LAYOUTS FROM AN OLD SF-ADJACENT PROJECT: Chapter 1, pt. 4! (Patreon)

[Here's a link to our previous installment in this series.]

So, yeahp, I'm serializing my insanely tight layout pages for the 2005 Marvel miniseries Iron Man: Hypervelocity, the first issue of which I wrote and laid out long before an artist had been chosen;  of course, the great Brian Denham wound up tackling the art for the project, but I had already rolled with these time-consuming roughs out of, I dunno, sheer perfectionism and unhinged micro-managing.

Either that, or these layouts represented the sum total of artwork I actually wanted to produce for this project. As I've noted here before, cranking out finished artwork is the bane of my g-d existence as an artist; I like (or even occasionally love) drawing loose, relatively spontaneous comic pages like this, but bog down toute suite upon having to painstakingly render my usual tight and precise completed artwork.

Even though we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of Hypervelocity's creation, I am loath to publicly acknowledge to non-Patrons that I'm serializing these layouts here, hence the "Old SF-Adjacent Project" monicker.

Anyhoo, here's the page we stopped on last time, back on January 19:

Now, our story resumes:

LMDs ahoy, not coincidentally looking like the Livewires mecha with their human faceplates removed:

Sudden scene change ahoy!

That line in panel 5 above really wouldn't fly nowadays, I suspect.

Lordy loo!

An oddly Venom-y take on the Iron Man armor, gotta say. (Mysterious Chica's commenting on Tony being eaten by an Iron Maiden, by the way; "too bad for you, baby," is her closing line in French.)

Note that the MARV was based on a proposed, airfield-targeting "Counter Air Missile" dealie, as seen in the scan below:

Onward to our final two pages:

Note that I chose to use no sound FX whatsoever in Hypervelocity because I assumed they would combine with all the narrative captions and dialogue to produce way-too-visually-crowded comic pages. Also, a mediocre or worse letterer can absolutely tank a comic with bad sound FX, as I've discovered on occasion to my dismay. (This might be why many UK comics writers tend to avoid sound FX in their scripts, unless that was a move to convey more "mature" storytelling.)

And now, The Big Reveal:

Shocking!!!!!

Anyhoo, our next update in a few weeks will kick off serialization of issue #2, as we find out how this shocking!!!! turn of events came to be. Woo hoo!

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?