This page brings up an issue that, henceforth, I’ve been rather spotty about addressing: the idea that Emp’s supersuit—or just its “glove,” here—heats up dramatically after unleashing one of the hypermembrane’s mysterious “VORPP” energy blasts. Sometimes I indicate this heat—as seen here with Emp fanning her steaming hand—and other times I don’t; can’t decide if I should work up a No-Prize-ish explanation for this mysterious variability or not. This is a matter I need to consider in greater detail, though, given that an imminent Empowered storyline will require our desperate heroine to VORPP again and again (and again, and again)…  

Panel 2: Enjoy a rare image of Emp’s supersuit in fully intact condition, folks! (Rest assured that it will not remain so for long.) As I’ve said before, nowadays I default to drawing her suit torn up a bit just because that’s more visually striking than the boring featurelessness of the undamaged membrane—and also, grinding out all the dark values of the complete suit is harder on my oft-ailing drawing hand.

Also, enjoy with this panel yet another of my many, many forays into what film critics sometimes call “deep staging,” in which a big, prominent foreground element is set up against—or frames—a dramatically important element in the background. (Here, a tight close-up of King Tyrant Lizard frames Emp in the background.) “Show-off-y” as they might be, I positively adore the dynamism and energy of such skewed and unbalanced compositions, and always prefer them to flatter, boring, more “objective” shots in which the camera is pulled back from a panel’s dramatic components.

Here’s a link to a film-criticism website discussing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, with my point of emphasis being the article’s first cluster of screencaps featuring bold, powerful depth-of-field-intensive compositions. Damn, but I love those Kane screencaps—and the images from earlier films that inspired Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland. 

Ah, but while I’d love to claim that I was a precocious young artist inspired to attempt “deep staging” by a viewing of Citizen Kane, in reality a John Buscema page from How to Draw Marvel Comics first interested Ten-Year-Old Me in this approach. In fact, here it is below, as the second of two pages:

The two pages in that jpeg are different takes on the same conversation scene, but with the less compelling first version of the page (at top) being staged as flatly and dully as Buscema could deign to render. The second version of the page (at bottom), by contrast, is Buscema at full speed, showing the chops that made him by far my favorite artist as a youth; note that several of the panels do indeed feature “deep staging” often reminiscent of the Citizen-Kane-related screencaps mentioned earlier. (Gotta love that first panel, though, in which the arguable key change between pages is in the angle of Boss Man’s cigar.)

 -Adam Warren