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DIRTY PAIR: QUICK & DIRTY, part 3 (a 2003 layout-page-only story)!
🕑 Added 2020-03-19 13:00:13 +0000 UTC(You can check out the previous installment of this story here.)
Folks, here are (layout) pages 13-18 of an unpublished, 48-page story titled Dirty Pair: Quick & Dirty that I wrote and drew back in late 2003.
Below, I'll cut & paste my notes from the initial installment of the story:
My reasons for creating this story—and for drawing it in this rather odd, proto-Empowered "tight layout page" format—now seem hazy and unclear to me. At a time when my (ahem) "career" in comics was not going well at all and I was flailing around desperately for work—as opposed to nowadays, when I'm still flailing around desperately for work!—I believe that I was trying to interest Dark Horse in doing more Dirty Pair comics, around the time that the DP license was about to expire, or possibly already had.
Ah, but did I intend to have Quick and Dirty eventually published in some more finished form? Almost certainly not, as I'd abandoned any attempts at creating comics in a conventional comics format after 1999-2000's miniseries Dirty Pair: Run from the Future. My godawful work technique back then—loose roughs, extraordinarily tight layout pages like the ones above, then recopied and even tighter pencils on Bristol board, then finished inks, then color guides for a separate colorist—had become so maddeningly slow and repetitive that I swore off drawing comics after Run from the Future's miserable work experience.
I think my intention was to show Dark Horse that this was the sort of Dirty Pair story I would write for other artists to draw, but nothing came of this admittedly rather puzzling effort, as I'm fairly sure I just couldn't get any other artists approved by the Japanese license-holders to draw these (theoretical) books.
I wound up paying dearly for not investing in myself and creating wholly creator-owned comics earlier in my career, folks; let this be a lesson to all and sundry! Work-for-hire at handsome mainstream page rates is one thing (which I'm still interested in doing, from time to time), but investing decades of my life on a pseudo-creator-owned property that, importantly, I didn't actually own was an incredibly foolish choice on my part.
What does seem clear to me now is that I still wanted to write and draw comics, but without the stifling repetition of my old work approach. After Quick and Dirty, I began to realize that, hey, maybe a comic's art could be reproduced from tight layout pages along these lines—and by the summer of the next year, I started scribbling the first stories that would eventually evolve into Empowered, my (still-)ongoing, creator-owned "sexy superhero comedy" series.
I'll never draw another published Dirty Pair project, though in theory I wouldn't mind writing one. In reality, that's really not likely to happen, as Dark Horse hasn't been able to get approval to reprint my old DP work, let alone get new projects rolling. I do hope to write and even draw new SF-oriented comics down the road, though.
No time right now to add commentary on the pages, but I might later try to do so in an UPDATE-type dealie. (Or maybe not, as such commentary is very, very time-consuming.)
Tomorrow on this here Patreon: Time for another bunch of Vintage Con Sketches from the days of yore, folks!
Comments
KranberriJam
Page 15 is fantastic!!
Joe Crawford
I certainly feel thankful you found your own creation and brought it to the world. Thank you for sharing your experiences here. I appreciate it.
Adam Warren
Vague plot at most, soon discarded once it belatedly occurred to me that such a crossover would be like an EMP volume for which I earned notably less money and had far less control, neither of which appealed to me much.
Adam Warren
My thoughts exactly.
Strypgia
The Angels are looking particularly hot in that last page main panel. And an Emp/DP cross would have been... pretty wild. Emp's body Image insecurities would have been going nuts if faced with the Angels' tight superspy bodies.
Burninator
Did you go as far as coming up with a plot or anything for the DP/Emp crossover, or was it just an idea?
Adam Warren
In happier times when reprinting my old DP work still seemed like a viable possibility, I had ALL kinds of crazy ideas, even including an EMP/DP crossover. All those goofily optimistic concepts are long-defunct now, of course.
Burninator
Whelp, Boom Boom (Out Went The Lights). Sure hope for Kei's sake none of that neural tissue was spiked; wouldn't put it past these people to hide some atmospherically triggered hostile nanites or prions inside their people as a "fuck you" to any would be captor. I actually saw something on the ancient (largely unupdated since 2007) fansite Teatime in Elenore City claiming "drafted new project -- Quick and Dirty, 48 pages; probably to be published in a form similar to Empowered -- 2007"(probably sourced from speaking with you at the time at a convention or something), suggesting that at one point you had plans to release the book more or less as is. I think I also saw something equally old somewhere else from an interview or something suggesting that you had some sort of plans at the time for doing more Dirty Pair books in the Empowered pencils-only format. (If memory serves me correctly, there was some zany scheme involving alternating releases of Empowered and Dirty Pair books?)
Adam Warren
Honestly, no. Howeva, many, many unused elements from my (very literal) reams of unused DIRTY PAIR notes have appeared in EMPOWERED, as well as in my SF-oriented comics.
andrew
Have you ever considered creating your own DP expy's (ala Deadpool to Deathstroke) within the Empverse?
