Hey, not a bad look in panels 1 and 2 for the doomed young fella. Must say, here he seems like like rather more of a “player” than he came across in a later Empowered one-shot focusing on the character, the Guest Artist story Hell Bent or Heaven Sent featuring art by my buddy Ryan Kinnaird. In that story, a hapless Emp and Capitan Rivet run afoul of disastrous nanoware accidentally triggered by the mecha character’s “cybermasturbational” sexual fantasies, which doesn’t portray the lad in a terribly complimentary light. Then again, I’m not sure that many folks would fare all that well if their sexual issues were embarrassingly manifested in the real world by alien übertechnology, as befalls this unfortunate Superhomey.

And yes, the nameless mechahottie is a reference of sorts to the chrome “Sexy Robot” that artist Hajime Sorayama painted so often back in the 80s. I rather like the idea that, within the context of the Empverse, Sorayama was possibly painting portraits of an real-life mecha, rather than working from imagination.

For the record, the supranym of panel 3’s mecha Superhomey is “Mechanismo,” which is an ultra-obscure reference to the title of an 1979 art book put together by the late SF author Harry Harrison, of The Stainless Steel Rat and Make Room! Make Room! fame. Post-Star Wars, publishing briefly saw a curious SF trend in which assorted, preexisting, spaceship-intensive paintings from artists such as Angus McKie, Jim Burns, Chris Foss and many others would be rustled up and licensed for a book, with a prose SF narrative hastily written around them. Mechanismo was a slight variation on the trend, as it included Harrison’s essays on various SF topics along with the improvised narrative accompanying the paintings. As an SF-hungry lad in the late 70s and early 80s, I ate up all those books, basking in the beautiful paintings whilst scratching my head at some of the wonkier prose that went along with ‘em.

-Adam Warren