Hrmm. Not much to say about this title-page illo, other than one thing I realized a few years ago: While I like drawing both Emp and Ninjette to roughly the same degree, when I have to draw each repeatedly, I soon grow weary—no, my drawing hand grows weary—of having to draw all those dense values and highlights in ’Jette’s long hair. (Specifically, I first grasped the issue during the Kozue-centric Empowered vol.7, by the end of which my poor fingers were begging for mercy after grinding out her raven hair and equally dark outfit roughly a bajillion times in a row.)

Superheroic Emp, by contrast, offers with her tattered supersuit just the right balance of both the rich value range I crave aesthetically, while her quickly delineated hair spares my drawing hand a fair bit of stress. As I’ve noted before on many occasions, I intensely dislike drawing Emp’s fully intact suit because A) it looks visually dull, as the membrane was conceived from the beginning in a half-shredded state; and B) rendering the full suit chews up my hand even worse than Ninjette’s hair. 

-Adam Warren