Panel 4: While I personally didn’t mean to insult the kind folks who originally commissioned the “damsel-in-distress” sketches that eventually spawned Empowered, I feel that this is absolutely something that Emp as a character would say. I’m always amused when online sneerers accuse me of hypocrisy when I depict Emp objecting to her own objectification—can’t you dumbasses figure out that I’m just writing what I think the character would say? That my characters are not, in fact, mere mouthpieces for my own views? That Emp herself would not necessarily be thrilled in the slightest with the nature of the series she inhabits?

Panel 5: EXCESSIVE DIALOGUE ALERT! EXCESSIVE DIALOGUE ALERT! Three large word balloons like these constitute just too much g-d text for one medium-sized panel. This problem of “overdialoguing,” only now raising its ugly head in Empowered, would become a much worse problem in subsequent volumes. The problem is, I had a large number of points I wanted to hit, and I didn’t care to burn more pagecount by dispersing the dialogue throughout more panels and pages. Well, I should’ve both dispersed the dialogue and trimmed it back, even though I’d end up not covering all the points I wanted to address. Believe me, if Empowered had been lettered via software, I’d seriously consider going back and stripping out great swathes of excessive dialogue in these books.

-Adam Warren