Woo hoo! Behold, Emp’s bare behind in panel 2! On the other hand, whoop-dee-frickin’-doo, given the sketchily nonexistent rendering I am able to apply when drawing a nekkid Emp. Paradoxically enough, her body contours are revealed far more clearly when she’s wearing her graphite-intensive supersuit than when she’s out of it.

Takes about 600 more pages to pay off, but this story’s riff about Emp’s supersuit being able to turn invisible becomes a key plot point at the climax of a future Empowered volume. So, yeahp, try to keep this page in mind when you’re reading the webcomic serialization’s payoff scene about 2.3 years from now. (Don’t worry if you don’t think you will, though, as I’ll include a link back to this sequence in that future page’s commentary, assuming I’m still alive at that remote, distant and far-flung date.)

Note that Emp’s hair is drawn as waaaaay too long in panels 1 and 2, for reasons wholly unclear to me at this time. Not like it’s growing quite long enough to obscure any of her, ah, “southerly naughty bits,” either. By the way, I do like the idea that Emp might actually be trying to grow her hair long enough to cover up her much-(self-)lamented backside, since her supersuit’s mercurial unreliability prevents her from wearing a butt-camouflaging cape or the like. If so, I’m afraid that she’s likely outta luck on that score, as insufficient time has passed during the series for her hair to grow that long; in truth, I strongly suspect that her golden locks will never quite seem to develop the length she’s hoping for.

Speaking of flowing tresses—or the lack thereof— I should warn you that the inconvenient fact that Emp’s supersuit requires her to remain, well, clean-shaven downstairs becomes a running joke through the first few volumes of Empowered. (This isn’t quite as long-running a joke as the perennial end-of-volume question about why the ultra-revealing hypermembrane never displays “camel toe,” though.) “Latex-coated steel wool,” indeed.

-Adam Warren