My way-too-tight layouts for "Unnamed Robot Comic" issue #3, pt.1 (plus a li'l EMPOWERED)! (Patreon)

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

Behold, the first set of my layouts for issue #3 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.)

Page 2 of these layouts proved especially fateful, as that's when Livewires' Social Butterfly alters herself slightly to appeal to the target by lengthening her hair, empoutening her lips and pumping up her chest "a skosh", as seen below: 

The fateful bit, here, is that a few weeks later, while I was waiting on editorial approvals for the issue's cover art over the July 4th weekend of 2004, this variant iteration of Social miiiiiight just have influenced the character design for a hapless superheroine drawn in a tossed-off, one-off joke comic over the holiday:

The "one-off" bit proved untrue, as I did another one-pager with the character later on in the weekend:

And yeahp, these two cranked-out shorts would one day evolve into Empowered. Yay!

Anyhoo, stand by for more Unnamed Robot Comic layouts later in the month, okay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON:  Stand by for a weekend bonus post of I Am Empowered, folks! As for next week, at the moment I'm not quite sure what's going up when, thanks to the semi-randomized "M/W/F+" posting schedule.