FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: EMPOWERED AND THE MASK CITY MELTDOWN (pt.4): Guest Artist cover art! (Patreon)

Behold, the initial work stages on the cover illo for issue #1 of an abortive two-part Guest Artist miniseries titled Empowered and the Mask City Meltdown, which I initially wrote with one particular artist in mind back in 2017 or so; alas, that first artist didn't end up working on it, so I pitched it to the excellent artist Rob "Robaato" Porter, who had earlier colored a bunch of Emp covers for me.

Alas, we never never quite able to get the miniseries' scheduling worked out, so Rob had to bow out of the gig... but not before doing some preliminary art for the issue #1 cover, based on my rough seen in an earlier post. I worked up some suggestions & correx based on his first draft, which led to this nearly final image:

Bit of an old-school Ms. Marvel feel to that Emp, huh? Nice!

Anyhoo, the last two pics in the gallery above (after my initial rough, which I just tacked on) were Rob's tests on doing some "damsel in distress" imagery in both B&W...

...and in color:

Once again, nice! (Oh, well.)

After Rob had to turn it down, I abandoned the project entirely, though I did briefly consider drawing it myself as part of Empowered vol. 12, a plan which was soon abandoned in turn as I had no interest whatsoever in drawing all the many, many urban environments this story would've required.

Howeva, guess what? I'm going to begin serializing Empowered and the Mask City Meltdown on this here Patreon later on in the month, using my freakishly tight three-color(!) page roughs and excerpts from my full scripts for the two issues. Yay? (FWIW, the story does feature some funky revelations about the nature of Emp's nameless city, and also hints at a change to the series' status quo that's a key feature of Empowered vol. 12.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, as my post buffer is presently nonexistent, but you can rest assured that something will be going up on Monday.