This Empowered page’s lack of a so-called “two-shot”—that is, a panel showing both characters in the same shot, to help clarify the physical geography of the scene—strongly suggests to me that I was experiencing second thoughts about this story’s fabric-store environment whilst drawing it. As a writer, I often think of theoretically “fun” settings for stories that turn out to be no fun indeed once I actually have to draw the damn things. Some environments seem obviously difficult, such as high-school classrooms, which involve the nightmarishly complicated perspective tasks of orienting dozens of desks and chairs in space—and thus, I’ve steered clear of ever drawing a challenging long shot of such a scene, instead using manageable close-ups and medium shots on the rare occasions that a classroom’s appeared in my work. Other settings only reveal their challenges once you’re in the middle of rendering them, one such example being a convenience-store interior I drew in Wildstorm’s Gen13, with all those package-stuffed shelves rapidly exhausting my patience.

In retrospect, I find myself interested by the villainous “supranym” of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, in that the (kinda-sorta) use of a collective term for a single character is a colorfully  offbeat approach to naming a suprahuman. Then again, why not do so? Why should bad guys—or good guys, for that matter—be limited by “inside-the-box” thinking in regards to conventional practices of supranym creation? I like the idea of characters with more abstract names, such as book-title-spanned capes That Hideous Strength or The Fire Next Time or The Unbearable Lightness of Being—okay, maybe that last one’s a bit of a stretch. Or imagine a suprahuman inspired by the convoluted titles of, say, Fiona Apple albums; why, even the relatively restrained title of Apple’s The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do could make for an idiosyncratically compelling new supranym! (Or not.)

-Adam Warren