FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: The rest of those layouts from a freshly failed comic project! (Patreon)

[Our previous sneak preview of this now-defunct project can be seen here.]

So!

Back on November 27, I posted a sneak preview of a one-shot I had recently finished work on. To repeat from my earlier post, I got an offer from Udon Productions to write a Street Fighter one-shot featuring the popular, kinda-sorta-new-to-me character "Juri."  As I am rarely if ever offered the opportunity by any company to even pitch on writing a comic, I jumped at the chance to dip my toe into the "writing-only"  end of comics production again.

Anyhoo, I worked up a story idea, crafted it into a two-page pitch synopsis, and sent that along to Udon to (eventually) get approval from the license holders at Capcom. Ah, but in the meantime, I got fired up about the prospect of working solely as a writer for a li'l bit, as opposed to the seemingly endless and so far fruitless effort to develop a viable "digital workflow" process for projects I would draw myself.

So, in what I thought was a properly calculated risk, I optimistically proceeded to lay out all the one-shot's pages and then worked up all the dialogue and panel descriptions into a finished script. I went even further to redraw my loose page layouts into a series of tight, partially colored thumbnails, as seen here years ago in earlier posts on projects Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell and the abortive Empowered and the Mask City Meltdown:

That's the "quad layout" format (on a single 8.5" X 11" piece of paper) that I use for these partially colored thumbnails. I previously showed pp. 13 & 14 as separate images in our previous post, so here's page 15 "popped out":

Vicious self-criticism ensues as new and improved clone "Neo-Juri" attacks OG Juri both verbally and physically, before the original version finally prevails:

Our next "quad layout" for pp. 17-20:

Yeahp, emotionally and psychologically unstable action heroines ranting maniacally while meting out ultraviolence might just be a bit of recurring motif in mon oeuvre, folks.

I was definitely having fun with the fight scenes and beatdowns by this point, gotta say.

I was also coming around on the appeal of Juri as a character, I also gotta say. (In fact, before disaster later struck, I was even considering pitching Udon on a further Juri miniseries.)

My beloved high-contrast imagery strikes again, along with my likewise beloved riff of "sound FX conveying off-panel destruction."

Above is arguably my favorite page from the one-shot!

Below, a two-page layout finishes off the story:

And the isolated final pages:

Note that the caption reading "THE END" was of course a fakeout, as one more page followed:

Someday down the road, I'll likely serialize my complete script for this story, so the thumbnails' imagery will be fully clarified for you fine folks.

Anyhoo, as noted in our previous post, looks like Capcom currently doesn't want any appearances in the Udon Street Fighter comics by Juri, period, so this one-shot is now effectively defunct. Udon might repitch the story to Capcom within a year or two, though, if their preferences change.

To repeat from the end of the Nov. 27 post: Regardless of this one-shot's fate, though, I'm still glad that I worked up this story, as I found the work mostly enjoyable (or at least tolerable) and fulfilling, in contrast to the maddening frustration of so far futilely struggling to establish some kind of (possibly mythical) "viable workflow" for comics drawn by me.

So, as noted before, this one-off freelance gig started me thinking about doing more "writing-only" comics work in the immediate future, as I have roughly a bajillion different story ideas that aren't ever going to seen if I remain dependent on my own drawing availability (or lack thereof).

In the aftermath of the Juri near-debacle, a long-standing fantasy comic pitch (one never addressed in detail here, BTW) is stumbling towards Possibly Actually Happening with an artist whose work I admire greatly, while I'm working up a rather less likely, mainstream-adjacent proposal with another artist whose work I also admire greatly. Meanwhile, I'm working up a pair of Big Two writing-only comic pitches along with mmmmaybe another pair of writing-only fantasy proposals that would be creator-owned dealies. Yay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?