Nice close-ups of Ninjette in panels 1 and 3. A tad dubious about her use of “my young padawan” in panel 3, though, which seems to posit that the Star Wars prequels exist in the Empverse. My theory is that the Empowered superheroes didn’t start appearing until after 1977, or even after 1983, so the original trilogy could’ve run its course before the presence of godlike beings began warping the wider culture. Without going as far as Alan Moore’s Watchmen—which, if you’ll recall, tangentially proposed that the less impactful presence of a handful of superheroes had a profound if not devastating effect on pop culture—seems likely that the Empverse’s pop environment would be rather different than our own mundane reality. That is, if you think superhero movies are tiresomely ubiquitous and inescapable now, imagine how much worse things might be if superheroes really existed…

Panel 4: Rivet’s use of “Crucial!” might be considered technically inaccurate, as that exclamation dates to 1987’s Prince song “U Got the Look”—with Sheena Easton, lest we forget—rather than the 1984 timeframe referenced in the previous few panels. Oh, well. 

-Adam Warren