I do love this urban park setting, which is probably my second favorite Empowered background to draw, as it is so g-d easy to render. My most favorite background? The jumbled, vaguely futuristic-looking piles of colorful but utterly meaningless “future-techy riffs” seen in later volumes. Note that these backgrounds—or “BGs,” in comic-speak—do take a fair bit longer to draw than the silhouetted foliage of this park setting, but are just as easy and stress-free to visualize and render in pencil; with very little thought and rarely any first-draft sketching, I can grind out such environments while essentially “on artistic autopilot.” Plus, I like those BGs because they give the erroneous impression of time-consuming background detail, unlike the fairly obvious detail skimping of an urban park setting.

Note that these ultra-tech BG riffs are my own idiosyncratic version of the wonderfully wonky and wholly meaningless high-tech BGs that Jack Kirby used to draw. In fact, I once tried to imitate “Kirby-tech” environments in a Scarlet Witch & Domino story I wrote and drew for the Marvel anthology book A&X. In that 10-page story, the two superheroines ventured into a ship belonging to the almighty Celestials, whom Kirby created back in the 70s for his Marvel series The Eternals. Alas, I found his old techy motifs too alien and off-putting to sustain drawing for long, and wound up switching over to a BG version of my own ultra-tech visuals, but with occasional Kirby design riffs sprinkled in. 

Panel 2: I rather vividly recall stumbling across commentary online about a “damsel in distress” scene in Empowered vol.1, in which a captured Emp was depicted as both gagged and blindfolded, the latter being a rarity in Emp “DiD” sequences. The commenter noted—with apparent approval, mind you!—that the blindfolded Emp looked “so dehumanized!” Interestingly, other readers perceived the image differently—if anything, some felt a higher degree of protectiveness for her in such a state of even greater helplessness than usual. As I’ve noted before, I’ve talked to at least several diehard bondage aficionados who no longer particularly appreciate the “DiD” scenes in Empowered, as they have too much sympathy for Distressed Emp to find the imagery titillating. Different strokes, folks!

-Adam Warren