CRASSLY COMMERCIAL UPDATE, effective through 4/21/2016: In the interests of commercial floggery, I should hasten to mention that Comixology is holding a "Dark Horse Heroines Who Rule" sale on digital comics, including all volumes of Empowered. In case you'd like to jump ahead—waaaaaay ahead—of the vol.1 stories currently being serialized on this site, through 4/21 you can snag all 10 existing volumes of Empowered for the sale price of $5.99 each, as opposed to the normal price of $9.99. Here's a link to the sale (or you can just click the Comxology link in the upper right of this page).
New Empowered readers might well be wondering, what’s up with the anomalous narrative captions on this page? Up to now, the series has steered well clear of such caption use—why the sudden change? For that matter, what’s up with those word balloons in the lower corner of panel 2, which seem to constitute metacommentary on the story itself? Rest assured, new readers, that a reason does indeed exist for these seeming anomalies—but what could that reason possibly be? This story does roll on—and on, and on—for a fair number of pages before the “big reveal” is finally made, so you’ll have plenty of chances to guess what the heck’s going on with this rather peculiar chapter.
An odd thing just noticed in panel 1: Why the hell is Emp eating a slice of cheesecake that’s facing the wrong way? That’s very, very strange. Does anyone ever seen cheesecake being consumed, in effect, backward, with the pointy part facing away? Did I get this concept from somewhere? Did I witness a shocking act of backward dessert consumption, and port it directly into Empowered? No idea, alas.
I should mention a puzzling bit of anatomical stylization in panel 4: Emp’s lower torso sports a very rare artistic flourish that I’ve dubbed “Hershey’s Kiss hips,” in which her midriff and waist slopes down to her leg without clearly defining the hipbones. This is very strange, as I am normally quite fond—perhaps a little too fond—of strongly defining the iliac crests of Emp’s hipbones when I draw her torso. (That might not have been the case a decade ago, though.) Note that this odd trend can sometimes combine with the related issue of the Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch, from which this Emp also suffers a bit. Then again, might’ve been the case that I was just screwing around with random attempts at figure-drawing stylization, either cribbed from another artist or worked up on my own.
-Adam Warren
