Panel 1: For you incessant quibblers and nitpickers desperate for another inconsistency to snark about, I draw your attention to the frankly mysterious manner in which Emp’s tears leak out through the lenses of her supersuit’s mask, rather than dribbling out from underneath the mask as one would assume. Ah, but given how often our emotionally labile heroine cries, no doubt the supersuit worked out some superior way to vent her saline output, right? (BTW, stop snickering, as “emotionally labile” is, in fact, a real-life bit of psychological terminology.)

That, by the way, is the true beauty of the old Marvel “No-Prize” concept: Any nitpicking and persnickety reader can sneeringly and snarkily call out a flaw or inconsistency in a story, but only the more creative and imaginative reader can posit a plausible or—more importantly—entertaining explanation for an apparent error that feels appropriate for the story’s universe.

If I may indulge in some snark myself: I’m deeply and profoundly sorry for all the more fastidious nitpickers out there if, say, the insufficiently realistic depiction of Emp’s upside-down chest earlier in this story ruined the otherwise documentary-like verisimilitude and absolute commitment to artistic realism of a g-d “sexy superhero comedy” like Empowered for you. (Of course, I already wrote a g-d essay about said upside-down chest earlier, but clearly none of y’all bothered to read it.) Then again, this makes me the most obnoxiously, tediously persnickety geek of all, as I know better than most about how difficult it is to craft genre stories without spawning continuity flaws or plot holes, but I still indulge in geeky, snarky, hairsplitting nitpickery of genre material myself. Oh, well.

-Adam Warren