Panel 2: Behold the once-old-school trope of the bad guy touching and or lifting the captured heroine's chin, a once-common fictional gesture now seemingly vanished from pop culture (as far as I'm aware, at least).

Panel 5: One of the jokes here being the idea of a bad guy whose supranym is presumably derived from the Zapatista movement potentially voting Republican. Gasp!

Next week on the webcomic, strife and tumult soon erupt on the heels of Emp's seed-sowing, followed by the spectacle of a truly obnoxious supervillain design.

PANEL 5 UPDATE: Aaaaand cue at least a few commenters immediately leaping to sweeping assumptions based on Emp's dialogue, if not outright flouncing off the g-d webcomic in a huff. For f**k's sake, people, Emp is (I thought) pretty obviously pursuing a manipulative tactic via politically charged rhetoric to divide and conquer her foes based on still-unknown intel. Might've been funnier or at least more novel if she had instead outed Zappatista via some sort of "Greetings, fellow Republican" gambit, but this is what I chose to roll with eight g-d years ago when I originally wrote this scene.

If you're wholly averse to reading semi-contemporary overheated political exchanges—and I wouldn't blame you if you were—feel free to skip the next three days of escalating hostilities and return to the webcomic on Thursday, June 16 for the aftermath, okay?

As for everyone else, try to keep things civil, please? The politicized bickering and mayhem that are about to erupt in the story were just a tad more whimsical and semi-amusing in 2014, which still seemed like a pretty g-d polarized timeframe in that moment; little did I f**king know, obviously. In retrospect, I might've been better served to have found some other topic for the supervills to violently disagree over but, well, that's not what I chose to depict back then, for good or ill.

Today’s Patreon update: In an attempt to scratch out more worktime to complete the long-gestating Empowered vol. 12, I've switched over to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday Patreon posting schedule that won't feature the fixed content format I previously used. So, who knows what today's post might feature? Could be Life Drawing or Distressed Damsels content (both of which are featured at least three times per month), or something in the Work Stages, Vintage Con Sketches or Design departments, or possibly something entirely new. Golly!

-Adam Warren