Panel 1: Could’ve easily left off Mindf**k’s second thought balloon without losing much—or possibly anything—from the narrative. Learn and learn, folks; live and learn.

Circa vol.8 or so, I became suddenly alarmed by the excessive dialogue in the series, and made some attempts to dial things back a bit. More recently, I became alarmed again at continued dialogue excesses, however modest they might have been in later volumes compared to earlier blizzards of text. That second freakout, though, was more about how my comics work was often privileging dialogue over visual storytelling; I became annoyed that too many of my comics were primarily delivery systems for dialogue, rather than taking a more balanced approach in which purely visual storytelling could play a bigger role.

The just-released Empowered vol. 11 certainly doesn’t have that problem, but that’s in large part because a massive chunk of the book consists of largely dialogue-free action scenes.

-Adam Warren