And now, my latest attempt to paste in another excerpt from the first chapter of long-defunct prose experiment I Am Empowered, a Year-One-ish first-person account from Emp in 140-character Twitter format detailing her earliest days as a superheroine.

MY STUPID NAME, AND MY EVEN STUPIDER SUPERSUIT (part 7(?); conclusion)

More conventionally—not to mention battle-relevantly—I can ragdoll bad guys with superstrong punches and go villain-bowling with boulders. 

With the suit's strength and my own way-too-broad hips, I can even deliver The Mother of All Hip Bumps, hard enough to roll a BadGuyMobile.

I can leap remarkable, even astounding distances. Unfortunately, in a built-up urban landscape, this often means I'm leaping into disaster.

More on this topic later, but let's just say that super-jumps from rooftop to rooftop are much, MUCH harder than they look.

With a wave of my supersuited hand, I can zap things—or "VORPP" things, really, as that's the sound the resulting energy blast always makes.

Yes, indeedy, it's true: As a superheroine, my powerset includes the gift of DEADLY JAZZ HANDS.

Unfortunately, my badass VORPPing tends to be wildly inaccurate, as one would tend to expect from a jazz-hands-based form of energy weapon.

Clarification: My VORPPing capacity ranges from non-lethal zapping—perfect for swatting pesky, normal-human minions—to very lethal indeed.

At max VORPPing effort, I can do severe damage to cars, mecha, villain-lair walls, criminal rocklife, animated abstract-art sculptures, etc.

Happily, the supersuit seems to sense my VORPP-related intentions when I rock my Power Vogue-ing, so no one gets accidentally vaporized.

Next up: The membranous eyepiece lenses in my supersuit's mask open up an awesome—though bewildering—array of vision-related options to me. 

I don't just have beyond-perfect, 20/Ridonkulous vision, as if I'm the world's largest and most bizarrely plumaged peregrine falcon. Oh, no.

And my mask's lenses don't merely give me camera-like zoom and macro viewing capabilities. That stuff, at least, is comprehensible to me.

Seeing in the dark? Easy-peasy, though the suit cycles oddly through night-vision options, some of which are familiar, some of which aren't. 

When I'm villain-hunting in a pitch-black warehouse, the suit might show me recognizable thermal imaging, or greenish light intensification.

Other times, it uses much stranger night-vision modes, like a "sparkle-vision" dealie that detects organic electrical activity—I think.

No, what's odder is that my supersuit's lenses occasionally let me perceive puzzling and disturbing imagery that I can't really understand.

If I squint the right way, I can literally look into people's bodies. Sometimes what I see is MRI-ish, and sometimes it's wet, icky, gooshy. 

At other times, my wacky "suit-vision" inexplicably—and creepily—shifts into what I've come to think of as "Alien Augmented Reality" mode.

Weird little caption-y thingies filled with incomprehensible symbols start popping up in my field of view, tagged to random objects nearby.

Often, I look up into the night sky and see strange, amorphous shapes rippling across the starfield, labeled with unintelligible captions.

Then I say out loud—if no one's around, that is—"Hey, supersuit, this sad, ignorant hominid can't understand what you're showing her, okay?"

And, PLINK, the anomalous imagery suddenly disappears, until the next time the suit tries to present its Guided Alien View wackiness to me.

Amazing yet creepy: I made the impressive-slash-disturbing discovery that, when I'm wearing the fully intact supersuit, I never have to pee.

No joke: One time I had the suit on for a good 20 hours straight before, startled, I realized that I hadn't needed a bathroom break all day.

Honestly, for a girl with a bladder capacity normally in the "thimbleful" range, not needing to pee counts as a truly legitimate superpower.

Sadly, this power disappears when the suit is damaged, which is problematic for anyone prone to getting tied to a chair for hours at a time.

Needless to say, I try my best not to think too deeply about the hows and whys—and WTFs—of the bathroom invulnerability the suit offers me.

So, yeah, the supersuit's membrane grants me all these unearthly powers and more, all in one shiny, glittery, glisten-y alienware package.

The material's normally quite sparkly, but it glitters much more brightly when it's accomplishing Bizarre Feats of Mysterious Badassery.

Going SuperSparkly is how I know the suit's working, just as a PC's cursor turning into an hourglass symbol shows the hard drive is active.

So far, so awesome, right? Well, notice that I haven't described what my xenotechnologically pseudo- magical Wondersuit actually looks like.

The Cruel Irony looms: My supersuit is a full-body hypermembrane of exotic matter that, as far as I can tell, is only a few molecules thick.

Holding the empty suit, its fabric is so eerily gauzy and insubstantial that it feels not like cloth, but like a weirdly slippery spiderweb.

Imagine if you will what my body, a endless source of shame and disappointment for me, looks like when enveloped by a molecule-thin glaze.

"Mercilessly revealing" does not begin to describe the resulting spectacle. "Wildly, even grotesquely embarrassing" might be more accurate. 

The hypermembrane bears no resemblance to any real-world fabric, failing to drape or fold or wrap or CONCEAL IN ANY G-D MANNER WHATSOEVER.

Wearing my supersuit, I look exactly as if I've been stripped naked and coated from head to toe with a gossamer film of glittery body paint. 

The Cruel Irony, revealed: I, of all people, wound up prancing around in The Most Humiliatingly Revealing Superheroine Costume EVAR.

My shame: No body-proud superheroine or deliberately provocative supervillainess wears an outfit even REMOTELY as slutty-looking as mine.

Four years in college complaining about offensive, titillating superchica wear, and I end up (under)dressed like this? Cue the sad trombone.

The suit is so unlike any form of human clothing that I can't feel even the slightest sense of its material stretching, tugging or shifting.

So, when I'm wearing the stupid thing, not only do I LOOK essentially naked, I FEEL essentially, absolutely, utterly and completely naked.

Unless I look down at myself—hey, there's my chubby, puffy body, totally on display—I can't tell whether I'm butt-naked or supersuit-clad.

I scoff at mundane nightmares of being nude in public, since my workdays are now waking nightmares of fighting crime while nude in public. 

One tiny—as in, nano-tiny—advantage of this mortifying costume: Cassidy will never, ever guess that shy li'l "E-Pow" is the girl wearing it.

Similarly, I'm sure that none of the derpy, Y-chromosomal dumbasses from my Suprahuman Studies classes would possibly deduce my alter ego.

They'd neverEVER think that the new superheroine prancing around in shameful skankwear could be their (ahem) "opinionated" former classmate.

In fact, the word they'd probably use would be "strident," the sexist male's coded, dog-whistle term for Unacceptable Thinking While Female.

They'd never guess that I'd wind up as an embarrassingly sexualized superheroine because, well,  I could never have guessed it myself.

As you'll soon see, rarely in my life have I felt less genuinely (lowercase-E) empowered than I have since I became (uppercase-E) Empowered.

As you'll soon hear me say—or exhale, really—on too many occasions to bother counting: "SIGH."

<END OF CHAPTER>

Wellp, if this actually worked, webcomic readers, I’ll try again next week with an excerpt from the next chapter of I Am Empowered, in which Emp addresses why the hell she’s writing this account in (old Twitter) tweet format.

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. However, my vast archive of years of Patreon posts—extensive Empowered previews, vintage con sketches, work stages on covers, "damsel in distress" commissions, life drawings & much, much more—remains available for Patrons' perusal.

-Adam Warren