DIRTY PAIR: QUICK & DIRTY, part 1 (a 2003 layout-page-only story)!

(Welcome, all Patrons and the general public! Future installments of this story's serialization will be available to the $3 tiers and higher.)

Folks, here are the first six layout(?) pages of an unpublished, 48-page story titled Dirty Pair: Quick & Dirty that I wrote and drew back in late 2003. 

My reasons for creating this story—and for drawing it in this rather odd, proto-Empowered "tight layout page" format—now seem hazy and unclear to me. At a time when my (ahem) "career" in comics was not going well at all and I was flailing around desperately for work—as opposed to nowadays, when I'm still flailing around desperately for work!—I believe that I was trying to interest Dark Horse in doing more Dirty Pair comics, around the time that the DP license was about to expire, or possibly already had. 

Ah, but did I intend to have Quick and Dirty eventually published in some more finished form? Almost certainly not, as I'd abandoned any attempts at creating comics in a conventional comics format after 1999-2000's miniseries Dirty Pair: Run from the Future. My godawful work technique back then—loose roughs, extraordinarily tight layout pages like the ones above, then recopied and even tighter pencils on Bristol board, then finished inks, then color guides for a separate colorist—had become so maddeningly slow and repetitive that I swore off drawing comics after Run from the Future's miserable work experience.

I think my intention was to show Dark Horse that this was the sort of Dirty Pair story I would write for other artists to draw, but nothing came of this admittedly rather puzzling effort, as I'm fairly sure I just couldn't get any other artists approved by the Japanese license-holders to draw these (theoretical) books. 

I wound up paying dearly for not investing in myself and creating wholly creator-owned comics earlier in my career, folks; let this be a lesson to all and sundry! Work-for-hire at handsome mainstream page rates is one thing (which I'm still interested in doing, from time to time), but investing decades of my life on a pseudo-creator-owned property that, importantly, I didn't actually own was an incredibly foolish choice on my part.  

What does seem clear to me now is that I still wanted to write and draw comics, but without the stifling repetition of my old work approach. After Quick and Dirty, I began to realize that, hey, maybe a comic's art could be reproduced from tight layout pages along these lines—and by the summer of the next year, I started scribbling the first stories that would eventually evolve into Empowered, my (still-)ongoing, creator-owned "sexy superhero comedy" series.  

I'll never draw another published Dirty Pair project, though in theory I wouldn't mind writing one.  In reality, that's really not likely to happen, as Dark Horse hasn't been able to get approval to reprint my old DP work, let alone get new projects rolling. I do hope to write and even draw new SF-oriented comics down the road, though. 

And now, a few words about the pages:

Apparently I liked drawing an orca-bodied posthuman in Dirty Pair: Run from the Future, so here's another one! Also, stand by to read the first of many, many alternate epithets referring to Kei and Yuri throughout the story, as clearly the Maximum Leader (TM) experienced a truly unfortunate previous encounter with our as-yet-unseen heroines.

Be warned, this is a pretty wordy story. And also be warned that you'd best be able to tolerate very heavy doses of "the terminal yo," per Jesse Pinkman, yo. (What can I say, the terminal yo has always amused me to no end, yo.)

I still rather like the "orca progression" sequence, gotta say.

These pages were drawn around the time that the transient but conspicuous phenomenon I've dubbed "The Mysteriously Intermittent, Post-Millennial Torso Glitch" was active in my work, so brace yourselves for some frankly wonky, cartoonishly wasp-waisted, serpentine figure work on Kei and Yuri. (Also, Big Pouty Lips, big chests, and small noses.)

I still like the "all-sound-FX" approach on this page, before all hell breaks loose.

In future installments, I'll likely serialize only four or five pages at a time, but I wanted to get to Kei & Yuri's first full appearance in this initial post. Patreon serialization of Dirty Pair: Quick and Dirty will continue on a weekly basis (amidst the other daily posts).

Tomorrow on this here Patreon: Time for another dose of vintage con sketches, as last week's early-2000s sketch dump received probably the most reaction I've ever had to a single Patreon post. Yay!