And now, my latest attempt to paste in an excerpt from another chapter of long-defunct prose experiment I Am Empowered, a Year-One-ish first-person account from Emp in 140-character Twitter format detailing her earliest days as a superheroine.
MY STUPID SUPERSUIT, CONTINUED (part 1)
Remember when I was blithely blithering about my supersuit's pros (unearthly empowerment) and cons (ungodly exposure of my bodily flaws)?
Well, I kinda failed to mention one rather important—in fact, ridonkulously important—"con" drawback to the suit's Elissa-empowering "pro".
Sorry, but I do have limits about how much painful, embarrassing truthiness I can reveal at one time re: how crappy a superhero I am, okay?
As I humble(cape)bragged earlier, the suit's hypermembrane allows me to utilize a modest little array of—to be frank—C-list superpowers.
I'm no all-purpose, sorcery-spewing powerhouse like Sistah Spooky, nor am I a walking arsenal of ultratech superweaponry like Red Griffon.
I certainly can't be deemed among the truly elect in superhero circles, as I lack a common requisite for A-list status: The power of flight.
In the hoity-toitiest cape-culture circles, you're quite often considered to be a second-class supercitizen if you aren't capable of flight.
The snobbishness directed by the flight-capable towards mere "ground-pounder" capes is, in my experience, insufferable and never-ending.
Flyers, like airborne hipsters, love to crow ad nauseum about wondrous aerial experiences that YOU, mere groundling, wouldn't know about.
Seeing the curvature of the earth, storm clouds at sunset, the glittering jewelry of the city at night, the rich tapestry of BLAH BLAH BLAH
Yeah, right, flying buttress(head). You can see the same crap during an airplane flight, can't you? "That's TOTALLY different," they sniff.
"Until you've felt the true majesty of capeflight, you have no idea what you're missing," flyers say, noses—and everything else—in the air.
After suffering decades of "airogance", flightless heroes have developed a richly varied lexicon of derogatory terms for the flight-capable.
Airheads. Pigeons With Capes. Flight-Path Fodder. Air Whores. The Flighty, Flighty Capetones. Butterballs (as in, turkeys). Skyjackoffs.
Thongbirds. (S)kid(mark) Icarus. Saucing Fliers. Jet-Propelled Jerkweeds. Air Pollution. Flight of Fancyboys. Cruising Missiles. Poultry.
Weather Balloons, Masked Blimps: Ugly, catty, weightist terms used by ladycapes to denigrate flight-capable superheroines. Yay, sisterhood!
Old-school: Whizzer. Doesn't sound bad, until you find it references an infamous 70s-era airborne urination incident involving FlyRobinFly.
Even a few flyer-derogatory acronyms have arisen, such as UFO (Unbearable Flaming Orifice) and LUTSIM (Look, Up in The Sky, It's a Moron).
Anti-flyer line: "They're like less-useful Predator drones, except that Predator drones only rarely get drunk and knock up college girls."
You haven't truly lived until a male superhero suavely tries to pick you up—literally—with the flyer's clichéd line: "Let's get high, girl."
I'm rarely thrilled about having to be carried by a male flyer, as they're prone to getting a little "hands-y" at times, if you follow me.
Especially in the, uh, heat of battle, male flyers can get suspiciously cavalier with how they grab and carry their flightless female peers.
After Powerglide flew me to safety during the HyperVigilantes battle, I thought I'd end up with his handprint bruises all over my thighs.
Mysteriously enough, this seems to be a problem mainly for lower-status superheroines like myself, as far as I can tell. Funny 'bout that.
Strange, that A- or B-List superheroines with higher social rankings and badass-ier powersets rarely face boundary-issue inappropriateness.
Despite her famous assets, Jugganaut never, ever gets bad-touched by flyboy peers, due no doubt to her A-List überstrength (and übertemper).
Okay, fine, I'm blatantly dithering and flying off on irrelevant tangents to avoid clarifying my fatal—well, fatal-ish—flaw as a superhero.
In fairness, I should say that my main powerset—superstrength and toughness, the ability to energy-zap—might normally qualify me as B-List.
Alas, what drops my ranking to C-List—or even, cringing here, D-List—is the glaring, Achilles-heel-y flaw inherent to my supersuit's powers.
Yes, I can indeed rock the entire aforementioned medley of not-totally-unshabby powers—but only if my suit's hypermembrane is fully intact.
If my supersuit gets ripped or torn, however, my unearthly powers instantly begin to falter, becoming all-too-earthily flaky and unreliable.
As my suit becomes more and more shredded and frayed, I lose more and more of my powers. My VORPPING grows feeble, my strength melts away.
By the time I wind up half-naked, I'm fully powerless. I'm just plain, power-free Elissa, clutching my suit's now-useless tatters to myself.
So, contemplate the subtle symbolism, here: In effect, I'm a superheroine who becomes less and less powerful as I show more and more skin.
Cruel Irony, The Prequel: In a Suprahuman Studies paper critically analyzing superheroine costume trends, I wrote this familiar sentence:
"A superheroine becomes less and less powerful as she shows more and more skin." College-Era Emp had no idea how true those words would be.
<END OF EXCERPT >
Wellp, if this actually worked, webcomic readers, I’ll try again shortly with another excerpt from this chapter of I Am Empowered.
Today’s Patreon update: Originally done as a means of scratching out more worktime to complete the long-gestating Empowered vol. 12, I've switched over to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday Patreon posting schedule that won't feature the fixed content format I previously used. However, my vast archive of years of Patreon posts—extensive Empowered previews, vintage con sketches, work stages on covers, "damsel in distress" commissions, life drawings & much, much more—remains available for Patrons' perusal.
-Adam Warren
