Note that Ninjette’s shuriken necklace appears to vanish mysteriously between panels 1 and 2. Oops! Welcome to the exciting world of Empowered panel-to-panel continuity issues, most of which are caused by the fact that, to prevent smudging, I have to mask off the rest of the page I’m working on. Thus, with the previous panel obscured by an opaque copy-paper mask, I rely on my memory of the panel I just drew—which, alas, turns out to be imperfect at times. An easy way to get around this problem is to use tracing paper to mask the previous panel if I think it poses potential continuity problems but, again, I don’t always recognize such looming issues.

Panel 2: I’m amused to recall that, instead of using the term “touching yourself,” the original version of Ninjette’s dialogue deployed the rather arch term “jill off.” I should say that said bit of slanginess was being tossed around a bit online circa 2005-6 as an impish analogue for the still-popular term “jack off,” but always in a deliberately ironic fashion, so I thought better of using it in the final version of the page. My condolences to you and your fellow bits of failed slang coinage, “jill off.”

Note that Ninjette’s rather simplistic take on fanfic consumption reflects not my own views on the matter, but rather what a “civilian” like ’Jette might think about the topic. God knows that, as an artist who’s created more than his share—and possibly your share, too—of sexualized material during decades on the job, I roll my eyes at the facile “you need to get laid” dismissal. (More on this matter later, including the fact that Shirow Masamune himself helped muddy the waters about this concept.)

Panel 5: What’s this? Could some version of the “Spooky spanks Emp” story actually have taken place in reality—or, at least, the Empverse’s version of reality? Alas, this matter is never directly addressed later in the series, so I leave it to the reader’s no-doubt-fertile imagination to decide—or, potentially, to write fanfic about! (Wonderfully enough, I’m told that Spooky/ Emp fanfiction does, in fact, exist, which gives an already metatextual story like this one an extra degree of amusement value.)

-Adam Warren