Panel 1: Note that this story, like a fair chunk of the previous one, goes very heavy on the close-ups—way too heavy, I gotta say. Ah, but I do have a rationale for this approach, said reason being that I really didn’t want to draw the restaurant’s interior in any detail. Laziness ahoy! Then again, I find mundane environments like this far more challenging and unrewarding than rendering the most complex of “ultra-tech laboratories” or the cape-comic like.

In fact, for up-to-date print or digital (but not webcomic-only) readers of Empowered, I should note that Emp and Spooky’s Chinese-food lunch in vol.10 was originally supposed to take place in a similar restaurant. I worked up detailed and complex designs and even a rudimentary SketchUp model for the setting, but eventually decided instead to use a more superheroic environment—that is, the “flying through the city” setting. Yeahp, having to draw a detailed and difficult urban cityscape struck me as still easier than trying to work up all the neighboring tables and booths and so on of a restaurant interior.

Panel 2: Note that Frank doesn’t appear all that thrilled with Thugboy’s, uh, gushing about Emp’s, ah, friskiness in the bedroom. (Go figure.)

-Adam Warren