Panel 1: Thugboy’s protective embrace of both Emp and Ninjette does seem to be a bit of a stretch, if not a tad opportunistic. Then again, the terrifying threat of the bellowing Demonwolf may well have frightened them all into huddling together for shelter from the raging storm of his invective.

Panel 3: Here, the slightly unusual rendering of Emp’s blush pattern is, I believe, a visual riff I borrowed fairly directly from the work of manga artist Mayoco Anno (Sugar Sugar Rune, Insufficient Direction, In Clothes Called Fat). 

While I’m fairly sure that I thieved the blush depiction from a random serialized chapter I stumbled across from one of her earlier works, Hataraki Man, gotta say that my favorite of her manga is Sakuran, a story about courtesans in an Edo Period brothel. The lone volume of Sakuran, in fact, still has a prominent place amongst the pile of reference manga lurking beside my drawing table.

Panel 4: This panel recounts a key scene from the Empowered vol. 1 story “Big Cosmic Pimping,” in which Emp did indeed narrowly escape being added to the harem of the mysterious “Cosmolactic Emperor” thanks to her allegedly excessive backside. This story’s easily one of the goofiest and off-the-wall stories of the notably eccentric early series, yet did nonetheless contribute the incredibly crucial element of the power-draining alien bondage gear that now imprisons the Demonwolf. Gotta love how certain threads from even the wackiest throwaway riffs of early Empowered were woven into a larger and longer-term narrative, even if the original story might not have been the most promising of source material to start with.

Gotta say, quite a missed opportunity for the Demonwolf never to have directly encountered this panel’s Pimpotron 3000, as the latter’s weirdly garbled, neologism-intensive speech patterns would make for an amusing contrast with the Blazing-Eyed Devilgoat’s stentorian yet oddly formal verbal stylings.

-Adam Warren