FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: 3-page preview of DIRTY PAIR: QUICK & DIRTY! (Patreon)

For this week's Failed-Project Friday, here's a three-page excerpt from an old 48-page Dirty Pair story that I'll begin serializing on this here Patreon at some point in the next few months. (Looking at these somewhat gray jpegs, I'll need to punch up the contrast levels in Photoshop a bit before I start the formal serialization.)

2004's Dirty Pair: Quick & Dirty is a bit of an odd duck, as it's 48-pager effectively drawn in a proto-Empowered format, but just before I figured out that I could produce comics shot directly from my penciled layout pages. (This story's scans date back to January of 2004; the first pages of what would become Empowered were drawn in July of 2004.) Yes, folks, these are theoretically layout pages, believe it or not—or at least I think so, as my reasoning from this time period remains fairly opaque to Present-Day Me.

With Quick & Dirty, I was just trying to get Dark Horse interested in doing more Dirty Pair comics, probably with other artists drawing 'em. (Maybe.) Honestly, I'm not sure if I intended this story to ever be published in this form. If we ever get clearance from the Japanese license holders to reprint my old DP work, this story will be included in that collection. 

Quick & Dirty is a wacky li'l episode indeed, featuring Kei & Yuri trying to access and capture the leader of a vast conspiracy that calls itself, well, The Vast Conspiracy.  Another goofy bit: The Thug-a-licious™ mass-produced goons all use "the terminal yo" at the end of their lines in a riff done, I suspect, just to further annoy dudes complaining about my use of the terminal yo in Gen13. (As I used to say, "Hey, online complainers, if the terminal yo is good enough for Jesse Pinkman and Junot Diaz, it's good enough for you, yo." )

I suppose I should warn you that this was a time of particular excess in my artwork, not that I was drawing all that much in 2004.  (At that time, I was still hoping to only have to write comics full-time, not draw 'em.) Big Pouty Lips stalked the land, along with notably large racks on Kei & Yuri; you can also see early examples of what I now call the Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch, an odd, wasp-waisted flourish of cartooniness that would loom large in early Empowered.

Anyhoo, I'm no longer sure of the details, but Dark Horse wasn't interested in whatever the hell hare-brained scheme I presented to 'em regarding more Dirty Pair projects.  This wasn't an unreasonable rejection on their part, either, as we were never able to get any artists other than me approved by Studio Nue (the license holders) to draw the DP. Them's the breaks of screwing around with projects that aren't fully creator-owned, folks. Live and learn! (Which I finally did, as my first such project would kick off in the summer of 2004 with Empowered's early pages.)