Panel 3: Another running joke—or visual riff, at least—throughout Empowered is that Emp’s (sadly frequent) tears emerge directly through the “eyepieces” of her supersuit’s mask, rather than leaking out from underneath the mask’s “cheeks.” 

Panel 5: This may be one of the earlier examples of Thugboy’s firearm-oriented T-shirts, though I do have a vague recollection of mentioning this riff in an earlier commentary. Anyhoo, here he’s wearing a T-shirt with the logo for Mossberg, or O.F. Mossberg & Sons if you must be persnickety, a company known mainly for its manufacture of shotguns. 

Also, I’m deeply disappointed in Past Me for not giving Emp’s apartment living room a black sofa, perhaps even a black leather sofa, which would’ve added plenty of the deep values that my artistic palette so direly craves. (Hence all those pictures on the walls with big, black mattes on their frames.) Instead, I was stuck with this frankly half-assed, wholly unreferenced, ambiguously light-colored couch, which bugs the hell outta me at times. Rest assured, someday that sofa will be replaced; in fact, the whole g-d apartment will be switched out at some point down the road, as the existing one is rife with tough-to-draw flaws.

-Adam Warren