And now, my latest attempt to paste in an excerpt from the second 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.

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE HAND (NOT) TWEETING? (Part 1)

You might be curious about the odd formatting of my rambling, here. You might even note that each ramble's no more than 140 characters long.

Well, I solemnly promise to explain this oddity in a bit. First, though, I'll (whiningly) explain the underlying rationale for said oddity.

Ever since I moved to this city, the oft-heralded Mecca For West-Coast Cape Culture, I find that I have absolutely no one I can confide in.

My mom knows that I'm a superheroine, but I very carefully edit and verbally Photoshop the picture I present to her of my so-called career.

Not being a dummy, she's already frownily, forehead-wrinkly dubious—and justifiably so—about my less-than-auspicious vocational choice.

She's well aware that superheroes have—by far—the highest injury and death rates of any occupation in the country. "WE'RE #1! WE'RE #1!"

Face it, crab fishermen, loggers, and coal miners: We fruitily dressed doofi get injured and/or killed much more often than you do. U JELLY?

Hey, I'm jealous of YOU, deep-sea fishermen. I'd rather wear practical, body-hiding raingear than my supersuit's skin-tight embarrassment.

Honestly, even the most glaringly neon ensemble of hip boots, fisherman's apron and crabber gloves is still less garish than my costume.

So, yeahp, my mom has plenty of all-too-good reasons to be worried about me, though she rarely voices her hair-graying concerns directly.

Instead, she communicates her anxiety for me strictly through the richly evocative but nonverbalized language of deep, exasperated sighs.

One sigh says: "Why can't you be unemployed and facing a brutal post-grad job market, instead of (semi-)employed and facing a brutal death?" 

Variant sigh: "Never thought I'd be unhappy, if not sick with fear, that my daughter landed a job in her chosen field right out of college."

Another sigh conveys, "Elissa Megan Powers, I will go to my grave regretting that I ever bought you those G-d Awesome Girl Underoos®."

I understand her complex Sigh Code because, just like my mother, I too am known to rock a sigh—or a few hundred sighs—from time to time.

I couldn't inherit Mom's perfect body or her self-assurance or her extreme non-spazziness, but I did receive her gift for incessant sighing.

The common plea that every one of my college roommates was eventually driven to make: "Will you PLEASE stop sighing? It's driving me crazy!"

Naturally, what was my response to my sigh-incensed roommates' desperate appeals? One last big, sad, woe-is-me-ish sigh, naturally. SIGHHHH

The point? I can't confess fully to Mom about how badly things are going, or she'd freak out even more freak-outily than she already does.

I've had to cut myself off from my college-era friends, because I just can't afford to let them know that I'm a (kinda crappy) superheroine.

My post-grad chats and text exchanges with them have been awkwardly and uncomfortably stilted, full of lies and evasions and half-truths.

More like quarter-truths or one-eighth-truths than half-truths, really, as I'm crazy-lady paranoid about blabbing any Secret Identity clues.

Speaking of paranoia, I'm convinced that Kristen and Hanna and Melanie—my college BFFs—can all tell that I'm pretty much blowing them off.

Late at night, biting my lip and grinding my teeth—not at the same time, obvsly—I'm certain that they now think of me as a stuck-up bitch.

I imagine Hanna's trademark Snarky Sneer as she hisses, "Ooh, Emp's too busy being West-Coast Awesome to bother with lowly peons like us."

Not helping: Thanks to craptastic social experiences dating from kindergarten to college, I've never felt 100% secure in any friendship.

On some level—even with Theoretically Close Friends—I always feel creepy-crawlingly uncertain, that I need them far more than they need me.

All the way back to childhood, I've hated my own abject neediness, since A Real Superheroine should be able to stand alone, shouldn't she?

And while desperately masking my abject neediness from friends, I'm simultaneously annoyed by how I think they must perceive me as inferior.

In my warped reasoning, I'm all, "So, I'm too inferior to deserve your attention, huh?", while thinking that, yes, I AM indeed too inferior.

Hello, approach-avoidance conflicts! Hi, passive-aggressive tendencies! Welcome, social-interaction dysfunction! Holy crap, do I ever suck.

HYPOCRITICAL EMP IS HYPOCRITICAL: While avoiding contact with Kristen/Hanna/Melanie, I'm kinda peeved that THEY'RE not trying to contact ME.

Let's recap, shall we? I can't be fully honest with my mom, and I can't be even remotely honest with my effectively forsaken college buds.

I can't be honest with any of my good friends in the superhero community because, well, I kinda haven't made any friends, good or otherwise.

I swear, I tried my fumbling and socially inept best to kiss up to Sistah Spooky, the undisputed Alpha B-Word of the Superhomeys' wolf pack.

I did everything but roll on my back and expose my throat and belly to her, submissive-Beta-wolf-style. (Maybe I should've tried that…?)

<END OF PART 1 EXCERPT>

Wellp, if this actually worked, webcomic readers, I’ll try again next week with another excerpt from this second chapter of I Am Empowered, which eventually addresses why the hell Emp is 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. 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