Panel 2: Dun dun dahh! Zounds! Gasp! Good heavens! (Or, alternately, from my dimly recalled childhood of watching wildly crappy Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons, “Heavens to Murgatroyd!”)
Plot twist: The As-Yet-Unnamed Chica turns out to not have been the hostage of the Threatening Knife Dude after all! What the devil is she playing at? Our well-intentioned heroine has been shockingly betrayed!
I used an interesting approach to rendering the highlights in Treacherous Girl’s hair, which are noticeably more complicated that the usual techniques I used back then for depicting dark hair. Not sure where I copped this particular riff from, or if it was something I actually devised on my own. (The former is more likely than the latter, alas.) In any event, wherever this hair-rendering riff came from, I certainly didn’t use it very often since this story, given my present-day unfamiliarity with it.
Speaking of visual riffs copped from other artists, check out panel 3. There, As-Yet-Unnamed Chica is rocking what online critics have unkindly referred to as “the muppet mouth,” a peculiar stylistic affectation of facial drawing that I deploy in Empowered mainly when drawing Ninjette. I’m reasonably sure that, artistic magpie that I happen to be, I picked up this particular quirk roughly 15 years or so from a riff used by the mangaka Shinofusa Rokuro.
Along those lines, I should note that one trick I occasionally use as a quick and dirty means of visually differentiating characters is to draw them like the work of different artists who have influenced me. For example, I drew a story a while back in which one heroine was based loosely on the work of Hiroaki Samura (Blade of the Immortal), while the other was influenced by designs of the less well-known mangaka Takeshi Okazaki. My hope, in doing so, is that I’ll actually learn something from these superior creators in the process, much as happened when I had to imitate the character-design approach of the great Kenichi Sonoda when I worked on the comic miniseries Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal.
-Adam Warren
