Volume 1 Page 198
Posted April 8, 2016 at 12:01 am

Emerald City Comic-Con update: As of today (April 8, 2016), I'll be set up at ECCC's Artist Alley, table Y-01, for all your signing and sketching needs! Note that Hiveworks and, seemingly, most of their webcomics creators will be at the convention as well, so feel free to swing by and say hi to any or all of us if you're attending the show!

Panel 1 features a camera placement very, very rarely seen in Empowered, thanks to how badly I’ve bungled the floor plan of Emp’s living quarters. As I’ve mentioned before, her apartment is loosely based on the San Francisco apartment I used to rent, back in the fabled day. (Yes, believe it or not, a fledgling indie comics artist could actually afford to live in the Bay Area back in that bygone, halcyon era.) Problem is, my recollection of that place’s layout is vague at best, thanks in part to the fact that I took very, very few photos during my time there. So, when I semi-recreated its layout for Emp’s home stomping grounds, I botched the floor plan to an alarming degree. (In all honesty, I've never even drawn up an overhead-view  floor plan for the damn place, which might well have prevented most of these problems.)

See, the apartment should have a kitchen or dining-room table to the left of Ninjette in this panel, but it never quite shows up in the series as a result of my vague and inconsistent approach to drawing this setting. Note that, throughout the series, we only ever see Emp and company eating while seated on her living-room couch, thanks to that table’s apparent nonexistence. (Sorry about that, Emp.)

This panel might also pose a very different location-based continuity issue, as its view from Emp’s windows seems to imply that her apartment is located fairly high up in its building—but, according to earlier glimpses at the flat’s door number, it’s only on the second floor. This, too, may be an unconscious callback to my old San Francisco apartment, which was also a second-floor dealie, but was located on a very steep Bernal Heights hillside—so, when you looked out its window from such an angle, the rest of the city seemed spread out below you, as if you were looking out from a much taller building. 

Given how often Emp waxes tearful throughout the series, I’m deeply annoyed that I never once thought to revisit panel 3’s riff about Emp liking hot chocolate—“with a zillion marshmallows”—after a “good cry.” Every damn time I stumble across this panel again, I briefly think, “Man, I gotta reuse that bit sometime,” but I never quite seem to get around to doing so.

 -Adam Warren

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