Volume 1 Page 191
Posted March 30, 2016 at 12:01 am

Panel 2 is arguably one of the most important panels of the early series, despite its rather ignominious creation. In truth, I sketched up this random hodgepodge of goofy-looking superheroes completely on the fly, with zero long-term intent beyond just filling out the shot’s background. Ah, but in the years to come, all of these tossed-off characters would loom large in future Empowered storylines—and several of them would, of course, meet somewhat grim fates, as is so often my storytelling wont.

Chronologically, I actually drew this page before the story “Love Changes Everything,” which speculated about the rather unsavory origins of these characters. In fact, perhaps I should clarify that most of the stories that make up Empowered vol. 1—and most of Empowered vol. 2 as well—were drawn in a completely different order than that seen in the published books. See, over the course of the nascent series’ first year or two, I noodled and meandered my way through roughly 300 pages worth of random stories, jumping back and forth at will to flesh out new ideas prompted by existing episodes. Then, well after the fact, I assembled a reordered selection of these stories to make up the first volume.

That approach still applies—more or less—to current Empowered installments, even though they feature far more directed and focussed storylines than these early books. While knowing the broad outlines of which plot points I need to cover, I’ll still hop around from one chapter to another, depending on which narrative thread appeals to me the most at that time. Gotta admit, I usually spend the first half of a given volume just trying to get “warmed up” for the more demanding work in the book’s second half. Generally speaking, production on the first half of a volume drags, while production on the second half soars. (At present, I’m well into the second half of work on Empowered vol. 10, but I don’t seem to be soaring quite yet.)

-Adam Warren

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