adamwarren
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Distressed Damsels: Genesis of the now-ubiquitous tape drone!
🕑 Added 2019-10-30 13:01:00 +0000 UTCWelcome, $3 tier Patrons, to a Wednesday feature normally reserved for the $5+ tiers; just thought I'd show you a bit of the extra content you're missing out on! Hope you'll consider upgrading someday (HINT, HINT)!
For this week's "damsel in distress" (DiD) post, behold a gallery of images addressing my long-ago creation in Dirty Pair of a bondage trope now ubiquitous in DiD art (especially on deviantART, anyway): namely, the airborne tape drone. VWIPP!
The gallery above leads off with the best artwork, two pages from a recent-ish commissioned piece featuring Kei bedeviled by one such tape-wielding drone, as also seen below:
Update: "Recent-ish" is a bit of a stretch, as these two pages (from a longer, unfinished, not-official-continuity "story") actually appear to be ten years old. Yikes!
Now, let's jump back in time so I can blither about how this trope came to be. Time for some old, crappier artwork, folks!
The tape drone has its origins in this one page from issue #5 of 1991's Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels, in which a run-amuck mecha is targeted with a barrage of drones streaming explosive detonation tape. The flying bots wrap the target up and blow him to hell. The end!
Well, that was the end until roughly 1996 or so, when I had to grind out a bunch of damsel-in-distress con sketches involving the Dirty Pair. I thought, "Say, remember those det-tape drones from DP: Plague #5? Well, what if they were retasked for restraint purposes?" And lo, the con sketch below, drawn on linen-finish cardstock, was the result:
Interestingly, this may be one of the earliest incarnations of the hairstyles and costumes that Kei and Yuri would wear in my final (published) Dirty Pair miniseries. Yeahp, at this time I was drawing so many con sketches and commissions of the Lovely Angels that I got bored with their existing designs and reworked 'em many times over.
Oddly, dug up a partially colored version of the same piece, using the same (Kei) markers that my buddy Joe Rosas used for the color guides on the Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious miniseries:
The kindly fellow who received that con sketch liked it a fair bit, so that year I scribbled an incomplete story fragment depicting another drone encounter:
I stalled out on that scene when other work arose, but the tape drone—and the new DP outfits and hair designs I'd first drawn in these sketches, IIRC—would later reappear in an actual comic, as seen in these two pages from 1999-2000's miniseries Dirty Pair: Run from the Future. In a narrative focusing on the Lovely Angels' use of non-lethal incapacitation and restraint tech (as opposed to just blowing holes in their foes), here Kei sics the renamed "TapeBoy" drone on a hapless target:
Delightful coloring by the great Ryan Kinnaird, folks! Also, enjoy what would turn out to be the final Dirty Pair issue I'd ink; the rest of the miniseries was pencils-only, featuring so-called "digital inking" in Photoshop.
Note that the TapeBoy's tape is using Predator-style camouflage, which gets shorted out by jamming technology on the next page:
Ah, but by the final issue of the series, Kei winds up victimized by her own hijacked 3WA technology:
Skipping ahead a few pages:
Interestingly, the digital inking of my pencils varied depending on who was handling the task. Compare the above page with the next few (set a few pages later), in which the digital inking was done by, I think, the colorist Margaret Hessian, who was exceptionally good at converting my pencils to ersatz inks. Note the crisper, cleaner, more precise "pseudo-inks" below:
Mummification—and suffocation—ahoy! Ouch! (SPOILER: Worry not, Kei does indeed survive this ordeal.)
Wellp, I created the tape drone in Dirty Pair, but never did much with it after this one published scene. The trope was taken up and, I believe, primarily popularized in the work of the inventive, accomplished, and tech-savvier-than-yrs-truly DiD artist "we-r-nomad" on deviantART. Here's what might be one of the earliest tape drone images by another artist, featuring 'nomad's take on a drone-distressed Starfire.
Now, of course, the trope is ubiquitous in DiD art, thanks to its popularization and proliferation by more dedicated artists. Then again, not like I was doing anything with the idea at the time; whilst I was still struggling to maintain a career (ahem) in mainstream comics, I wasn't inclined to shout from the rooftops, "HEY, FOLKS! I INADVERTENTLY LAUNCHED A MAJOR FETISH TROPE!"—and still aren't, to be honest. Go crazy with it, DiD aficionados!
Gotta say, I'm convinced that someone in manga or American comics must've created some iteration of the tape drone long before I ever stumbled across the idea, as it seems such an obvious DiD concept. I've just never seen that previous take on the trope, wherever it might be.
Amazingly, the tape drone riff has never appeared in my bondage-intensive series Empowered, save for a single cameo in the upper left-hand corner of this montage page from vol. 7:
However, someday I'll have to discuss how Empowered's Advanced Restraint Research uses a whole bunch of concepts originally created in my literally hundreds of pages of developmental notes for unused Dirty Pair story ideas. (Some of which I might post here, down the road.) Wheeee!
Comments
SuichiTanaka
I figure this was a much better location to talk about this as it's not so public as your other posting spots. So, a number of years back a few of my artist friends and I were part of a group project revolving around a fictional insane asylum that acted as a cover for various DiD ongoings, We-R-Nomad being one of the partners. We were always looking for ideas for more characters, stories, and technology to pull from real comics and animation to give it a sort of legitimacy. One of my colleagues brought up that very scene from RFFT as something we should incorporate and when that occurred we also absorbed the idea of the tape drone from it, to reuse on other characters from that point on. After a few months had gone by and some illustrations had been done that were basically using the exact design of the Tape Boy™ you created, I thought it would be a good idea to not just wholeheartedly steal both the idea *and* visuals of it, so I redesigned it into the look that We-R-Nomad uses, so at least it was somewhat different than your original. Eventually the project died off naturally as when you get older, one's willingness to do art for free goes away. DeviantArt was just past the point where it was becoming popular during this time so We-R-Nomad moved onto that platform; taking the art he did for our project with him. Once it got onto that stage and more eager DiD artists were visiting and interacting with him, the idea seems to have gone viral and now we're in a world where the idea of a tape drone is somehow normal amongst the DiD artists of today. I've always been very open with people who ask that the idea was not ours but was in fact originally yours, but I've always second guessed myself as to whether or not you wanted to have anything to do with it. Your early Empowered vols seemed to have a real message of negativity towards the entire concept of DiD at all, so I've never made a strong public effort to credit you with the origin. Now that you've talked about it and your stance on it is more well known it puts a lot of that nebulous question to rest. I'm very glad that fate worked out in such a way that a certain someone was able to collaborate with you on a proper comic because of this very odd connection. It's the best ending I can think of for this weird story.
Moondai
I want a tape drone for when I have to wrap a ton of packages
Adam Warren
Sure, feel free to fire away on the topic, since this post isn't exactly overflowing with comments.
Aidenke
Love these "history" pieces that explore some of the rumored backstory for different elements that've been a part of your work for years. Super-neat to hear some of the deeper background here of something that's taken a much larger life over the years!
KranberriJam
That is a really cool story on the origin of the tape. It does make for some great DiD material.
SuichiTanaka
I KNEW it. I remember the Det-tape stuff from Plague of Angels and knew that had to be the seed of the idea. I just had no idea that the idea originated in the series of commission sketches that you did. Let alone that it was *before* RFTF. So, I actually have a bit more to fill in on the weird history of the tape drone after it left your hands, but I don't want to fill the comments with unsolicited stories. If you're interested I could lay it out, otherwise we'll just leave this as one of those viral ideas that you never thought would live beyond the boundaries of the original artist. Thanks for the insight however. I think despite people not commenting much, a lot of us were always curious about it.
