Distressed damsels: Unpublished EMPOWERED commissioned story(?)

Trying out that new Patreon "image gallery" function with this week's DiD post, folks.  Will it work out?  Let's find out together!

The pages above are from a commissioned story—well, scene, at least—for a kindly benefactor who didn't mind a sketchy, unfinished "vignette" format, sans backgrounds or non-damsel detail.  He was looking for a few pages of Emp "laid low" by a drone, possibly of Advanced Restraint Research derivation.  Alas, I have no scan of the first page, in which the ARR drone clamps onto the face of an unsuspecting Emp and gases her unconscious, before detaching (and taping) as seen in the initial page above.  

Like most of these commissioned episodes, the scene just sorta cuts off at the end of the pages, as I'd piled up enough content to fulfill the required parameters.   (Either that, or an actual, pagerate-based comics job had come along.)  This drone scene is a bit of bridge  between actual DiD comics work and the loose sketch sets I'll eventually be posting here, as some of my regulars were fine with figure-only vignette formats like these.  (Besides, let's be honest: most folks were interested more in sexy damsels than backgrounds or proper comics storytelling.)

UPDATE:  Found myself oddly annoyed by the missing first page, so I quickly sketched it from memory below:

As with many of these unpublished Emp sketch sets or "pseudo-comics," poses from the pages above wound up reused in Empowered proper.  Off the top of my head, at least three reworked poses can be seen in vol. 10's Le Chevalier Blanc story.  Can't you spot 'em below?

Attentive readers may notice that Le Chevalier's garbled French was even more garbled and, uh, French-ier in this earlier draft of the vol.10 story, as I rewrote his dialogue with a series of quite literally last-minute revisions for the published version.  (Someday I'll likely do a post showing both the original and edited versions of this linguistically controversial episode.) 

BTW, I do hope that DiD aficionados appreciated the heavier-than-usual dose of damsel-y imagery in vol. 10, as I was trying to make up the the relative paucity of such content in the upcoming Empowered vol. 11.  (The unplanned, years-long gap between volumes 10 and 11 made this once-brilliant plan not as clever an idea as I originally thought, alas.) There is some DiD material in that book, but given that this installment is a single long, frantic, 200-page action scene, I just didn't see many opportunities for conventional distress; Lord knows the volume's grueling ordeal features considerable, indeed overwhelming physical and emotional distress but, with a few notable exceptions, it ain't distress of the sexy, damsel-y kind. 

Of course, when I dared mention this fact online, a few DiD fans immediately informed me in no uncertain terms that they only bought Empowered for the bondage content, which was a tad disheartening.  One might hope that I might've bought myself some slack by the last twelve years and 2500-odd pages worth of comics featuring DiD imagery, but apparently not (he typed, teeth gritted just a tad). 

Then again, suppose I might as well ask you Big Spenders of the higher tiers: Do you, in fact, buy Empowered only for the DiD content?  Interestingly, over the years I've heard from a surprising number of DiD fans that they just can't appreciate seeing Emp getting tied up, as they've come to sympathize with her too much.  Come to think of it, one of my more generous regular commissioners switched over to wanting only non-Emp DiD material, for just such a reason.