As FanExpo Toronto came and went last weekend—without me in attendance this year, alas—I belatedly realized that I’ve been writing these commentaries for just over a year now, as I tapped out the first ones on the 2015 flight to Canada. If you jump back to the earliest commentaries, you’ll see that they were considerably shorter than is the present-day norm, as nowadays I tend to feel that anything less than three paragraphs is unacceptable. That, even though the only complaints I’ve gotten about commentary length have been of the “tl; dr” ilk. (Or, as I think of it, “too long; didn’t read; inexplicably wasted my g-d time commenting on the fact that I couldn’t muster the mental energy to read the OP, due to some peculiarly misplaced priorities on my part; I need to seriously reevaluate not just my online behavior but the entirety of my ever-dwindling mortal existence.") Might have to go back to a shorter commentary format for a while, due to the fact that I’m only a day or two ahead of schedule on writing these suckers.
This brings up a larger point, as I pass my personal one-year anniversary on this matter: Are you webcomic readers—or long-time Empowered readers, for that matter—still getting anything out of these commentaries? (Pretty sure I’ve posed this question before, but not within the last few months, I think.) Gotta say that I have at least anecdotal evidence that the webcomic serialization has introduced new readers to the series, but I get the impression that our pageviews plateaued some time ago. (I could easily find out for certain, of course, but no point in demoralizing myself unnecessarily.) Then again, I’m really not sure that the webcomic’s pageviews have all that much connection with these occasionally lengthy commentaries. I know a fair portion of the pageviews must be long-term Empowered readers checking the running commentary on pages they first perused years ago, but I dunno if newer readers get much value out of this accompanying blather or not.
Panel 4: I've been amused to occasionally see this panel’s neologistic term “shoulder candy”—meaning, a damsel-in-distress type prone to getting slung over villain’s shoulders—used elsewhere in the years since.
-Adam Warren
