Sunday, July 7, 2013

Freefall: Sketches and Art for a Post-Marooned Jenny Sequence

At the end of Border Worlds: Marooned (1990), Jenny Woodlore had made her way by jetpack to the penthouse abode of Dr. Oliver Beecher, only to find Sparky the robot with the message that the good doctor had already evacuated Chrysalis, the domed city. A scene was subsequently sketched out and partially finished realized as finished artwork in the 1990s, reconstructed her from extant materials. In it, Sparky plays a recording made by Beecher for Jenny on a Contraptoid-like robot, informing her that the space station is on a collision course with a neighboring planet. 



Jenny, already exhausted from her climb out of the bowels of the space station, and devastated by the arrest of Drasin and Cody and the loss of the hotrod, straps her jetpack back on to leave the penthouse. Her depleted fuel supply is used up before she can land in the park below, and she freefalls through the trees, protected only by her space suit. Crashing to the ground, she is assisted by onlookers, and staggers to her feet only to collapse again in a fountain. After she revives, she makes her way to a tramway that takes her back to the hangar on the outskirts of the plate of the space station. Removing her space suit, she collapses in tears in the shower, and finally passes out, nude, on her bed. The conclusion of this sequence marks the approximate halfway point of the story material planned for Border Worlds.






















Below are several sheets of chisel-point marker sketches from the same sketchbook. The appearance of the Meddler and Rory Smash on one of them date these to around the time I was working on Bizarre Heroes, and particular the final issue (#0), when I was contemplating a time-travel crossover. 





3 comments:

  1. Don this is awesome to see as i have read this series and always wondered if it would ever be completed! This is great stuff! Would you ever finish it and offer it in digital format in its completed form?

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  2. There is interest in collecting the extant series and adding to it, but an announcement at this time is a bit premature. But stay tuned! Thanks for the kind words.

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