Panel 1: Behold, a very, very rare Empowered example of a supervillainous deathtrap. This is a particular cape-comic trope that’s never held all that much interest or appeal for me, and one that didn’t strike me as a good fit for the Empverse, even before I’d worked out the so-called “Unwritten Rules” governing superheroic interactions. Moreover, in my subsequent vision of the Rules, a superhero’s semi-accidental death in battle would be one thing, but a bad guy deliberately, coldbloodedly committing an execution-style murder would be quite another—and a deathtrap would fall under the latter category, certainly.

This does bring up an amusing scenario: What if a supervillain is really, really into the whole deathtrap trope—as some folks definitely are—but doesn’t care to run afoul of the Unwritten Rules by actually killing a superhero(ine)? He might set up an intimidating, even terrifying faux deathtrap that is, in fact, carefully non-lethal—but what if the Infernal Device then malfunctions, leading to desperate shenanigans aplenty as villain and supervictim struggle together against it? Wackiness ensues!

-Adam Warren