VERBOTEN UPDATE: I was a bit puzzled when the comments on yesterday's page went off on the word "verboten" being spelled with an umlaut in Mindf**'s telepathic thought balloon. "What the hell are they talking about?" thought I, before doublechecking the posted page and indeed espying said umlauted verboten with mine own eyes.

See, for the last few weeks I've been using my original pencil scans for these webcomic pages, rather than my usual, Rube Goldbergian multi-step process of using screencaps from the final, "printed" Comixology/ Dark Horse Digital version. My old scans give me a bit better pencil repro than the digital iteration, but at the cost of occasionally leaving out corrections and changes made for the published Empowered volume. One such change was the deletion of the offending umlauts over Mindf**k's blurted "verboten, verboten, verboten," which I (charitably) suspect were intended as a whimsical bit of linguistic japery on my part. However, I gather that I must not have felt strongly enough about the alleged joke to push for its inclusion when my editor or proofreader flagged those ol' umlauts, so away they went, never to appear in a published version of the page—until yesterday! An Empowered webcomic exclusive, folks! 

Panel 1: Lotta expository bricklaying here, though the overdialoguing gets worse in subsequent pages. No easy way to cut the verbiage down too much, alas, as some key points are being addressed. I can still see a few places where trimming would've been judicious, howeva. 

-Adam Warren