Panels 2: Why, look, it’s a pay phone! Another anachronistic reference that has, alas, not aged terribly gracefully in the intervening decade since 2006-Era Me drew this page. Oh, well. One oddity: I’m pretty sure that this particular phone set-up is, in turn, an even older visual reference to a similar phone booth(?) I drew for 1998’s miniseries Gen 13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy. So, amusingly enough, this is an anachronistic reference that was, in fact, already anachronistic a decade ago. Gosh!

Panel 3: As noted in earlier Empowered volumes, the mysterious and often vacillating powers of Emp’s supersuit can permit her to make telephone calls using the hypermembrane alone, but presumably not when her hands are duct-taped behind her back.

BTW, speaking of duct tape—or, here, Duck® Tape—check out this link I was just sent, to a type of glitter-finished tape that looks eerily like the sparkly surface of Emp’s supersuit, when the latter is depicted in color. Why, if our heroine were taped up with this stuff, it would be nigh-indistinguishable from her suit! Wacky!

-Adam Warren