Excessively exaggerated skinniness on the large figures of Ocelotina and Emp on this page—not quite in the Mysteriously Intermittent Post-Millennial Torso Glitch range, but still wonky to my present-day eye. I’d find this wonkiness more defensible if this were, in fact, a deliberate artistic choice on Decade-Ago Me’s part, but I can assure you that I was pretty much just “winging it,” slapping down figure drawings about as fast as I possibly could. Flaws like this—and the now largely disappeared Torso Glitch—arose almost entirely from sheer hastiness of production. 

Lord knows that I miss such blinding speed, by the way; thanks to recent years of life drawing, I have a better grasp of the anatomy I’m depicting, but I’m much, much slower at cranking out Empowered pages nowadays. As I write this commentary, I’m down to the last few pages of Empowered vol. 11, a process that’s taken me at least a year and a half worth of grindingly slow full-time work. (Might be more than that, even, as I had to take a break from the book in late 2017 after stalling out on drawing the g-d thing.) Man, I sure do miss those bygone days when this series wasn’t an absolute chore to draw; after the well-intentioned but ultimately nightmarish ordeal of vol. 11’s epic, sprawling, book-long battle, I’m hoping to go back to less hellishly difficult territory with vol. 12.

-Adam Warren