My way-too-tight layouts for "Unnamed Robot Comic" issue #6, pt.1! (Patreon)

UPDATE: Here's a link to our previous installment, in case you'd forgotten what the heck was going on in the series. By this point in our increasingly grim and seemingly hopeless story, only Stem Cell was left to carry on the Livewires' quixotic mission.)

UPDATE #2: Whoops, accidentally tacked on an incorrect page from issue #5 at the end of the gallery; fixed, now.

Behold, the first set of my layouts (plus cover and initial cover rough) for issue #6 of 2004's Marvel mecha-team miniseries Livewires (link no doubt rendered useless by the recent utter bollixing of Comixology), titled here as "Unnamed Robot Comic" due to the fact that 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 (and the fine inker Jason Martin and the coloring studio Guru eFX, lest I forget), 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.)

Anyhoo, with this set of Unnamed Robot Comic layouts, we're continuing serialization of the three-issue action epic that takes up the rest of the miniseries. Death and destruction await! Ah, but we're also well into a three-issue arc in which I started drawing a fair chunk of the comic myself, both due to deadline issues for Rick and also (mainly) because the story started featuring heavy-duty, technically complex scenes of ultra-tech hardware that weren't his strong suit.

So, following up on this post, within a week or two I'll show you folks another Work Stages dealie showing the pages I wound up drawing from the gallery above, including pencils, inks and colors. Wheeee!

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, due to the semi-randomized M/W/F posting schedule I'm using nowadays. Let's find out together, shall we?