As I’ve commented rather frequently of late, I’m a bit taken aback by the cartoonishly stylized “big head” proportions I would occasionally indulge in a decade ago, as seen so distinctly with these two images of Metatextual Emp. That’s just not an artistic flourish I’d bother with nowadays, though I’m not really criticizing Decade-Ago Me for the choice. Tastes change over time, folks. 

Meta Emp will keep on hoping for more purely “tee hee”-oriented volumes in the future, but she’s not likely to be satisfied on that front for a while. The next few books in the series aren’t necessarily quite as intense as this volume’s ending—though Your Mileage May Vary on that point—but neither do they slather on the Happy Fun Time, I’m afraid.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that I’ve done the same g-d thing at the end of every book so far, my choice to add “The End” at the top of p.205 invariably causes a few readers to think that the entire series just ended. Sadly, I only got around to tacking on the James Bond-style “Empowered will return, by the way” under “The End” as of Empowered vol. 11, a clarifying solution which I should’ve thought of much, much earlier.

-Adam Warren