LAYOUTS FROM AN OLD SF-ADJACENT PROJECT: Chapter 4, pt. 3! (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 #4. pages 11-15. as SHIELD has just been alerted to the supposedly "rogue" Iron Man armor's presence at an undersea "mecha party":

 Sharpies ahoy!

 No idea if such a localized form of supercavitation is even remotely viable, but what the heck.

Ehh, probably should've added narrative captions clarifying these potentially unclear fight-scene images; oh, well.

 For the record, that last panel's bit re: percentage of simultaneously firing neurons has nothing whatsoever to do with the old myth claiming that "humans use only 10% of the brain," blah blah blah. Instead, that line was based on an short but compelling piece by the science writer Carl Zimmer (of Parasite Rex fame, which directly inspired endless SF and horror riffs) not only debunking that 10% goofiness but addressing a rather different neural limitation, which you can read here.

Of course, that didn't stop a number of readers from assuming that I was in fact invoking the 10% myth; at least one such reader also misinterpreted the underwater railgun sequence that follows, as I'll address with our next installment (if I can dig up the relevant blog post from 2005).

To be continued!

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?