Panel 1: Like the previously seen esoteric ninjutsu art of kyonyÅ«jutsu (“enormous breast magic”), the Japanese translation and kanji characters for chijojutsu, here, were provided by my friend Tomoko Saito. She would be best known of late as the letterer and retouch artist on the demanding Dark Horse translation of the Hiroaki Samura manga Blade of the Immortal. I say “demanding” because Blade was the only translated manga in the modern era to still be rearranged into left-to-right-reading order, and to have all its katakana sound FX carefully and painstakingly replaced by hand with English-language FX. For once, the reader wouldn’t be losing out—as was often the case, back in the day of commonly reversed or “flopped” manga— with the original kana FX being replaced, as Tomoko is a phenomenally skilled letterer who took great care to emulate and translate Samura’s FX style into English. In fact, Tomoko hand-lettered my own Dirty Pair and Gen 13 Bootleg comics, back in the halcyon days when books were lettered by hand on one’s original pages. My own hand-lettering on Empowered is a feeble attempt to emulate her vastly better fonts and FX usage—I would love to have asked her to letter the series, but A) we have no budget for an outside letterer and B) it’s far faster and much, much less of a hassle to letter the series myself, even if the results are inferior to what a more skilled letterer like Tomoko could have contributed.

Tricky bit: Note that chijojutsu, as seen here, does not seen to require much in the way of unearthly ninja magic—or, possibly, any ninja magic whatsoever, given that pretty much any attractive person could pull off the not-so-esoteric technique seen here. Mysterious!

Panel 3: What’s happening here, you ask? Cliffhanger time! Tune in tomorrow for the big reveal!

-Adam Warren