Panel 1: Strangely, I’ve long had an explanation in mind for an issue never directly addressed in the series: That is, what happens to the castoff shreds of Emp’s supersuit after it gets torn from her body? Why has no ultratech supervillain ever tried to grab pieces of the hypermembrane for analysis or exploitation? The answer—here provided as an Empowered webcomic exclusive!—is that the stray shreds of Emp’s tattered suit eventually evaporate once they’re out of contact long enough with either her body or the rest of the hypermembrane. Ah, but what then happens to the resultant vapor, you ask? That issue, alas, is a touch SPOILER-y, so I’ll have to withhold full clarification of the matter for a bit.

Panel 2: As we’ll see, the blindfold that Threatening Knife-y Dude tosses to Emp is fairly reasonable from a semi-“realistic” point of view, as he presumably planned ahead to bring it along. This, howeva, brings up a semi-related issue that a reader asked me about, regarding the many times in future episodes that poor Emp winds up with the same type of gag in her mouth: Who are so many long, skinny pieces of white cloth always available when supervillains need to capture her? Is Emp’s city overrun with a fashion for folks rocking white scarves of fairly heavy material? Could it be that her city possibly sports—ha ha!—some analogue for the “Terrible Towels” famously waved by Pittsburgh Steelers fans? Or do bad guys need to be ready at all times to literally wave the white flag in surrender? Mysterious! For that matter, why is so much rope always on hand in every supervillain’s lair? As we’ll find out much, much later on in the series, a potential explanation exists for the bizarre frequency of Emp’s recurring episodes of “damsel in distresshood”—but even that explanation would require some notable and peculiar “distress”-related logistics among the bad guys it affects. 

Panel 5: Two recurring artistic flaws from early Empowered team up here, as “Emp’s excessively, even wildly overlong hair as a stylistic flourish” and the dreaded Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch join forces in this panel. Strangely, the rest of her figure strikes me as okay, but the narrow, oddly tilted tube of her waist and upper torso monkeywrenches the shot. Oh, well. Then again, as I’m having severe problems with drawing right now, I remember that I had hoped to no longer have to draw at all before I began work on Empowered, that I’d hoped to switch to a writing-only role in comics over a decade and a half ago. (That didn’t quite work out, obviously.) Guess I should cut 2006 Me some degree of slack, given that I wasn’t expecting to still be drawing anything by this point. 

Or maybe not. In any event, gotta wrap this commentary up, as time is short. Later, folks.

-Adam Warren