Panel 1: Amusingly enough, Emp’s riff of “so wrong it hurts! It hurts!” is taken from the uncensored version of Prince’s song “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” from the album 1999. The longer cut of “Let’s Pretend” has a cheerfully obscene spoken-word ramble near the end in which The Purple One explains that he wants to “f**k you so bad it hurts! It hurts!”  

Panel 4: In reality, of course, the men around Emp would have no such reactions if they were to behold her squeezed into a pair of undersized Ninjette shorts, but such are her less than strictly reality-based body-image issues. (Directly stole this moment from a long-ago conversation with a somewhat Emp-like friend of mine, who also harbored comically mistaken ideas about a similar imaginary scenario.)

Panel 5: Speaking of imaginary scenarios, I was amused to stumble across the term “counter-factual scenario” a decade ago when I picked up a handful of “What If”-style essay collections written by card-carrying historians. These writers seemed obsessed with not using the now-familiar term “alternate (or alternative) history,” possibly because they didn’t want their speculative blithering to be lumped in with presumably—ahem—lesser works of mere fiction. 

I found myself thinking over and over again whilst reading the essays, “Folks, you’re talking about alternate g-d history scenarios, for f**k’s sake. As in, y’know, The Man in the High Castle or SS GB or—God help us all—the peculiarly Abraham-Lincoln-hating books of Harry Turtledove?” (Srsly, dude seemed to have a world-class hate-on for Lincoln.)

But noooooo, the vewwy, vewwy serious and not at all fiction-related term the editors used instead was “counter-factual scenario,” which seemed different from lowly “alternate history” only in that real historians were writing these goofy-ass essays. So, I borrowed this frankly pretentious term for Empowered vol. 7; not to wax too SPOILER-iffic, but you might encounter a few more “counter-factual scenarios” later on in this volume.

Today’s Patreon update: Open slot in the weekly schedule today! Not sure what I’ll be posting, but something will go up today. I’ve been posting every weekday (sometimes multiple times per day) on this Patreon for over a year, so why stop now?

-Adam Warren