Volume 1 Page 129
Posted January 4, 2016 at 12:01 am

Note, in the background of panel 2, the framed pictures on the wall, each featuring a weirdly broad black matte. The oft-seen wall behind Emp’s living-room couch is oddly infested with these frames because, well, I am constitutionally ill-suited to draw featureless interior walls. Because most of my earlier career involved the depiction of science-fictional settings with often convoluted and detail-intensive backgrounds, I get a tad itchy when drawing contemporary settings that lack distinctive BG detail. Hence those picture frames, which provide a welcome sense of, “Hey, look, I’m drawing a background, okay?”—and their bold mattes add pleasing areas of black to the panels, as I get likewise antsy with a page devoid of dark tones. (That’s why almost every character design in Empowered features a strong dose of high contrast, as I can’t abide drawing “coloring book”-style artwork—that is, open and color-friendly pages that lack intense black values.)

Note also that we never, ever get a distinct, legible view of whatever the hell might be depicted in Emp’s framed pictures, even when one such frame is otherwise clearly visible in a panel. Your guess is as good as mine, Empowered readers!

Panel 5’s heavy-duty Barrett M82A1 .50-cal rifle is the first hint that Thugboy’s history will turn out to be rather more murky and complicated than Emp might’ve first thought. At the time I drew this page, kitting him out with a big ol’ Barrett was just a whimsical bit of gun-nut japery on my part. Ah, but immediately afterward I asked myself, “So, exactly why would a low-level goon would rock such over-the-top firepower?” Idle musing soon led to the creation of Thugboy’s past career as a Witless Minion (more on this later) and his involvement in the Empverse’s yet-to-be-revealed San Antonio disaster (more on that much later).

That’s one of the things I love about Empowered: The series’—ahem—“worldbuilding” developed organically as the stories progressed, rather than as a tiresome ordeal of top-down preplanning. Prior to Empowered, I’d worked up a handful of far more ambitious SF-comic pitches, each of which boasted reams of exhaustive story notes, character designs and background sketches long before a single comic page was ever drawn. All those ambitious proposals, however, came to naught, while Empowered’s handful of throwaway, tossed-off jokes would eventually evolve into a long-running project considerably more complex than its stillborn forebears.

Short version: Better, I think, to build a comic’s world as you’re cranking out its pages, rather than indulging in the intellectually masturbatory vice of elaborate, convoluted, wheel-spinning worldbuilding ahead of time. 

-Adam Warren

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