Volume 2 Page 111
Posted November 7, 2016 at 12:01 am

Strong drawing job on this page’s wacky yet provocative images of “busty Ninjette disguised as Emp,” I gotta say. The exaggerated narrowness of her waist and flare of her hips falls within an acceptable range of cartoony stylization without, I feel, stumbling into a full-on case of the dreaded Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch. (Your Mileage May Vary on this point, of course.) Strong facial expressions, also, on both of the first two shots of a highly mischievous ’Jette. Well done, 2006-Era Me; you didn’t entirely suck! (But I kid 2006-Era Me!)

This page marks the first appearance of one of my very favorite Empowered tropes: Obscure, abstruse and hyper-specialized ninja "jutsu" skill sets, featuring Japanese translations—and, here, calligraphy—by my friend Tomoko Saito, ace letterer of Blade of the Immortal and many of my earlier comics, back when I had the budget to afford a separate letterer. Oddly enough, the first few "jutsu" forms we encounter in this series are rather silly but not stunningly magical or unearthly in nature; only later on did I take full advantage of the sheer, goofy improbability inherent to the Empverse by making subsequent ninjutsu skill sets more and more supernaturally wacky. 

Here, Ninjette deploys “ninja magic” only to produce a remarkably convincing pair of fake boob in cartoonishly short order. By the way, I was about to use the old-school term “falsies,” but who the hell still uses that word any more? Feels like a relic from my childhood, when the term seemed to be flung about hither and yon with abandon—and even then, “falsies” seemed a vocabulary word used mainly by the older generation(s).

Not really sure, by the way, why I never again showed Ninjette rocking these fake breasts. Given her devil-may-care-attitude, frequent state of inebriation and goofy sense of humor, seems likely she would’ve broken them out on other occasions at least once or twice. Then again, I think it entirely possible that she did indeed do so, but we were never privy to those moments. Empowered volumes may be 200-odd pages long, but even that voluminous—and occasionally voluptuous—pagecount isn’t enough to show us all of the madcap shenanigans that these hard-drinking and impulsive young folks might have indulged in… *Cue raised eyebrow*

-Adam Warren

Comments
Privacy Policy