Panel 1: And lo, a few casual clawed swipes from Ocelotina have magically reduced Emp’s supersuit to the default tattered state I always draw it in. Yeahp, ’tis true, the tear patterns of her suit have a fairly specific order I tend to repeat over and over again out of familiarity; in theory, the shredding should be much more random than what I depict, but ehh, whatevs. 

That’s one of the more amusing things about Emp fan art, BTW—I’m always vaguely startled when artists depict very different tear patterns in her suit than the ones I draw. I remember specifically seeing one piece of fan art in which a damsel-in-distressed Emp’s feet were bare, which is something I’ve rarely—or possibly never—drawn during the series. 

Not that I’ve spelt this out directly, but as the hypermembrane loses surface area, my idea is that it prioritizes its remaining coverage in descending order to (1) Emp’s mask, then (2) her hands and feet, then (3) her, ah, “bikini areas.” Note that, when Emp wound up stripped mostly naked by the future Ocelotina in an unfortunate incident in Empowered vol. 2, she still retained mask and “socks.”

Panel 3: Some wonky anatomy on Emp in this shot, but then again, that’s a pretty tricky pose to attempt “straight off the dome,” as it were. I’ve tackled some similarly challenging poses in life drawing from photoreference, but still had plenty of trouble while looking right at a g-d photo.

-Adam Warren