DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Rose & Lily vs. Troops, THE (INCONCLUSIVE) END! (Patreon)

Wellp, the ultimately tragic tale of Kei & Y-- uh, Rose & Lily's struggles against the hapless "Troops" wheezes to its welcome if inconclusive ending with these pages, as I haven't been able to dig up the remaining pages. Nor am I likely to spend much time looking for 'em, TBH, after our previous, now-deleted excerpt of Rose & Lily's tale wound up getting flagged by Patreon Trust & Safety as "content glorifying sexual violence." ( I should've guessed that this sketchier-than-usual commissioned story would've ended up biting me in the butt.)

Anyhoo, to cut & paste for context: These are more pages from a commissioned Dirty Pair comic story in proto-Empowered format, created back in 2003 during a time when I assumed that I wouldn't be drawing comics professionally any more, due to my disenchantment with struggling through conventionally penciled and inked comic pages.

In retrospect, I clearly still wanted to draw as well as write comics at this time, but not via the slow, grinding, miserably tedious work process I had largely abandoned; only a year or two later, I would belatedly figure out that I could, in fact, publish comics in this pencil-based "tight layouts" format, and Empowered would result.

So this final, quite lengthy damsel-in-distress commission wound up being this close to a real Dirty Pair story, as it included many more of the "techy" elements from my actual DP continuity than most of these DiD pieces, yet still featured the rather unlikely situations, heightened cheesecake levels, and distinct costuming—that is, the high-heeled boots—of a damsel-y DP scenario or simulation.

A few words:

Kei-- nay, Rose finally blazes into action after quite truly playing the distressed damsel's role up until this point. Yay!

Panel 3: I've always had tremendous difficulty depicting the g-d hips correctly when a female character is lying on her side; I certainly didn't pull it off this time, needless to say.

Yeahp, it's the ol' Raising Arizona stunt with the pulled grenade pin. An oldie but a goodie, folks! (As reused in a nearly 20-year-old story, of course.)

Cheesecake aplenty! Well, no s**t, as that was why I got paid for the g-d commission in the first place.

After this, IIRC, another bad guy hassles poor Rose (as hinted in the final panel), but Lily kinda-sorta rescues her. Anyhoo, that's all I got from this ill-fated story, folks. (Man, I really should've listened to my own misgivings and not posted this often sketchy-ass commission; oh, well. Taught me a valuable if unpleasant lesson about Patreon, in any event.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Ehh, another update of my 2018 Manga March Madness brackets will likely go up shortly, followed by a more substantive post on Monday. 

UPDATE: Looks like said post will be the final new page drawn for Empowered vol. 12, as opposed to what I thought was the final new page I drew a week ago. (I wound up having to draw and hand-letter a new title page for the main storyline, as opposed to the Photoshoppery-intensive, font-based title page I originally had in mind.)