The progression of panels 1-4, showing Emp’s facial expression shifting as she belatedly remembers that she’s still supposed to be mad at Thugboy, is one of my favorite moments from all of Empowered vol.1. I would, in all likelihood, be even more appreciative of this scene if I didn’t harbor the disquieting feeling that I might have based this sequence off a riff from Fujihiko Hosono’s 90s-era domestic-comedy manga Mama. Oh, well.

Then again, that’s probably par for the course when you have a few decades worth of wide-ranging influences crammed into your head. Every now and then, I’ll be midway through, say,  lettering a panel and find myself thinking, “This seems marginally reminiscent of… something.” Then I remember, right, this word balloon kinda reminds me of a dialogue trick Howard Chaykin used in American Flagg! #2. Or I’ll look at an exploding beastie I’ve just drawn and think, right, this is kinda like that one scene from Kazushi Hagiwara’s Bastard!! vol.16. Or I’ll be choreographing a fight scene and realize that, right, that I’m making an oblique reference to Jet Lee’s crazy spear work from the HK wuxia classic New Legend of Shaolin.

A bigger problem, arguably, is when I belatedly notice that I’ve ripped myself off, and have inadvertently repeated something I’ve already done years before. Committing too many of these blunders might make me look a tad ossified and repetitive, which isn’t a good look to cultivate. This is complicated, though, by my deep and abiding love of “callbacks” to earlier events and mirroring of older scenes, which I do quite deliberately all the time. The trick, IMHO, is to be aware that you’re potentially repeating yourself; it’s a disorienting experience, believe me, to discover a moment of involuntary repetition after you’ve completed a given work.

-Adam Warren