Panel 1: Yeahp, apparently Sistah Spooky can spawn a decent-sized tornado at will, an ability not ever glimpsed again hereafter. (Have to try to remember to mention this particular application of her power set for later use, especially if I ever get around to the Sistah Spooky/ Emp team-up miniseries I’ve long been considering.) Admittedly, this seems like serious overkill just to stop a civilian car and pop its trunk, a task which presumably could’ve been handled far less apocalyptically—but then again, Spooky does have a bit of a flair for the dramatic. Plus, might well be that superheroes like her would deploy such spectacular “shock and awe” tactics not just for my own “Rule of Cool” narrative purposes, but to unnerve future opponents and put the fear of god into potential bad guys—or “the fear of me, at least,” as I once had another character state it. Hey, that’s a useful insight; might have to feature another superhero deploying exactly such a justification in a future Empowered story! (Still, the level of collateral property damage depicted in this particular scene seems a tad excessive, to put it mildly.)
Panel 3: “Sigh,” as Emp would put it. In the original, first-edition printing of Empowered vol. 2, the future Ocelotina was, if I may get a bit vague, "bad-touching" poor Emp in an even worse fashion. This wasn't just in indisputably bad taste, it was also a seriously blatant violation of the Empverse's so-called "Unwritten Rules" that no civilian would be likely to make, even one so oblivious as Ocelotina-to-be. (In fairness, at that time I hadn't actually thought up the Unwritten Rules as yet, but the point still stands, I think.) Note that her groping of naked Emp is already bending if not outright breaking the Rules; the now-excised "bad touch" went unacceptably further than that. This was a horrendously bad call on my part, to put it mildly, and one I wound up excising with the next printing, as seen in the page's current state.
I had initially wanted to redraw this problematic sequence before publication, but just plain crapped out due to sheer laziness, as I was thoroughly burnt out from having to correct and reletter all of the book's 200-odd pages at once. (That’s a reason, folks, but not an excuse, if you follow me.) After receiving complaints post-publication, I was more than happy to go back and partially revise the pages' artwork for future printings, so the future Ocelotina's contact with Emp went from "completely and utterly appalling" to merely “appalling.”
I wasn’t actually planning on mentioning this incident, as I hoped I’d castigated myself adequately enough in earlier commentaries, but since a comment on a recent page mentioned the edits, I thought I should probably address the matter. The idea, however, that correcting a glaring—and, in retrospect, galling—narrative error after the fact constitutes “P.C.” self-abnegation or “self-censorship” is a bit of a crock. (You might have noticed that I quite literally censor myself constantly in Empowered dialogue, for example.) The original version of this scene constitutes a massive tonal blunder that should never have seen print in the first place; if I’d been doing my job as I should have a decade ago, anyone now complaining about the edits would never have been aware of their existence to begin with.
Panels 4-5: Spooky’s ability to cause Emp—or, presumably, anyone else—to fall asleep on command is a little tricky, given the many different contexts in which this power could’ve been profitably used elsewhere. Must admit, this ambiguity regarding the limits of sorcery was inspired by the notably loosey-goosey approach to power sets for sorceresses in the Marvel and DC universes. “Wait, Raven can turn into a giant, cosmic bird at will? Why don’t we ever see this power used again?” (That one from the Teen Titans cartoon, by the way.) When I was a kid, the Scarlet Witch zapped bad guys with generic-seeming “hex spheres,” which seemed like every other superhero’s vaguely defined “zapping” powers—or, in an Empowered context, “vorpp”-ing powers. Decades later, Wanda’s initially modest “probability alteration” abilities would be scaled way, way up into the capability to rewrite the entire universe on a grand scale—which seems like a rather excessive escalation, gotta say.
Related side note: In fact, in 2013 I wrote and drew a full-color(!) 10-page story teaming up fellow probability alterers Scarlet Witch and Domino for the Avengers/ X-Men anthology A+X, in which the two heroines with vaguely similar “luck powers” face off against an alien superweapon which uses megascale probability alteration to snuff out civilizations. If you’re interested, the issue is still available on Comixology or the Marvel App.
Panel 6: Those three marks before “SNGZZZZ” are—to me, at least—referred to as “half-bursts,” whereas the asterisk-like mark after SNGZZZZ is the rarer “full burst,” used to indicate either a gasp before unconsciousness or an outright death rattle. Ah, but of late I’ve found that most people in comics don’t call these peculiar parts of our medium’s idiom “half-bursts.” Here’s ace letterer Nate Piekos defining them in an excerpt from the very helpful “comic-book grammar and tradition” page of his BlamBot website:
“Whiskers,” huh? In today’s cat-video-intensive pop culture, that might well be a catchier term.
-Adam Warren
