Note panel 1’s rare bit of word-balloon-free “aside lettering” at lower left—that is, Thugboy’s Keanu-esque utterance of “Whoa…!” A dialogue technique long vanished from most mainstream North American comics, you still encounter such sotto voce, muttered-under-one’s-breath riffs in Japanese comics, God bless ’em. 

Panel 2: Speaking of God, He alone knows why the hell I still insist on drawing super-tight close-ups of my character’s eyes, despite the fact that my cartoonily stylized and detached-from-reality art style breaks down horrifically when I zoom in for “up-the-nose”-close shots akin to those of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in the West. Ah, but such are the inherent shortcomings of—ahem—“unrealistic” artists like myself—our styles aren’t “fractal” enough to stand up to super-tight camera placement. That being said, this particular shot isn’t all that problematic, as the only visual element that looks notably wonky, here, are the slightly odd growth patterns of Thugboy’s eyebrows. In a medium shot or conventional close-up, that slight wonkiness wouldn’t be noticeable, of course, which is why I recommend that all my cartoony-skewing brother and sister artists stay the hell away from super-tight shots like this.

Panel 3: Oof! Without question, I—or, should I say, dumb ol’ 2006-ish Me—absolutely cratered Emp’s figure proportions in this shot. This tragedy occurred because, in my heedless rush to crank out this Empowered page, I didn’t “draw her figure through”—that is, I didn’t pursue the correct approach of sketching out her figure in full on a separate piece of paper, then transferring the drawing into the final panel. Instead, I just scribbled a partially visible shot of Emp into the available panel space and, in the process, wholly botched and accidentally stretched out her proportions, an error which is remarkably easy to commit when drawing “cut-off” figures like this. As you look at that panel, visualize the absurdly long arc that Emp’s upper torso would have to describe in order to line up with her lower torso. Again, oof.

Now, at first glance, this seems like a simple mistake to correct—and I’m pretty sure that I recognized the problem before sending the original page off to be scanned. All I’d need to do would be to draw a new art patch of Emp’s lower torso and butt—and partially visible, her thighs—that would be moved rightward quite a bit, so as to clearly truncate the wonky elongation of her upper torso. Or, I could've drawn a new patch for the rest of her body and moved that to the left, as seen in this quick and dirty bit of Photoshoppery:

...which doesn't address the issue of her butt being out of alignment with her upper body, as one side is raised too high. So, perhaps I should've drawn an art patch for all of Emp's body in this shot.

Ah, but I didn’t make that correction—or any such correction—because I was in the process of making a much more sweeping blunder during the collection of Empowered vol. 2. See, in a fit of stunningly bad planning—or lack thereof—I wound up doing all the art and lettering corrections for the volume’s 200-odd pages at once, over the course of a day or two (or three). Normally, I work up “correx” every few pages, or maybe for 10 or 20 pages of a story at most; having to grind through a full 200 pages of correx in succession proved to be a mind-numbing grind, as you might guess. By the end of the process, I was so burnt out from churning out a seemingly ceaseless stream of hundreds of relettered word balloons and redrawn panels that I had to admit defeat and, well, just couldn’t muster the energy to bother with a final round of art corrections. This panel, needless to say, was one of the correx I neglected to make—but as mangled and screwed-up as this shot of Emp might be, I made a much worse blunder with a story later on in the volume, which needed far more extensive corrections that I neglected to make, alas. (More on that screw-up in a few weeks, folks.)

In closing, one more note on panel 3: Thugboy’s first word balloon quotes a line from Johnny Gill’s 1993 booty-concerned song “The Floor,” a lyric which fish-hooked in my mind to such a degree that I had to anachronistically apply it as dialogue for a young man very unlikely to have ever heard the song. Oh, well.

-Adam Warren