Panel 3: Lo and behold, a rare Empowered “ping-pong” dialogue exchange, which is a practice that I’ve previously excoriated at great length. Still, this short, clipped exchange is brief enough not to set off my ravening antipathy for such a dialogue approach.

Panel 4: Dang, but this panel’s close-up of Emp is a g-d train wreck. Great that 2006-Era Me was trying something different, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the results were a mess.

Panel 5: And yet, this very next close-up of Emp is vastly superior to the previous panel’s bungled travesty! 2006-Era Me, just like Present-Day Me, was quite clearly a “hit-or-miss” kind of artist at times. Still, better to try something different on occasion—and fail!—rather than sticking only to artistic riffs that one knows for certain will work.

Panel 6: Points off to 2006-Era Me for the lame “M. Night Shamalamadingdong” joke, especially since the tired and overused—if not, dare I say, problematic!—riff arguably violates the unspoken compact that the All-Seeing Autarch never, ever uses anyone’s name directly. (With one very notable exception to this practice occurring in Empowered vol. 7, as long-term readers will recall.) Further points off, I guess, for an indirect callback to Shyamalan’s movie Signs, which I suspect is not a reference that has aged very gracefully during the intervening decade. Then again, that’s certainly to be preferred to a mention of The Last Airbender or Lady in the Water or The Happening, I suppose. 

-Adam Warren