DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Rose & Lily vs. linen-finish cardstock, pt.3! (Patreon)

(Our previous installment can be seen here.)

Behold, the abrupt and incomplete ending of a comic-format oddity from the year 2000 or so, as I recently unearthed what is probably a "dual-purpose" or "double-dipping" commissioned comic featuring Dirty Pair's Kei and Y--nay, Rose & Lily once again bedamseled all too easily, presumably in a nonsensical sim of some sort.

The "dual purpose" bit, here, is that I was probably doing this short story in part as a test for drawing comics on the linen-finish cardstock that I had been using for my more pin-uppy con sketches throughout the 90s. I did wind up doing a few brief comic sequences via this medium in Dirty Pair and Gen13, but eventually soured on the technique and never revisited it at any great length.

A few words:

A g-d nine-panel page layout on a commissioned story like this is quite the rarity, gotta say. Even more amazing is the fact that I rendered such fine detail on the "Lily frees herself" panels via the decidedly low-resolution medium of linen-finish cardstock, as the paper's  cloth pattern generally frustrated such attempts.

Also, gotta love those amusingly futile messages displayed on Rose & Lily's hot pants; then again, these poor girls are so distress-prone that such messaging is no doubt the default mode for their outfits.

Note that 2000-Era Me grew tired of the hot-pants messaging with this page, and left it blank. Note also the extremely stylized close-up on Lily in panel 5; in the years to come, I wound up changing my approach to character design quite a bit.

Panel 5's Lily pose looks like an homage to a mildly infamous shot from Gunsmith Cats of May getting flung against a wall; IIRC, I referenced the same pose in the second Dirty Pair miniseries in a somewhat obnoxious gesture to tweak a censorious editor at the time.

Not sure what happened to the pseudo-Hangman fella's dialogue in panels 4 & 5, but I'm sure you're not missing much of anything, folks.

Anyhoo, that's the end of this incomplete "story" in finished-page form, though I think that I roughed out a few more pages in sketchy layout format; if I ever dig up those roughs, I'll probably post 'em here, assuming they're reasonably legible.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON:  As 2021 closes out with a full, five-day week of posts, time for me to cram in one more Life Drawings installment into the month of December.

On the damsel-y front, Biggest Spenders of the $10 & $20 tiers can expect their Monthly Exclusive Bonus Post on Friday to feature s'more DiD material, as I did at least one recent art-req sketch set (of several) that was all-DiD.

Next year, you can expect to see one more early-2000s Rose & Lily epic, proto-Empowered commissioned story to be serialized here; after that, I'll have pretty much exhausted the supply of old comic-format DiD material. (Oh, well.)