This page’s “swimming with sharks” scene—along with an earlier story’s shipboard setting—provides one of the first hints that Empowered takes place in a coastal city. I hadn’t yet decided which coast, though; only years later would I finally decide that Emp’s unnamed city is on the West Coast. 

One thing I immediately loved about this series was the freedom it gave me to break many of the so-called “rules of storytelling” I’d so often heard during my comics career. One such oft-repeated rule is that you should always identify the setting(s) of your story, as much concrete details theoretically increase the immersiveness of your story for the reader (or whatevs). While that’s often true—think of the specificity inherent to the Hell’s Kitchen of Daredevil or the Toronto of Scott Pilgrim—I don’t think that’s necessarily always true.

Unless you’re getting genuine value and interest out of the setting, what exactly is the point of setting any given superhero story in a particular city? Not like the made-up cities of the DC Universe make for any worse (or better) of a playground for capes than than Marvel’s New York City. Plus, as a writer, you’re placing a serious burden on your artist when you commit to a specific urban locale. Some artists would be enthused by the prospect of drawing exacting shots of, say, downtown Chicago from photoreference—but most comics artists, I can assure you from personal experience, would not be so enthused.

Let’s face it, the use of particular locations will sometimes only annoy readers familiar with the setting. Back when I still had a life of sorts, I lived in San Francisco for a few years, during a bygone, halcyon era when struggling indie cartoonists could afford to live in the Bay Area. (Needless to say, that was a loooong time ago.) Even nowadays, though, I find myself involuntarily nitpicking inaccuracies and geographical implausibilities in movies, TV and comics set in San Francisco.

So that’s why, in the end, I elected to be as vague as conceivably possible about the city in which Empowered is taking place. I don’t think this admittedly extreme level of geographical evasion really harmed the story very much, though I arguably did miss out on opportunities for storytelling by drawing very, very few detailed backgrounds in all of vol. 1. (Given how intensely I dislike depicting contemporary urban settings, I find myself not terribly disappointed about those potential lost opportunities.) While I certainly wouldn’t recommend this embrace of artistic laziness—if not outright negligence—to other artists, I’m still amused by how little the series was affected by it.