Metatextual Me was being somewhat disingenuous on this topic, as I’ve probably earned more income from Empowered over the last decade than I have from all my previous comics work combined, from the hardscrabble days of Dirty Pair through the comparatively lucrative Gen13 and my other sporadic forays into mainstream Marvel and DC comics. Ah, but that’s the power of having work that remains in print and keeps earning me royalties every quarter of every year since 2007—well, for the most part, at least. Most—in fact, almost all—of my other comics work is long out of print nowadays, though hope springs eternal that omnibus collections of Dirty Pair might someday appear.
(UPDATE: I should say that some of my out-of-print projects are still available as digital comics. Highlights here are arguably the written-by-me Marvel projects Iron Man: Hypervelocity and Livewires, the latter of which I also drew a fair part of.)
That
being said, the series is nowadays far removed from its earlier salad days,
when new volumes ranked in the monthly top 10 of graphic novel sales in
the comics direct market. (Then again, that was during a time when
vastly fewer GNs were being released.) We now sell more copies in the
bookstore market than in comics stores, though I’m afraid that says more
about the gradual diminution of our direct-market numbers, presumably
due to the dreaded “standard attrition” known mainly for whittling down
individual “floppy” issue sales over time. (FWIW, once the burden of Empowered vol. 11 is finally removed from my weary shoulders, I hope to look into a lil' ko-fi or even Patreon action in the near future.)
-Adam Warren