Panel 3: Yikes! Absolutely, brutally botched Emp’s torso in the “living” image of Schrödinger’s Catgirl—or “Schroedinger’s Catgirl,” if your font lacks umlauts. Arguably, the dreaded Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch has struck once again, with tragic results for Emp’s waist and midsection. Note that I’m not really concerned about any lack of—ahem—“realism” in the drawing, but rather am criticizing a specific type of wonky stylization that profoundly displeases my present-day eye. Of course, nowadays I’m no doubt bungling my present-day artwork with flourishes that will similarly displease me a decade from now, should I still be alive and still be drawing. Then again, this sort of thing is probably a danger for most comic artists who work in a style so profoundly detached from reality. Without the more realistic artist’s reference points of real-life human faces or figures to emulate, your work can easily warp and skew off in ever more distorted and exaggeratedly stylized directions of cartooniness.

 The “nonliving” Catgirl drawing isn’t that much of an improvement, alas, because I once again stumbled headlong into my ongoing difficulty with drawing Emp lying on her side and depicting the correct degree of hip and torso tilt.

 Note that Emp’s catgirl outfit is, I suspect, strongly influenced by an old chapter-break illo from Rumiko Takahashi’s manga Ranma 1/2, which depicts female-form Ranma dolled up in a suspiciously similar costume—though, as I recall, Takashashi drew her with a notably more modest one-piece suit, not a bikini. If I may quote Grant Morrison from Doom Patrol’s 90s-tastic parody issue “Doom Force,” as an angry superdude berates an already scantily clad female character for not being quite scantily clad enough: “WHY DO YOU INSIST ON DRESSING LIKE AN OKLAHOMA SCHOOLMARM?” While I am by no means the biggest Grant fan around, at least he gave us—nay, granted us—that deathless line of dialogue.

 Note also that Schrödinger’s Catgirl is, of course, a problematically inappropriate sexualization—on Thugboy’s part, I hasten to add!—of the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. 

 -Adam Warren