My way-too-tight layouts for "Unnamed Robot Comic" issue #2, pt.5! (Patreon)

(UPDATE: Here's a link to our previous installment, in case you'd forgotten what the heck was going on in the issue's narrative.)

Behold, the rest of my layouts for issue #1 of 2004's Marvel mecha-team miniseries Livewires, titled here as "Unnamed Robot Comic" as I'm more than a tad dubious about identifying this series of posts publicly. Keep this to yourselves, won't you? (The joke of using the title "Unnamed Robot Comic", by the way, is that Livewires' mecha protagonists consider the term "robot" to be an offensive slur.)

The final art on the series was done by my old bud Rick Mays, but as you can see I cranked out insanely tight, fully dialogued, Sharpie-and-pencils layout pages for the series ahead of time; not only was this approach a faaaar from cost-effective use of my worktime, but in retrospect I feel that these layouts constricted Rick from drawing the beautiful faces and figure work he produced for other books. (Oh, well.)

BTW, with this sequence mentioning Life Model Decoy Nick Fury (and setting up future plot points)...

...let's pour one out for the long-defunct microbrewery Devil Mountain, whose products included the Devil Mountain Pale Ale mentioned in panels 2 & 3 above. (I was a big fan back in 2004, but I think their product line ceased while I still finishing up the miniseries.)

Interestingly enough, in Empowered vol. 12 I'm about to the revisit the same flashback concept of "present-day characters appearing directly in a memory" seen here. I thought that I was homaging a similar riff I recently saw in the late Satoshi Kon's anime Millennium Actress (which I hadn't checked out until a few months ago), but it turns out that 2004 Me had already covered the concept 17 years ago. Nicely done, Past Me! 

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Who knows what might go up next? At the moment, not even me, thanks to the semi-randomized "M/W/F+" posting schedule! Golly!