Panel 2: Note the rare use of a long word-balloon tail in this context, as I normally despise such lengthy "arrows," which are an ungainly characteristic—one of many!—seen in modern, crappy comics lettering. Yes, mainstream comics letterers seem almost hilariously obsessed with ABSOLUTELY CLARIFYING the speakers of dialogue by tacking on grotesquely long balloon tails stretching across panels to jab overtly at the babbling characters. Even worse, some letterers will shove pointy balloon tails right in the open mouths of the characters speaking them, which seems more a tad reminiscent of riffs from Revolutionary War political cartoons to me.

As is all too often the case, manga handles this issue much better than American comics, in that almost all mangaka use wee, truncated "arrows" on their word balloons to indicate the speaker—as do I, much of the time, though not in this particular panel's case. (OTOH, if a comics writer is truly crafting distinctive dialogue patterns for his or her characters, word-balloon tails could be left off entirely, as I've seen at least several daring and confident manga creators do.)

Next week on the webcomic serialization, Assertive Emp is Assertive as Empowered vol. 9's concluding story pages roll on.

Today’s Patreon update: Originally done as a means of scratching 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