Don't have much to say about this page, folks, so I might as well blither about my ever-burgeoning Patreon account!
Pretty sure I must have well over 300 posts(!) in the ol' archive, as I've been posting on a frankly unsustainable every-weekday basis since the Patreon kicked off back in March. New pages from the upcoming Empowered vol.12, as well as plenty of sneak previews of other upcoming work! A never-ending series of monthly art requests based on Patron content suggestions! Failed-Project Friday, a recurring series exploring my many, many rejected comics pitches! A weekly post of "damsel in distress" commissioned artwork and comics, of the same sort which eventually spawned Empowered! A new feature, Comics Riffs I Love, which explores art and storytelling techniques that have inspired and influenced me! Weekly life drawing sets both new and old, along with the high-resolution raw scans for 'em! All this and so much more, with Patreon tiers ranging from $1 to $20!
"So much more" now includes the unfinished prose experiment I Am Empowered, a defunct project from 6-7 years ago that effectively serves as Empowered: Year One, given that it's a Twitter-formatted, Emp-POV recounting of our heroine's earliest misadventures. Taking place just before the beginning of Empowered vol.1, this series of Patreon text posts addresses a fair number of points not covered in the comic; in fact, much of the material generated for this incomplete project wound up later seeing use in the series proper. Anyhoo, I'm serializing I Am Empowered's 140-odd pages of prose on the ol' Patreon for the next few months, with the feature being available to Patrons at the $3/month level and above.
In fact, from here on out I'll likely tack a daily mention here of what's going up on the Patreon on each day. Problem is, I'm writing these commentaries weeks out from when each webcomic posts, and can't tack a direct link to that day's Patreon update until it actually goes live. (Wellp, maybe I'll just use a general Patreon link.) As this is Monday, that means the aforementioned weekly double dose of life drawings (and high-res raw scans for each) will be posted this morning at 9:00am EST.
Anyhoo, hope at least a few of you might consider supporting the Patreon at some point, as that's about the only way I can conceivably imagine Empowered continuing in the long term. Print and digital sales have been steadily dropping over the last decade, alas, and while the webcomic serialization brings in some nice bonus bucks every month, I certainly couldn't sustain this format as a full-time gig. "Sigh, " to quote Emp.
-Adam Warren
