Panel 1: Thinking back on it, this story does represent a bit of a turning point in the series with bondage imagery—nay, “damsel in distress” imagery, to wax euphemistic. As the next bunch of volumes each feature ongoing plotlines reaching an action-packed finale at book’s end, the once-incessant scenes of Emp getting captured end up getting relocated to isolated chapters delivering the “DiD” goods. Scenes of Distressed Emp wind up being fairly extraneous to the larger, sweeping story arcs to come, with the notable exception of Empowered vol.9, in which I impishly propose a “retcon” establishing that Emp might not have been quite as Distressed all along as the reader might have thought. (Uh, SPOILERS?) 

So, I wound up arguably “quarantining” the bondage-y content into separate short stories in the midst of future volumes’ longer, mostly distress-free plotlines. As I was still—and am still—doing some Empowered pages as DiD commissions, and because I know some portion of the series’ readership appreciates the content, I decided not to axe the DiD riffs from the series entirely, which I suppose could’ve been an option. As I see it, though, I’m not doing a bondage comic, but a comic that happens to (fairly frequently) have bondage imagery in it; the distinction might seem marginal to some, but it’s an important difference for me. Then again, not like I would’ve been “cleansing” the series to win approval from others, as Empowered is no doubt irrevocably tainted by its dubious origins in the eyes of some, even though the series has been almost shockingly well-reviewed at times.

Panel 3: Not a terribly nice move on the Charity Lady’s part, but I suppose the publicity couldn’t hurt Grant-A-Wish… or could it? One suspects that publicizing such a stunt might only encourage further requests along such cringe-inducing lines. (Hrmmm.)

Panel 5: I do enjoy the fact that Manny is enough of a budding supervillain to reflexively blurt out “YOU FOOLS!” in the midst of crisis.

-Adam Warren