Panel 1: Note that this advice-offering fella is Frank, the gangleader dude who almost executed Thugboy for his undermining and Emp-supporting treachery in an earlier Empowered vol. 1 story. I often think of him as “Empverse’s Frank,” in tribute of course to “TV’s Frank” from the great Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Panel 4: See those two dimples on Emp’s lower back, just above the waistline of her rather low-riding jeans? For most of the last few decades, as I dutifully drew them over and over again on one “toothsome rump”—to quote the Demonwolf—after another, I mistakenly thought those were called “sacral dimples.” Only a few weeks ago, howeva, I discovered that the term “sacral dimple”—singular, you’ll notice—refers to a relatively rare trait that can, in infants, sometimes be an indicator of spina bifida(!). Turns out that the correct term for the anatomically universal pair of indentations above the—ahem—gluteal cleft is, in fact, “dimples of Venus,” a notably more colorful and vivid turn of phrase. (Wikipedia also suggests the more prosaic “butt dimples” or the frankly science-fictional “Venusian dimples,” but let’s ignore those heretical deviations from obvious vocabulary greatness.)
Panel 5: Note that, in the first edition of Empowered volume 2, I tragically misspelled “Stendhal’s syndrome” as, I think, “Stendahl’s syndrome.” Whoops! Tragic, I say. Ah, but as someone rather unkindly put it to me on another occasion, “He who lives by the sword of pretentiousness, dies by the sword of pretentiousness.” Seriously, though, I don’t think a Stendhal’s syndrome reference is all that pretentious or abstruse, given that I first ran across the term circa elementary school—and even as a wee lad I found the concept evocative and even semi-relatable, given my own intense reactions to (comics) art.
Side note: In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons RPG terms, I see the Sword of Pretentiousness as a +3 sentient bastard sword, presumably with a high Ego but a lower Intelligence rating than the sword itself might think.
-Adam Warren
