Panel 2: Brings up a tricky question: What color, exactly, is Emp’s supersuit? Early on, I kinda saw it as dark with blue-tinged highlights, hence Thugboy’s awkward reference to his off-panel, suit-wrapped manhood’s color. Ah, but since then, I’ve come to see it more as being blue in hue, to the point that I briefly flirted with Empowered cover illustrations in which the suit was rendered entirely with color, lacking the heavy, black-inked shadows seen on most of the earlier cover artwork. (After a few such images, though, in time I turned back to adding those inked shadows to her supersuit after all.)

Panel 4: Sudden appearance of Big, Pouty-Lipped Emp, coincidentally before an off-panel scene involving said mouth! For some reason, Comics Twitter is currently being swept by a meme of “my art in 2006 vs. my art in 2016.” While this is interesting to see with other, younger artists’ work, I ordinarily wouldn’t bother with such an indulgence myself—but it’s just occurred to me that my 2006 artwork is still rife with Big, Pouty Lips and the dreaded Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch, two concepts that are now pretty much gone from my current work. (Relatively thin lips and occasionally rather more torso than I had intended to draw are the order of the day, at present.) 

Panel 5 represents a rare occasion in which I think a long word-balloon tail is a good idea—that is, when you need to clearly indicate that a particular character is speaking, and in the process clarify and emphasize that Emp is, well, “going down,” as it were. (Must admit, the archness of the phrase “going down, as it were,” cracks me up a little too much. As I’ve repeated so often in quotation of the great Craig Ferguson, “I made myself laugh, and that’s half the battle.”)

-Adam Warren