DISTRESSED DAMSELS: "Cocktail Dress Distress," pt.1

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. 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 soon-tattered cocktail dress.

As we're about to see, the first few pages of this story fragment were redrawn from a very similar few pages I'd drawn years before for another commissioner. I can't find the first page of the original, but below is the second:

Not sure what the deal was with Rando Blonde above, as she doesn't appear to be based on any particular character I can recall. (As opposed to Cory Emerson from Dirty Pair: Plague of Angels and Run from the Future, who will appear in a number of upcoming DiD illos and story pages as an early version of Emp in distress.)

I'm pretty sure I did at least a few other illos or comic pages from this vague Rando Blonde scenario, but haven't been able to dig 'em up as yet. I can tell you that her white (or at least shiny) dress was doing my rendering scheme no favors, as my pencil work needs higher-contrast values to really shine.

So, quite a few years later, when I drew another take on the same scenario with Kei in 2004, I made sure that her dress would wind up high-contrast as all get-out.

Quite the set of super-duper pouty lips in that "sorry about the dress" panel, huh?

The weird thing is, I'm fairly sure that the Rando Blonde original version of page 1 had a slightly different and possibly better layout, but I can't find the g-d thing to make sure, or to figure out why I made the changes.

Below, brace for the dreaded "Escher girl" twisty-torso pose in panel 1. While I spruced up a fair bit of the artwork from the Rando Blonde version, I didn't elect to do anything about that rather serpentine torso. (Not that the client was likely to complain.) 

The smartcuffs do seem to indicate that we're in a halfway viable "real" Dirty Pair setting, I suppose.

In panel 1 below, note that I have always had extreme difficulty in drawing the pose of a woman lying on her side; even today, with photoreference at hand, I can't consistently pull off the hip and torso tilt generated by this oddly difficult pose.

In panel 2 above, note that, by this time, I was putting a bit more artistic effort into semi-accurately depicting a skintight dress on a "toothsome rump" (per Empowered's Caged Demonwolf), as opposed to the final Rando Blonde panel above. Uh, yay for artistic integrity, I guess?

As noted earlier, with panel 3 the oft-mentioned Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch seen in early Empowered was well in effect, as this story seems to have been drawn in December 2004, well after the first round of proto-Emp comics were created. Note that this sucker has some of the most finished artwork I'd ever do for these commissions; I can think of maybe only one other episode ("Yuri vs. Shortie") boasting pencils anywhere near this tight.

This story fragment is 12 pages long in total, so I'll be posting 3pp of it per week, along with a few extra DiD pieces each time. Hope that's enough weekly damsel content for y'all for a bit!

NEXT WEEK ON "COCKTAIL DRESS DISTRESS": Poor Kei finds herself foiled by her own "smart dress," as we'll see in a brief flashback. Can she remember the g-d passphrase to free herself?

TOMORROW: Time for another excerpt from the Twitter-format prose experiment I Am Empowered, folks!