My way-too-tight layouts for "Unnamed Robot Comic" issue #6, pt.4: THE END, folks! (Patreon)

UPDATE: Here's a link to our previous installment from a month ago (oops), 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; earlier in the issue, she'd just finished a grotesque hacking of her own AI to alter her personality freely. As our previous excerpt ended, "Stemmie" confronted the hivemind of Furybots alone, but with a knowing smile on her lips as her desperate plan comes to fiery fruition...)

Behold, after a lengthy delay, the penultimate set of my layouts for issue #6 of 2004's Marvel mecha-team miniseries Livewires (link no doubt rendered useless by the 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've reached the conclusion of the three-issue action epic that took up the rest of the miniseries; ah, but we've also wrapped up a three-issue arc in which I drew 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 (or three) I'll show you fine folks another Work Stages dealie showing the pages I wound up drawing from the gallery above, including pencils, inks and colors. (UPDATE: Sorry, no colors, as I have no such jpegs for this issue.) Wheeee!

A few words on the closing pages:

Always liked this miniseries-closing scene, gotta say. (The high-contrast lighting appeals to me greatly, which no doubt heightens my appreciation for the sequence.)

Dunno if I ever gave the Livewire in panel 4 above a proper code name...

...and that's where we leave Livewires, folks. Circa 2016, I wrote and drew a Deadpool Annual story co-starring Gothic Lolita, who clearly did have her pigtails (and the rest of her) restored after the miniseries ended. A few years later, I did a cover for a Black Panther-related title (posted here somewhere, way back in the archives) written by my bud Jim Zub, which featured at least some of the Livewires as puppeted machines dealt with summarily by T'Challa's team of, well, "real" Marvel characters, if you catch my drift.

Other than that, though, the Livewires are gone but not entirely forgotten, as a published yet still arguably failed project. (Oh, well; perils of being a creator whose work, to be blunt, has never quite resonated strongly or widely enough to garner sustained mainstream success in my field.) Come to think of it, for some future Friday I might try to dig up the long-defunct pitch for a time-travel-based original comic from which at least a few of the Livewire characters were derived. Yay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, as my post buffer is presently next to nonexistent; but as I am indeed rolling with every-weekday posts to finish off the month of September, you should see something tomorrow.