Volume 3 Page 166
Posted November 8, 2017 at 12:01 am

Panel 1: Really wish that I’d used only two stabbing “SHKKs” behind branch impacts. Three of ’em seems to slow down the action a bit too much for my taste. BTW, I do love the occasional action panel in which the action is conveyed solely by sound FX.

Panel 3: The idea, here, is that Ninjette is beginning to succumb to the sleep poison mentioned a few pages back. Not sure this is as clear as I'd like it to be, but I didn't care to have Ninjette saying (or thought-ballooning) something about the situation directly.

Panel 4: Worry not, this Japanese name will soon be revealed in romaji (English-language lettering) form before too long. Note that I copied the name’s kanji and hiragana by hand, as I have an odd fondness for trying to emulate the very particular hiragana font used in untranslated manga. 

This panel is also a rare Empowered appearance of the dreaded “one-eyed monster” shot, a flaw that once plagued my early- to mid-90s comics artwork. See, when you draw a highly stylized facial structure like this, you can run into trouble when rotating the character’s head past an easily drawn 3/4 view into more of a “5/6” or “7/8” angle, in which the far eye (and wonky facial architecture) poses a tricky drawing challenge. So, on occasion, the arguably lazy artist might just leave the far eye off entirely, creating a goofy-looking “one-eyed monster” effect like this. Note that I still see manga artists doing this on occasion, though I’ve thankfully stopped pulling this stunt in my own work—well, since this page, at least.

-Adam Warren

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