Distressed Damsels: Origins of EMPOWERED's ARR! (Advanced Restraint Research) exoframes (Patreon)

Following up on last week's DiD post about the genesis of Dirty Pair's tape drones (which went on to be a ubiquitous bondage trope after being popularized by other artists), here's another example of DP ultra-tech gear—likewise created by me for a series of unpublished commissions—that went on to a second life.

Anyhoo, sometime in the late 90s (judging by the DP's hairstyles, suits and nose designs), I cranked out the sketches above for a commissioner who wanted a generic "Kei 'n' Yuri in distress" scenario,for which I worked up the idea of an exoskeleton used for restraint purposes. This might be a reference to the exo worn by the bad guy (Streib?) in Dirty Pair's first miniseries, Biohazards, which in turn I likely borrowed from a riff in a William Gibson SF novel. (Can't remember which book that might be, though; probably Neuromancer or Count Zero, I assume. Or maybe Burning Chrome?)

For the record, the DP sketches were drawn on the backs of folded 11" X 17" photocopies of Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy penciled pages, which is why you can see faint patterns in the paper, and also why the scans don't quite line up along the paper's fold lines in a few places. Why, I oughta see about scanning and posting those photocopies sometime, come to think of it!)

Between these exoframes and the earlier tape drones, by this point in the 90s it had begun to occur to me how easily and creatively SF future-tech could be used to restrain targets—not just for mildly kinky DiD content, but as practical in-universe tactics. The non-lethal hardware used by Kei and Yuri in my final published DP series, Run from the Future, all spun out of this concept; using fancy guns to blast or burn holes through foes seemed to me to be a rather crude way to do things, when you could take 'em out non-lethally with ultra-tech gear.

Wellp, years later, for my DiD-commission-spawned "sexy superhero comedy" Empowered, I created an entire supervillainous operation based on that concept—which would be, of course, the pirate-themed doofi of Advanced Restraint Research, who first appeared in the vol.3 story excerpted above. And lo, the restraint exoframes from those long-ago DP sketches reappeared to torment poor Emp! 

Interestingly, quite a few concepts from old DP DiD con sketches and commissions reappeared in Empowered, some of which I'd forgotten entirely. (Most shocking to me is that Ninjette's first encounter with Emp in vol.1 uses poses and choreography derived from a series of sketches featuring Kei squaring off with—brace yourselves—GoGo Yubari from Tarantino's Kill Bill vol. 1. No, really!) If I can dig up scans of that old material, I'll post it here on some Wednesday in the future. 

Aaaand I just blew 1.5 hours working up this g-d post. Lordy loo! Not the most cost-effective use of my worktime, must admit. "Sigh," to quote Emp.