Here are three very rough page layouts I did for the late, lamented (at least by me) Metal Men: Metal Mania limited series. Sometimes when I become anxious that I haven't made things clear enough in a script I do a rough layout to help get the idea across. Yeah, that's called paranoid, anal-retentive, controlling as well as pretty stupid, because I never ask for a layout check even if the layout is actually used by the artist. Color me an idiot, this is how I often work, but at least in this case I only did three pages and I didn't kill myself on them. Anyway, thought this might be of interest to someone, especially since this is all anyone''s ever going to see from the project, unless somehow my daughter becomes EIC of DC someday. God forbid, because that would likely mean she was a very lonely child.
Here's the first doomed page of the first doomed issue -- Gold's head leads us into the Recovery Room with the entire team finishing a re-assembly. We get a quick name-check of all the MM characters as the Recovery Room computer's voice handles exposition duties. We know their names, we know they break a lot, and get put back together and we get right into the goddamned plot without dicking the reader around for eighteen pages:
This is page 2 from the second issue (which reveals that everything you knew in issue #1 was WRONG! Man, I thought DC loved proving that everything you knew was WRONG! Where did I go WRONG? Maybe it was when I wrote the characters in character...), along with some extra doodling to figure out a few things, and a pointless Flintstones reference. As opposed to those useful, incredibly necessary Flintstones references:
This is also from the second issue, the last page of a sequence I really liked, wherein Tin has a dream about finding his long lost, oft-destroyed love, Nameless (with nods to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi flick, The Black Cat). There was an explanation as to why a robot would dream. It made perfect sense, too. Alack and alas... all of this was written so only about five people could ever read it. Gad, that's even worse than a small press book. Anyway:
And there you go.
