bangs (if that's the term) magically flop from one side to another depending on the shot. Amusing, if goofy.

IIRC, only one character from this incomplete design sheet, the censored "edible Messiah" dude, actually made it into the issue. Pity, as the mecha cosplaying Y**i would've been fun, not to mention the AD 2141 iteration of Trent Reznor. (I was listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails in the 90s, to put it mildly.)

Alas, the image below is the only hardware design I could find from Fatal But Not Serious issue #1:

Note that Kei's sidearm was originally a "mollywire" projector, rather than the plasma-blasting weapon of mayhem that it became later.

Dammit, I know that a design sheet for the armor worn by the DP has been spotted in my studio files somewhere in the last decade or two , but I haven't yet been able to dig it up. Will I be able to find that piece before this piece posts on Tuesday morning? Let's find out together, folks!

Next Tuesday, we'll see a whole bunch of hardware designs from Fatal But Not Serious issue #2. Yay!

TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON: As usual on a Wednesday, time for yet more "damsel-in-distress" content of some sort for the $5+ tiers!