Somewhat confusingly, the “très obtrusif” title bit that Metatextual Emp refers to, here, actually appears on the next page. Well, you’ll see what I mean—or what she means—in our next installment, folks.

The 8-page Empowered story that follows was originally drawn for an Image anthology book edited by Erik Larsen, one that was intended to see print in the relatively gigantic “Treasury Edition” format used by Marvel and DC during my 70s-era childhood. While this format is arguably best known for the Neal-Adams-drawn Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali one-shot, during the 70s it was deployed for quite a few collections of lesser-known material; I owned Treasury Editions featuring reprints of Fantastic Four, Avengers and Thor stories, for example.

Anyhoo, the anthology book wound up being delayed for many years, due to the “cat-herding” difficulties inherent to wrangling busy freelancers into submitting creator-owned stories for a job outside normal deadline parameters. (Giving short-term-oriented freelancers open-ended deadlines often means that you'd best be open to never seeing very many—or any—pages from them, alas.) Long after I’d finished this story and used it in Empowered vol. 3, “Feel the Überburn” did finally see print in a 2014 Treasury-Edition-sized collection titled “Giant-Size Kung Fu Bible Stories,” also featuring work by Larsen, Bruce Timm, Tom Scioli, Ryan Ottley, Andy Kuhn and Arthur Adams. (Check the image at the link for Erik Larsen's version of Emp, by the way!)

-Adam Warren