Panel 2: While I think this is actually one of the better shots I drew of shirtless Thugboy early on in the series, I still don’t care for the excessive trapezoid-muscle mass I inflicted on him. “It’s a trap!” The issue, here, isn’t really one of supposed “realism”—BTW, you have no idea how much I despise the disingenuous, hypocritical, opportunistic use of that term regarding comic-art anatomy!—but that I was deploying an exaggeratedly cartoony flourish that I no longer care for.

Panel 3: As we’ll see later, the key word in Ninjette’s statement, here, is “fertile.”

Panel 4: This line proved to be a bit of a continuity issue later on in Empowered, to the point that I kind of ignored it when later stories dealt with her ninja clan. Presumably she’s referring to an incident that’s never been directly depicted in the series.

-Adam Warren