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FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: James D. Hudnall's DANGEROUS AFFAIRS, pt.3
🕑 Added 2019-09-27 13:00:02 +0000 UTCFollowing up from last Friday, which showed the first five pages of what would've theoretically been issue #1 of this failed pitch, here are six more pages, the last ones I would ever draw for the project.
Below, I'll cut & paste info from last week, with a few notes about the pages afterward:
These are1986-era pages that I drew but did not write from the superhero comedy Dangerous Affairs, created and scripted by my late friend James D. Hudnall, writer of comics such as ESPers, Strike Force Morituri, Psycho, Sinking, and Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography. Midway through my second year at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art circa '86 or '87, my classmate (and eventual Dirty Pair, Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone, and Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal colorist) Joe Rosas had put me in contact with Jim, and we briefly collaborated on this comics pitch.
Dangerous Affairs was a "cape comedy" about a normal schmo (Randy) sucked onto the world of "supes" after he starts dating a superheroine (Rae). Ah, but what's funnier about it is that, if you look closely enough in later story pages, you can see that it's arguably Urusei Yatsura with capes, which would've been a great idea—Rae is kind of the Lum figure, and the character Ice Queen (who appeared earlier) stands in for Oyuki.
Jim might've pitched this series somewhere with my art, but I'm not sure. I discontinued work on the series, however, once a more promising comic project arose; you see, not long after I finished these pages, Jim in turn put me in contact with Toren Smith, and I began work on the portfolio of Dirty Pair artwork and comics that would eventually land us the rights to do an American comic version of the DP. Yay!
Notes about the pages:
p.6: Yeah, there was an odd time jump between this page and the one that preceded it. No idea what was up with that; an odd artistic choice on my part, as I doubt that was in Jim's script.
p.7: Rae's costume is pretty straightforwardly a ripoff of the outfit worn by heroine Ruu in Atsuji Yamamoto's SF comedy Elf 17. (Note: One of the multiple image links I Googled up for this gave my PC a g-d malware attack, so use caution.)
p.8: Enjoy the godawful brush inking on Rae's costume on this page, folks. Alas, I was still a few years out from switching over to quill-type pens entirely, a move which absolutely supercharged by work with Dirty Pair: Plague of Angels.
p.9: Clearly, I had a lot of that odd, vertical-line-based screen tone on hand, as seen in the last two panels.
p.10: My lettering from this era is quite lousy, true, but those long, tapering word-balloon tails are incredibly bad. What I find genuinely disheartening is the fact that you can see godawful, attenuated tails (or "pointers," as some dub them) just like these all over the place in modern comics lettering. (Ughh.)
p.11: And lo, behold the final comics page I would ever draw from someone else's script.
And that's it for Dangerous Affairs, folks! Little did I know in 1986 that, twenty-odd years later, I would wind up launching my own (sexy) superhero comedy.
Comments
Joe Crawford
This is fascinating to me. Thanks for sharing this!
Adam Warren
Yeahp, does seem that way, though I had no recollection of reusing the design. (Side note: In an odd Kubert-School-related coincidence, Carvalho is named after one of my classmates.)
Otaku Twenty-Four Seven
I also note that "Big Bopper" looks like a proto Carvalho (or at least the first body he's seen in) from Plague of Angels, especially with his eyewear
