DISTRESSED DAMSELS: "Cocktail Dress Distress" pt.4

(You can check out the previous pages of this story fragment here.) 

Per your votes in a recent Patreon poll, here's the second-highest-rated option from said tally, which is yet another incomplete commissioned DiD story in proto-Empowered pencil format, dating from 2004 or so. This time around, a shockingly easy-to-subdue Kei gets gassed, gagged and trussed up by an unnamed Bad Girl whilst (presumably)  snooping around at a hoity-toity party, hence the quickly tattered cocktail dress. But Kei turned the tables on said Bad Girl in the previous few pages, only to escape into the hall and stumble into the strapping lad above. 

A few words:

Okay, panel 3 looks a tad iffy...

A fair number of the upcoming Dirty Pair-based commissioned stories feature fight scenes with partially tied heroines, and I gotta say that those bits are a refreshing change of pace from just drawing damsels flopping around helplessly, which does tend to get repetitive in a hurry. (One scene even has Yuri fighting with her legs bound as well, which pushes this riff to an extreme.) 

A belt with voice recognition technology!  A bigger question, really, would be what technology is represented by the hexagonal garter stays on Kei's stockings. 

Strapping Lad's wavy, brillantined-looking hairstyle is a very specific character-desgn riff that's quite unusual for my work, so I clearly put some extra effort into drawing this fella, but I can't remember exactly why I might've done so. 

Note that, after a random scene in Dirty Pair: Run from the Future that featured Kei resetting the pigmentation on her irises, I'd decided to roll with her eyes now being green, instead of the brown coloration I'd previously used. (Hence the "green eyes and garters" bit; points to Strapping Lad, BTW, for actually being able to notice Kei's eye color when the rest of her eyecatching ensemble might have distracted a less observant male.)  

And that's it for the story fragment that was "Kei's Cocktail Dress Distress," folks, as I presumably shelved this commission after hitting the patron's page limit, or perhaps was switching over to full-time work on early Empowered by this point in 2004.

Next week, I'll probably go back to the poll I put up a few months ago and see which commissioned story option ranked #3 in your collective estimation. Or would you like to see something different? I could post s'more DiD sketch sets new(-ish) or old, or perhaps keep posting some of my older damsel-related con sketches. Lemme know what you'd prefer, okay?

Tomorrow on this here Patreon: No idea what the heck I'm gonna post tomorrow. Let's find out together, shall we?