Panel 1: You Mileage May Vary as how creepy or not young Manny’s wish might be, but at least his request didn’t involve some kind of supervillainous deathtrap. For some reason, the idea of such deathtraps have never held much interest to me as a writer, but they probably are something I should explore down the road. Then again, that sort of screwing around with lethality would be pushing the Empverse’s “Unwritten Rules” a fair bit, which might be another reason I’ve never bothered to address the trope.

Panel 4: Pretty sure the ropework on this page was photoreferenced from a book on shibari, the Japanese art of bondage which features much more complicated knots than I usually bother to depict. Yes, folks, even though Empowered is derived from a long-ago series of “damsel-in-distress” commissioned sketches, I rarely deigned to draw technically rigorous bondage imagery back then—or now, for that matter. This story is a rare exception to that trend, as we’ll see.

-Adam Warren