LAYOUTS FROM AN OLD SF-ADJACENT PROJECT: Chapter 4, 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 #4. pages 17-22. as SHIELD has been alerted to the supposedly "rogue" Iron Man armor's presence at an undersea "mecha party"; we left off with page 16 as a railgun was being fired (again) at Tony Stark 2.0:

Kinda needed the setup for this first panel of page 17:

 In an odd footnote to this page, futurist Anders Sandberg did a review of sorts of Hypervelocity back in 2007, with a footnote explaining in detail how difficult it would be for the armor to catch a railgun projectile; however, he missed the point that this scene was occurring underwater, as the captions (hopefully) indicated. (Oh, well.)

This was notable to me because his blog was one of the very first websites i regularly visited when I first went online sometime in the 90s, via a friend's AOL account; I can still hear the three-step dial-up connection being established, BTW.

Onward!

Ehh, probably should've added narrative captions to those last five(!) panels.

 Dunno if that "Tonyslut" line made it into the final version, let alone the razor blade in Absynthe's mouth.

 Onward!

 Brace for cliffhanger!

The rationale for the random bursts of foreign languages in Absynthe's dialogue will be explained later on in the next issue of Iron Man: Hypervelocity, never fear. Speaking of which, we'll kick off serialization of issue #5's layouts later this month, okay?

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?