As noted yesterday, this is the second of three Empowered pages I was able to write and draw in a single workday, a record of productivity that I would never again reach.

Panel 1: Here, a rare attempt at halfway interesting shading on the characters. At the time, the very soft pencil leads I used for most of the line art didn’t really lend themselves to intermediate tones like these; pretty sure I had to break out an HB-lead pencil for this shading.

Years later, after quite a bit of experience with life drawing from photoreference, I was able to achieve a richer tonal range with my 5B and 6B pencils. I took up that pursuit in large part because I was weary of my rendering skills’ severe limitations, and also because I was frustrated with both my limited grasp of human anatomy and, more importantly, the increasingly repetitive shortcuts I was using to get around that ignorance.

Next week, we finish off this story with some rather literal tearjerking, and head on into a dramatically key chapter in the volume.