Panel 4: Yeahp, Emp is referring to the unfortunate incident in Empowered vol. 2 during which she was suckered into surrendering herself into captivity to—theoretically, at least—save a distressed damsel.

By the way, I don’t agree with commenters characterizing Emp’s behavior in that original story as being all that gullibly stupid or clueless. In Emp’s line of work, she kinda has to take civilians at face value when they cry out for rescue or otherwise appear to be in genuine distress; that assumption just comes with the territory when you’re a superhero, folks. Should she have preemptively VORPPED both future Ocelotina and the knife-wielding faux bad guy out of sheer, bloodyminded paranoia? Should capes be cringing in fear of possible betrayal from treacherous victims? Not really, as this “scheming civilians” scenario is supposed to be rare indeed in the Empverse, despite the fact that it’s happened more than once in Empowered. Then again, given that this comic never really shows the bajillion other times that Emp must’ve had to rescue (entirely) innocent civilians, perhaps the unflattering perception of Emp’s gullibility isn’t as off-base as it seems to me.

Panel 5: I presume the censored word, here, is “bitch,” but I could be wrong. Note that down the road, I began using smaller “censoring bars” to make sure that the exact profanity being obscured was more obvious, which had the amusing side effect of arguably making the censoring a bit more superfluous. What can I say, folks? These goofy-ass black bars entertain me to no end, and I now consider them to an integral part of the Empowered format.

-Adam Warren