Distressed Damsels: A late 90s commissioned sketch set, soon to be revisited!

For this week's DiD post, I'd originally intended to show two different versions of the same commissioned sketch set, drawn 20 years apart; however, I'm having a helluva tough time piecing together the scans for the recent follow-up version in my very narrow timeframe for setting up today's post. So the second version of this sketch set will have to wait until next week, folks!

Anyhoo, back in the late 90s, several of my regular DiD commissioners at the time were cool with loose, quickly drawn sketch sets rather than more finished-looking pieces, and this is definitely an example of the former. No backgrounds, no comic panels, just straight-up damsel imagery; that sorta thing, I could easily knock out between drawing panels of my "day job" comics.

Speaking of which.... As with last week's bondage exoframe sketches, this set was drawn on the back of a photocopy of a penciled page from Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy (which I'll someday post here in a non-DiD entry); if you closely enough, you can see vague hints of that artwork in the sketch set's background.

The theoretical concept was that Yuri from my iteration of the Dirty Pair was being ambushed in a hotel room by rogue superagent Shasti from the Dangerous Acquaintances (and Run from the Future) miniseries, who hacked into the suite's laundry drones and reprogrammed 'em for damsel-distressing. Those drones are a menace, I tell ya! 

This isn't the first time I would address the concept of a DP-verse hotel suite's automation run amuck for DiD purposes; in fact, I once laid out a legitimate (if obviously unpublished) DP story featuring just such a scenario. 

I should also note that Shasti often appears—usually in person, though—in the hitherto unseen Kei & Yuri DiD commissioned material I drew over the years, which I'll be posting here in the months to come. The "Escape & Evasion class" that Shasti's scribbled voiceover mentions in the sketch set above is the subject of an actual story in a proto-Empowered format, believe it or not; truth be told, the outfits I drew for poor K&Y in that story led directly to Ninjette's shorts in Empowered. Go figure! 

20-odd years later, I revisited this sketch set for the same commissioner, for a rather different-looking set of results. I'll try posting that set here next week, okay?