Volume 1 Page 153
Posted February 5, 2016 at 12:20 am

I’m ashamed to note that, in the original version of panel 2, I managed to botch the Demonwolf’s quotes of the (in)famous Peter Grave lines from Airplane! Luckily, my late friend Toren Smith, an early recipient of the emailed jpegs that would later mutate into Empowered, caught the errors and set me straight. If I recall correctly, Toren had worked at a drive-in theater as a teenager, hence his encyclopedic recall of dialogue from movies that had played there; his perfect recital of Greedo’s alien speech from Star Wars was an especially impressive feat, by the way.  

Hyena-laughing Ninjette in panel 2 still cracks me up. I’m vaguely saddened to admit that I may never have shown her laughing quite so uproariously ever since. (Then again, poor Ninjette encounters considerably fewer opportunities for guffawing and/or cackling in future volumes of the series.) 

Panels 3-5 first bring up the concept that our heroine Emp might be a wee bit kinky, particularly in terms of role-playing in the bedroom. (And not role-playing of the sort addressed by Thugboy’s occasional AD&D-referencing “STR: 18(00)” T-shirts, either.) This “plot thread” of sorts would take a while to germinate, eventually finding full flower in Empowered vol. 5’s “When Titans Fornicate,” a torrid tale of sexualized role-playing baroquely narrated by the Caged Demonwolf(!). Later still, this thread explored the idea that Emp is conflicted by the difference between what she thinks the ideally progressive sexual desires of a truly empowered (super)woman should be, and the rather embarrassingly less-than-ideally-progressive desires that she actually possesses. An interesting topic, must say, derived from conversations with a couple of similarly conflicted friends of mine.   

For the record, the original version of panel 5 featured a “spit string” of saliva hanging down from Emp’s mouth, rather directly hinting that, uh, “oral activities” were afoot. See, back in the halcyon days before Empowered vol. 1’s publication, my editor and I had clung to the belief that the book could see print without shrinkwrapping, due to my scrupulous avoidance of actual nudity in the stories’, um, “love scenes.” Ah, but my editor felt that Emp’s spit string in this panel would’ve been a step too far, so I redrew the panel saliva-free for publication. Alas, the volume wound up shipping shrinkwrapped For Young Readers’ Protection regardless, so this exceedingly minor bit of censorship ultimately proved pointless. To quote Emp, “Sigh.”   

-Adam Warren

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