An interesting approach with this page, in that it’s a single Emp figure stretching across all three panels, with only her hand positions and gestures changing between panels. Nice idea, 2006- or 2007-Era Me!
Panel 1: Enjoy some vintage Big Pouty Lips on poor Emp, here! I should let webcomic readers know that this sort of extreme Big Poutiness faded from my modern artwork quite some time ago—but the trend continues largely unabated over the next two or three (older) Empowered volumes being serialized here, for good or ill. If anything, I’m more annoyed by her lips’ rather wonky placement on her face, which really doesn’t work well to my present-day critical eye. Bad call, 2006-2007-Era Me!
Panel 2: No idea whatsoever as to where the heck Emp’s “Who Cares?” Bear T-shirt came from. Can’t even guess if I came up with the joke myself, or snagged it from an image I saw online. (I could try Googling this concept to find out, but the ol’ DSL’s on the fritz right now, so to hell with it.)
Holy crap, Emp’s blonde tresses are flowing outta control—and excessively long—in this shot! This brings up an interesting point: So Emp apparently goes hiking in the mountains with unbound hair? Seems unlikely that she wouldn’t tie it back in a ponytail in this context, but I probably avoided doing so, here, because that would pose a bigger problem—why the hell wouldn’t she ponytail her hair when she’s out superheroing? I could No-Prize my way out of that conundrum by claiming that, say, her flaky and wildly jealous supersuit considers a hairtie to be infringing on its territory, I suppose—but I prefer to leave the matter unaddressed.
Panel 3: To be honest, not entirely sure if the Uwe Boll reference is entirely appropriate for Emp to be making. As we’ll see in future volumes, Emp has definite geeky tendencies—such as her interests in fanfic, yaoi and superhero-licensed underpants—but I’ve never directly established that she knows very much about either videogames or videogame-related crappy movies. (Then again, as we’ll see later in this very volume, her apartment does indeed feature a game system of some sort—but Thugboy or Ninjette could conceivably have brought it over, perhaps.)
-Adam Warren
