DISTRESSED DAMSELS: "Sticky Situations," pt.2 (Patreon)

With this week's post, we're continuing serialization of a 2003-ish commissioned story featuring my iteration of Dirty Pair's Yuri that I've actually considered redoing as an Empowered episode, for reasons that will eventually become obvious.  

You can check out the previous installment of this goofy narrative here.

(Perhaps I should point out that Yuri is canonically 19 years old, and definitely looks so in my version of the character, in response to the warning that's popped up again onscreen as I prep this post: "Patreon doesn't allow the featuring of seemingly underage characters in the context of adult content." Not sure if everyone's getting this warning, or just manga/anime-influenced artists...)

Howeva, a few words about the genesis of this story, starting out with the random con sketches that inspired it, starting below:

I can't recall if the commissioner from this 2000-ish con sketch actually requested notoriously goofy Marvel supervillain Paste-Pot Pete (later renamed "the Trapster," disappointingly enough) victimizing the "hot pants & garter belts" version of Kei and Yuri, or if I decided to inflict ol' Pete on an unsuspecting fellow who just wanted a DP DiD piece.

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten the riff that the "smartcloth" of DP's hot pants featured warning messages, however useless those messages might be. 

Anyhoo, another longtime regular patron (though not yet a capitalized Patron) was amused by these sketches, and circa 2003 asked for a longer-form Paste-Pot Pete encounter of some sort. And lo, thus did the longest of all these commissioned, proto-Empowered comics begin— and even more amazing, this wound up being the only such narrative with a definitive conclusion. No, really!

And now, a few words about the pages:

Panel 2: Yeahp, in case you folks hadn't figured this out, the commissioned DiD story versions of Kei and Yuri wear high heels instead of the clunky boots I drew in this era of the DP. Also, as seen in this panel, I was trotting out some notably exaggerated anatomy for Yuri in part because, well, very few people were ever gonna see these pages.  (Whoops!)

Not sure how a strand of glue stretched across a walkway counts as a "trap," but what the heck. (In fact, as you'll eventually see by the end of the story, a rationale does exist for this story's bondage-related improbabilities.)

Dang, but that is a lot of perspective drawing and background work for one of these goofy-ass commissioned comics. Hard to believe! The notable appearance of the almost Shane Glines-esque Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch (which lingered into the early Empowered chapters that I'd be drawing in 2004) on the often wasp-waisted Yuri is not so hard to believe.

Again, that's a lot of perspective drawing in panel 1, given that the patron wasn't especially interested in environmental work. Also, note in the last panel another bit of cartoonish anatomical exaggeration from this era—I would occasionally draw high-heeled damsel's lower legs with considerable elongation, though not on purpose. Hey, I was just wingin' it in these never-to-be-published pages, to put it mildly

Anyhoo, next week the gluey shenanigans roll onward, with Yuri tumbling into quite genuine peril. Look out, Lovely Angel! 

TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON:  I'm continuing serialization of the Twitter-format prose experiment I Am Empowered, which tells tales of Emp's Year One-ish earliest adventures from her first-person POV.