Yeahp, folks, turns out that the—ahem—“stories” you’ve been reading for the last ten pages were all comic-format dramatizations of prose fanfiction, more specifically of the “erotic fanfic” variety. Did the godawful narrative captions and metatextual Emp word balloons clue you in about this little secret? If so, congratulations for figuring out my little game, here!
Believe it or not, one of the crappy “visualized fanfics” you just experienced becomes a long-term plot point of sorts, though this exceedingly slender narrative thread doesn’t pay off until a thousand or two pages from now. We will one day meet the writer of one of these unlikely scenarios, and said writer turns out to be every bit the wanker you would expect. (Pun intended, for the benefit of long-term readers who have already perused Empowered vol. 9 in print.)
Panel 2: So-called "timeslip" issues have long plagued Marvel and DC—that is, the ever-widening differential between how much time has passed in comics continuity and how much time has passed in real life. (Extreme examples: Have Superman and Batman actually been kicking around since the 1930s in the context of the DC universe? Was Ben Grimm really a fighter pilot in World War II? Did Tony Stark build his first Iron Man suit in Vietnam—or Afghanistan?) Sadly, Empowered has already developed its own set of "timeslip" problems as well, since I first began drawing the series twelve or so years ago, but only a few months have passed in the actual comic's timeline.
In this very panel, you can see one such problem in action: The (thankfully) little-noticed flaw that Emp's PC sports a big, strapping CRT monitor, a technological detail that grows more and more anachronistic with every passing year. Back in 2004, 'twas not entirely unreasonable—though not, alas, very forward-thinking on my part—for postcollegiate Emp to own that type of monitor. At least one of my nieces went to college with a CRT-equipped PC, and I was still rocking one myself, back when Empowered was slowly lurching and flailing itself into existence. In the Empverse, our cash-strapped heroine's supposed to still be using whatever computer she used in college; it's pretty much impossible—and growing asymptotically closer to impossible with every passing year—that she'd own a wheezingly ancient monitor of this type. She'd have gone to school with either a flatscreen-equipped PC or, far more likely, a laptop.
Still not sure how to fix this worsening error, alas; I should note that it has occasionally crossed my mind to someday "get my Tintin on" and go back and redraw anachronisms of this sort, if this series is still in print in the distant future. Ah, but as I’ve said before, the Empowered experience is all about embracing imperfection, and thus I am loath to open the Pandora’s box of revising anachronisms. On the other hand, if this series is still going strong another decade from now, I might have to consider such “corrections” a little more seriously…
-Adam Warren
