Distressed damsels: 1999-ish con sketches, pt.1 (Patreon)

For the most part, I only have photocopies of my older con sketches, but for these 1999-era pieces, a commissioner from Back In The Fabled Day sent along scans of the original pencils. To be honest, photocopies might be better, as these pencils are surprisingly light and low-contrast; I had to level-adjust them in Photoshop to a far more pronounced degree than I normally use with contemporary graphite-based images.  

Anyhoo, as you can see, "damsel-in-distress" pics have constituted a fairly constant portion of my commissions at conventions for over twenty years, most of which featured Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair in distressing situations. Most of these images are rather far from being "in-continuity" for my version of the DP, as the comics' heavily augmented and cyberpunked-up Kei and Yuri would presumably be a lot less easily damseled by low-tech means. (Hilariously enough, a Patron spotted an actual, in-continuity rationale for this content, which I'll have to scan out of the relevant Dirty Pair volume and post here sometime.) 

The last sketch is a notable exception, though, as it's based on a scene from Dirty Pair: Sim Hell #3 in which the real Lovely Angels run afoul of "Lord Sleet's" virtual harem of Kei and Yuri copies, but here featuring our heroines with gags, per sketch request. In an odd bit of trivia, the original scene was supposed to feature Kei and Yuri gagged like this, as the straightforwardly misogynistic "Lord Sleet" would've had no particular interest in listening to their backtalk; however, at the time that seemed like a bit too much DiD content for a mainstream book, so I left that element off.

The Pint-Size Ninja Platoon from illos #2 and 3 was a goofy-ass concept I broke out for a whole bunch of DP DiD pieces; in fact, I did a couple of stories—okay, "stories" in quotation marks—in a proto-Empowered format featuring these wacky little dudes. (You'll see those here on a future DiD Wednesday, never fear.) Note that the Pint-Size Ninjas made an Empowered appearance in an unpublished page seen here a while back: