Volume 1 Page 230
Posted May 24, 2016 at 12:01 am

Panel 1: Yeahp, there’s another reference to Emp’s cold-shoulder/ freeze-out treatment of Thugboy having lasted a frankly unbelievable nineteen days. Nine days, maybe; nineteen, not bloody likely for either of the hot-blooded pair. Then again, in 2006-Era Me’s defense, I had a considerably less comprehensive grasp of both characters at this early point in the series.

Nice shot of Ninjette in panel 1, though I find myself noticing that I hadn’t yet chosen the specific set of costume-adorning shuriken that have been part of her outfit for the last eight or so Empowered volumes. The eight-pointed throwing star on her hip, here, has long ago been fixed as a four-pointer in the present default version of her costume. 

Panel 2: An early hint of the now-vanished artistic affectation I’ve dubbed “The 3/4-Shot Overbite,” in which a stylistic flourish led me to mess around with lady characters’ facial structures a bit too enthusiastically. So-called “realism” isn’t the issue, here, but rather the specific degree of stylization that I chose to embrace—and, nowadays, have chosen to reject.

Panel 3: Cute image of Emp, though sometimes I wish I hadn’t decided to make Thugboy so much g-d taller than her. Though I still don’t have a concrete number in mind for her height—I’ve never bothered to do a height-comparison chart for Empowered, 2000-odd pages into the series—she’s not supposed to be especially petite, which means that Thugboy is a towering treetrunk of a man by contrast. Then again, in an upcoming panel in vol. 2, we see an Emp/ Thugboy shot in which he’s depicted as even bigger than he is here, to the point that he looms as large as one of the ginormous villains from the old-school manga an anime Fist of the Northstar—or Hokuto no Ken, if you prefer.

Finally: Despite an announced attempt to write shorter commentaries in order to get ahead on my schedule, note that this one ran a full four paragraphs long, regardless! Ughh. Okay, technically this commentary ran five paragraphs long, counting this paragraph commenting on the overall number of paragraphs… Ughh, again. (Then again, depending on how you count the sentence I wrote for “hover text” on this page, this commentary could be considered as being six paragraphs long.)

-Adam Warren

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