Panel 1: For the record, I traced and redrew this panel from two pages earlier, so I could slap new dialogue over it for this page. If I’d been thinking ahead, of course, I could’ve drawn the original panel without word balloons, then used it on both pages with the dialogue lettered on overlays. When you’re a busy comics artist, folks, you gotta keep potentially time-saving shortcuts in mind at all times. 

Panels 2 & 3: By this point, do I even need to tell ya that the Overdialoguing Alarm is ringing? Far more upsetting to Present-Day Me, howeva, is the fact that Decade-Ago Me resorted to the use of what I call “ping-pong” dialogue exchanges, a back-and-forth writing riff that I normally avoid like the plague. The last time I weaseled out and went all “ping-pong” on Empowered was way back in vol. 1, with said page featuring a long, looooong commentary explaining in exhaustive if not exhausting detail why I dislike the practice.

This page is a definite case of me wanting to cover a lotta ground in terms of dialogue, but not wanting to expend much pagecount on it, leading to this unfortunate blizzard of verbiage. My issue with overdialoguing is that, in my eyes, the practice is actively hostile to the casual reader, if not the committed reader as well; when I see giant swathes of word balloons in a comic like this, I’m not thrilled about having to parse this much text.

The obvious solution is to have burned more pagecount on this Emp/ Thugboy conversation, of course. A less obvious approach though, might’ve been to skip forward through their talk a few minutes at a time (using captions such as 5 MINUTES LATER, perhaps, for extra clarity) with a series of smaller panels, to show dialogue excerpts conveying the arc of their conversation. Then each wee panel could’ve featured a different, close-up image from the scene—tight close-ups on the faces of Emp and Thugboy,* say; Thugboy’s hand stroking Emp as they discuss her body, contrasting with a shot of Emp’s hand twisting in an anxious gesture; the supersuit’s mask as it “listens in”; and a bunch of random images from the setting, such as close-ups of bedsheets or nightstand or framed photos on the wall. (Whither Mellow Mr. Monkey, come to think of it?)

A multi-panel approach would’ve definitely been more visually interesting and appealing than this page as stands, which blatantly says, “go screw, artwork; cramming in dialogue is all that matters, here.” 

-Adam Warren

*Commentary note: Here, I initially typed “Emp and Spooky” instead, just ’cause I’ve been talking about the Empowered and Spooky’s High School Hell miniseries of late. No, really! No sexual foreshadowing intended by that typo, I swear!