As panel 2 shows, drawing people kissing is one of the toughest comic-art challenges around—and, alas, I wasn’t really up to the challenge, this time around. Check out photoreference of couples kissing, and you might be surprised by how many images would look goofy as hell if you tried to draw ’em—especially if, like me, you depict a hyperstylized version of the human face that can’t always be compared to a real human’s face. I generally default to the same “kissing pose” that almost all artists use, but occasionally I try to mix things up a wee bit in Empowered, though often with little success.

Along those lines, props to the manga Scum’s Wish—or Kuzu no Honkai, if you like—by Mengo Yokoyari, which streams in English on Crunchyroll. The manga features copious scenes of various combos of characters making out, which is considerably more difficult than you might think, given how few kissing poses actually “work” with the artist’s stylized facial approach. Plus, Yokoyari is cool with drawing long “makeout” sequences with the same camera position, which is challenging for me to do; an alarm in my head starts blaring if I don’t vary my camera distance and placement over the course of a scene. This very page is a fine example of this tendency, as you can see how clearly my shot choices range from panel to panel.

So what’s up with Emp’s mysteriously metatextual narration in panels 2-4? If you’ve not yet figured out the nature of the game I’m playing, here, I think the next page’s abrupt scene change might well clue you in.

That’s some serious saliva-stringing in panels 5 and 6, huh? For some reason, this manga- and anime-inspired riff has always amused the hell outta me. I may, in fact, have drawn this solely to get under the skin of a friend of mine who gets hilariously skeeved out by the saliva-string trope. Enjoy, buddy!

-Adam Warren