Soon after I created my character Moonpie in the late '90's, the movie COYOTE UGLY came out. Its message of female empowerment through bartop dancing (or so I gathered from the commercials) seemed like the perfect match for her. After the introductory episode below, Moonpie was to set off on a quest for the mythical Coyote Ugly bar in New York City, where she would, of course, find herself at the center of all kinds of hilarious misadventures.

I wrote out the story and did a lot of sketches and preliminary page layouts, but I scrapped the idea for two reasons: first, the whole innocent-naif-in-the-big-city tale has been done to death, and second, I discovered, much to my chagrin, that Coyote Ugly is an actual bar, and that, yes, the female bartenders there actually do dance. As you can see, this put a major hole in the narrative. Moonpie could hardly be the clueless hick chasing her dream in the big city and searching for a nonexistent bar; in fact, Moonpie could have probably stayed in her backwater hometown and waited for one of the innumerable Coyote Ugly franchises to open up there. As somebody who's spent almost his whole life living near New York City, my ignorance is very embarassing. But, to give you an idea of what might have been, I've drawn up some of the panels I originally had in mind and placed them behind the cut, below.
The Moonpie saga continues here