Today, we kick off the webcomic serialization of Empowered vol. 3. (Woo hoo?) This is a rather mixed bag of a volume, as it combines some of my favorite stories from the early series with a few of my least favorite stories, the latter driven by some fairly desperate choices on my part to meet the book’s fast-approaching deadline. By this point in Empowered, the generous, 500-page buffer of story pages I’d once built up before publication was long gone, and I would spend the rest of the decade frantically trying to catch up.
Bit of the ol' Bruce Timm-style “wasp-waistedness” to Emp on this cover, though I’m slightly hesitant to brand this as an example of the oft-discussed Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch. While she’s notably skinnier in this shot than I would’ve liked, the image lacks the truly wonky, distorted, serpentine quality of a primo 2006-era Torso Glitch. Side note: Emp’s large head size, here, is unquestionably an example of the cartoony, “big-head” flourish of Rumiko-Takahashi-style figure proportions I liked to bust out on random occasions a decade ago. This, too, is a riff I’ve largely abandoned nowadays, along with Shane-Glines-worthy wasp waists and Big Pouty Lips. My insincere apologies to those of all y’all who enjoyed those previous elements of my artwork, but I had to move on to new sets of cartoony flourishes and goofy anatomical riffs.
-Adam Warren