As always, Thugboy’s dedication to wearing sunglasses—nay, “mirrorshades,” to bring up the title of an old cyberpunk SF (prose) anthology—in improbable situations remains unsurpassed. Then again, perhaps he’s just shielding his sensitive eyes from the glare reflecting off the no-doubt pale flesh of Emp’s, ah, “swimsuit area,” as it seems safe to assume that she doesn’t spend much time in a tanning booth, let alone naked in a tanning booth.

In panels 2 and 4, note the way that Emp’s supersuit can apparently split open from the sternum down, an ability not hereafter mentioned again, presumably because I forgot entirely about it. “Zipless unzipping”: an interesting concept for how the hell Emp gets in and out of the super-clingy hypermembrane, a topic which I don’t think I’ve ever addressed directly. We occasionally see Emp pulling the supersuit on or off throughout the series, but I’ve never really shown precisely how that process works. Mysterious!

Panel 5 depicts how the enigmatic hypermembrane of Emp’s mask can convey her blushing quite clearly, a visual riff that was fairly rare at this early point in Empowered. Back then, most of the time I was drawing her mask’s “cheeks” as being shiny and opaque, and only occasionally shifting the suit’s surface into “blushing mode” for moments like this, in which our often embarrassed heroine was seriously reddening. Nowadays, even though Emp is actually much less prone to embarrassment and humiliation than she once was, I probably draw her mask in “blush mode” far more often, just because I find that more expressive and emotionally revealing than the mask’s “opaque mode.”

-Adam Warren