Panel 1: As long-term Empowered readers may remember from a last-act reveal in vol. 8, another explanation may exist for bad guys’ insistence on putting a gag on Emp after capturing her. Also, gotta love Emp’s wobbly, wavery, tear-blurred eyes, which are a manga riff borrowed from God alone knows how many different artists.
Panels 2-5: Here’s another rare 4-panel sequence featuring a progression of facial expressions, an interesting technique that I’ve not used since a fine riff in an Empowered vol. 1 story. While this narrative flourish is cribbed from a scene in Fujihiko Hosono’s fine manga Mama—aka “Maison Ikkoku, if Kyoko had been a teenage mother”—it belatedly occurs to me that this might also be an unconscious reference to Wendy Pini’s work in the American comic Elfquest, as I recall she occasionally used a similar “facial-expression progression” back in the day. I never, ever discuss this topic, but I was a heavy-duty Elfquest reader in high school, though I ditched the comic in a rather unseemly hurry once I encountered Japanese comics during my subsequent time at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art. Wendy Pini was, I should say, one of the first American writer-artists to feature definite manga influences in her comics work; I believe now that these elements were one of the main reasons I enjoyed Elfquest back then. Ah, but once I encountered genuine manga—the “real, unadulterated stuff,” as I considered it—I ditched the series immediately, and never looked back. Unfair, I suppose, but how is any American comic from the 80s supposed to compete with the sheer majesty of, say, Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira?
In truth, though I don’t think about it as often nowadays as I once did, Otomo’s Akira was easily the single most important and influential manga for me during my formative years as a comics artist. The way I draw explosions, speed lines, nighttime city panoramas and a host of other graphic riffs are all directly cribbed from Akira pages, even if I haven’t directly referenced from the manga in years.
I can’t begin to convey to modern readers how stunning and groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting Akira was when I first picked up those big ol’ oversized trade paperbacks, which for me dropped like a g-d bomb—or a psychokinetic weapon of mass destruction, perhaps?—in the stale, uninspiring, half-assed field of American comics. Now, a sparse handful of Western comics were kicking ass in North America back then, such as Moore/ Bissette/ Totleben’s Swamp Thing and Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and (with Mazzuchelli) Daredevil: Born Again, but the rest of the field was an blasted, empty, hopeless wasteland of comics far crappier than present-day readers can imagine. I’m always amused when comics fans complain about how crappy modern print comics have become, as I can easily recall how godawful American comics used to be for much of my life. As a child in the late 70s, I was driven out of reading comics by a level of numbing, grinding stupidity exponentially worse than the crossover-driven and perpetually rebooting shenanigans of today’s mainstream comics—and despite anomalous high points that still hold up today, such as Los Bros Hernandez’ Love and Rockets and Chaykin’s American Flagg, the 80s and early 90s weren’t always that much better than the wretched misery of the 70s comics field.
Back then, I had no role models in the American comics field, no examples to emulate, except possibly the manga artists who influenced me—but I perceived Otomo and Yaz and Rumiko Takahashi and their amazing peers as distant gods, whose work was hugely inspiring but not directly relevant to what I wanted to produce over here. That didn’t stop me from pursuing the goals I had in mind, as unrealistic as they were—by all rights, I shouldn’t have been able to acquire the license to do an American Dirty Pair comic. And yet that’s exactly what happened, which started me down the long and, yes, winding road that led to Empowered decades later.
Anyhoo, this commentary’s gone too long for just one day, folks! Yammer at ya later.
-Adam Warren
