Must admit, Emp’s question in panel 1 seems like a question rather more likely to be posed by a male partner to a straying girlfriend than the reverse, but the intent here was to play up our poor heroine’s dire sense of insecurity and inferiority as much as possible.

I keep forgetting that, according to panel 2, Thugboy is supposed to have screwed SIstah Spooky on the hood of the Homeycar. If I ever do get around to depicting said vehicle—which has never once appeared during 2000-odd pages of Empowered—that prurient little factoid will surely be addressed in further detail.

I’m bemused that I never thought to reuse the “Note to Myself™” joke, which might well have proved useful during many problematic moments later on in the series.  

As readers Of A Certain Age will undoubtedly recognize, panels 2-4 are an homage to the classic TSR “Choose Your Own Adventure” books published during the early 80s. I’m sure that the format included many other types of stories, but I only read the ones tied into the TSR pencil-and-paper role-playing games Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st edition!) and Star Frontiers, which I was respectively DMing and GMing at the time. As I was a bit out of the target-demographic age range for the YA-friendly “Choose” books, I found myself endlessly amused by how hilariously at odds their somewhat tame narratives were with the bloodthirsty mayhem and relentless carnage that actually took place in my RPG campaigns.  

Geekery-intensive side note for old-school RPG folk: I found TSR’s SF game Star Frontiers to be a tad lacking in the action department, so I grafted the excellent hit location system from Chaosium’s RuneQuest onto it—and the results worked surprisingly well, as the campaign morphed overnight into a wildly, laughably over-the-top orgy of unending ultraviolence, like the last act of John Woo’s The Killer writ science-fictionally large. The soundtrack for most of our Star Frontiers sessions? A 90-minute tape loop of the audio from Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Nepalese bar shootout, which really was ideally suited “background sound”, save for its tragic lack of laser and gyrojet sound effects.

-Adam Warren