A casual decision regarding the speech patterns of soon-to-be Sistah Spooky’s Infernal Service Provider in panels 3 and 4 eventually came back to bite me in the butt, though I didn’t notice the problem until many volumes later. As you’ll see in subsequent pages, the demonic ISP’s dialogue has a rather snarkily jokey and sneeringly contemptuous tone to it, a quality that I later wound up repeating for the likewise sinister villain Fleshmaster in Empowered vol. 4. Not the end of the world, really, but this did start to bug me when Spooky’s ISP and Fleshmaster returned for the resolution of their individual plotlines in, respectively, Empowered volumes 8 and 9. In those books, I belatedly noticed that their speech patterns were a just a little too similar for my taste, but I couldn’t see any easy way to address the matter by that point in time.

This is one slight weakness of the organic and freewheeling format of Empowered, as opposed to the more structured format I’ve used for other comics projects. On a conventional script, I get more opportunities—considerably more opportunities, really—to craft and polish and rewrite dialogue in a holistic fashion, as I’m writing an entire issue’s worth of it at once. By the time I finish a script, I’ve had plenty of time to go back and forth throughout the story’s conversations, tweaking and touching up words and phrases for maximum clarity and character-voice differentiation. By contrast, I write—and, importantly, dialogue—one Empowered page at a time, which presents far more problems in fine-tuning speech patterns.  

In other projects, I’ve been able to more easily differentiate the lead characters’ speech patterns. For example, Dirty Pair’s Kei and Yuri speak in notably divergent manners, though in this case little deliberate effort on my part was required, as I’ve always seen the characters in distinct and contrasting lights, which was automatically reflected in how they talk. In the 2004 Marvel miniseries Livewires, I went to greater lengths in this department to separate the mecha team’s individual voices. Stem Cell: snarky but bemused, confused and vulnerable. Hollowpoint Ninja: Laconic, clipped, hard-edged. Cornfed: Friendly, polite, “Minnesota nice.” Gothic Lolita: Spacey, detached, coolly amused. And, lastly, the voice of Social Butterfly was almost cloyingly warm, affectionate and riddled with cutesy neologisms—a voice which was rather directly ported over for that of Empowered, at least when she’s talking to her friends and loved ones. 

This has led, at least with Empowered’s main characters, to the occasional accusation that “everyone sounds the same,” even though Thugboy and Ninjette really do have distinct dialogue tendencies to my ear. I should note that, in theory, I have been trying to convey that Emp’s verbal affectations and neologisms have partially infected the speech patterns of Thugboy and Ninjette, though I’m not sure how clear this comes across.

-Adam Warren