FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: The MATRIX ONLINE story

Welcome to another FFF installment, folks!  This time around, the defunct project in question is a pitch I made for a Matrix Online story, back circa 2002 when "RedPill" was commissioning Matrix-related comics to run on their website in the months leading up  to the 2003 release of The Matrix: Reloaded. 

Note that the main illo above features fine color work by my buddy Ryan Kinnaird; it also features some rather wonky figure drawing, as I was struggling with what I've dubbed "The Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch" back then.

I came up with a (rather long-ish) short story, "Mercy," about one female Resistance operative's quixotic quest for vengeance on the Agent who killed her lover.  Our heroine, an emotional basket case back before being freed from the Matrix, has only become more unstable since joining  the, uh, "Zionists"... but she's as highly intelligent as she is unhinged, and has figured out a clever way to permanently eliminate individual Agents.  (As far as I can tell, her technique would probably be viable within the Matrix milieu... not that I'm gonna say what said approach was, as I might be able to someday use the trick elsewhere.)

Things take a turn for the bizarre when, in the midst of pursuing her targeted Agent, she becomes sexually obsessed with him, even to the point of running around the Matrix in  "Agent drag" herself.  Ultraviolence and weird-ass plot twists ensue, needless to say.  I went back and reread the long-forgotten proposal a decade ago, and was surprised anew by how perverse and hilarious it was, if I do say so myself; it also featured a number of off-the-wall takes on "life in the Matrix" that were more fun than anything in the Matrix sequels, IMHO.    

(Note that a bunch of the character designs above were very clearly influenced by the work of manga artist Hiroaki Samura, of Blade of the Immortal fame.)

I wrote up a partial script and some layouts, and devised some vague plans of having Rick Mays draw the story but, as so often happens, the  proposal just sorta... wound down.  I gather that my story idea was  probably too long for The Matrix Online's format restrictions, but I'm not entirely sure, as I never heard from my contact at RedPill again.  Oh, well.  

Recently unearthed a rough for the story's very first page:

The maddening part is, I still quite like this story, and its massively, epically effed-up heroine... but the narrative is so extensively rooted in the Matrix milieu that I've  never figured out a way to transplant it into another setting without ripping off the Wachowskis. Oh, well, again. 

Whaddaya think, folks?  (Sorry about the slightly crappy repro quality of some of the character designs, as they were scanned from faxes(!) that are the only versions I could dig up.)