Panel 3: Readers often perceive this combination of lights on the surface of the Demonwolf’s cage—two small, round lights over a single large one—as representing an abstracted, almost emoticon-like “face,” but I can tell you that this isn’t intentional on my part. No, really! Note, however, that the two “eye” lights on the alien bondage gear’s surface do rather echo the blank, glowing eyes of the Demonwolf’s manifested body seen in the background of this panel. Strictly a coincidence, I assure you—or am I being disingenuous? Or might I have forgotten that this was once an intentional effort on my part, a decade ago? Mysterious!

As seen in the Empowered vol. 1 story that first introduced the Blazing-Eyed Devilgoat, when rampaging about in thus distinctly uncaged form he was using a little girl as a host. Well, two things spring to mind about this matter: 1) I did once intend to do a story about said little girl and the long-term consequences of her brief possession by the Eldritch Erlking, but never quite got around to addressing that intriguing narrative thread. 2) I considered this concept, of a titanically powerful “energy-form being” requiring an organic host, as a callback to one of the characters from my 1997 DC one-shot Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone. The character “Hikarimono,” whimsically nicknamed—or supranymed!—“Dead Prettyboy,” was a human who was slain and then reanimated by another bodiless entity, hailing from the energy-rich environment of the galactic core, who was forced to shelter inside a mortal creature when trapped in the energy-poor milieu of the outer galaxy. Note that, sadly, the unnamed “energy beast” animating Dead Prettyboy never spoke directly, unlike the obviously verbose Demonwolf. (In fact, Hikarimono spoke in an odd and clipped manner due to limited aphasia induced by brain damage caused during his death and resurrection.)

By the way, Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone—one of my favorite pre-Empowered comics work, I gotta say—recently went back into print as part of a big, “bullet-stopper” omnibus collection of Justice-League-related Elseworlds one-shots.

Finally, in panel 3’s third word balloon, note my shocking and quite frankly unforgivable omission of the word “sinister” from the Demonwolf’s self-description, as “Sinister Scourge of the Spaceways” has a much better flow and resonance than plain ol’ “Scourge of the Spaceways.” 

-Adam Warren