LAYOUTS FROM AN OLD SF-ADJACENT PROJECT: Chapter 3, pt. 4! (Patreon)

[Here's a link to our previous installment in this series.]

So, yeahp, I'm serializing my insanely tight layout pages for the 2005 Marvel miniseries Iron Man: Hypervelocity, the first issue of which I wrote and laid out long before an artist had been chosen;  of course, the great Brian Denham wound up tackling the art for the project, but I had already rolled with these time-consuming roughs out of, I dunno, sheer perfectionism and unhinged micro-managing.

Either that, or these layouts represented the sum total of artwork I actually wanted to produce for this project. As I've noted here before, cranking out finished artwork is the bane of my g-d existence as an artist; I like (or even occasionally love) drawing loose, relatively spontaneous comic pages like this, but bog down toute suite upon having to painstakingly render my usual tight and precise completed artwork.

Even though we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of Hypervelocity's creation, I am loath to publicly acknowledge to non-Patrons that I'm serializing these layouts here, hence the "Old SF-Adjacent Project" monicker.

Anyhoo, onward to Hypervelocity issue #3's pages 18 through 22:

Note that this concept is based on real-world supercavitating torpedoes. Yay?

The misspelled(?) kana for okaeri nasai is, of course, a reference to  the ending of Gainax's classic anime Gunbuster: Aim for the Top!

Some mecha imagery homaging the work of the late, great Yasushi Nirasawa in panel 3 above, you'll note.

Say, who's that in panel 1 below?

Yeahp, it's  Social Butterfly and Gothic Lolita from the previous year's miniseries Livewires, of course!

Panel 4: Absynthe's "ara" (in hiragana) obvsly long predates the current-day meme status of "ara ara."

Wellp, this is a fine point to pause serialization, as we move on to the action-intensive issue #4's layouts in another two weeks or so.

 NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?