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

ABOMINABLEMENT DIFFICILE (part 2)

Ah, but factors even more browknittingly annoying and hairpullingly frustrating than architectural design complicate the act of rooftopping.

Mo' problematic: The distance between superjump-suitable rooftops varies wildly, as does the ever-changing height differential between 'em.

Even an architecturally ideal set of rooftops can stymie the wannabe superjumper if the gaps and elevations involved are divergent enough.

All too darn often, I'm forced to take a meandering, indirect R2R path across the city, due to that route's less stringent difficulty level.

The straight-line rooftop path to a given supercrime scene might well be absurdly tricky, to the point that it's not even worth attempting.

Example: I've pulled off the eastbound crosstown R2R route between 1st and 3rd Avenue a grand total of ONCE. All other tries? Debacle-ish. 

The last time I even considered going that way in a hurry—cue the lasers and fireballs in the distance—I'm ashamed to admit I chickened out.

Even with adrenaline a-pumping, I still found myself too intimidated to envision trying that route, painfully aware of its mishap potential.

My merest glance along that skyscraper obstacle course autotriggered humiliating flashes of every blundering failure it had inflicted on me.

FLASH I'm crashing through a skylight FLASH screaming shrilly before a forty-story faceplant FLASH slip-sliding on solar panels in the dark

FLASH panicking and missing a rooftop entirely FLASH stumbling over another g-d parapet FLASH ragdolling into the void FLASH FLASH FLASH

I very clearly felt that the Hirsch-Rockwell Building—with its slanty roof, up high at the very limit of my jumpability—was laughing at me.

Same deal with the blatantly scornful gargoyles on the snooty Gothic façade of 25 Hanover Place, glaring down at me with sneering contempt.

I dithered handwringily, gazed hopelessly up at the Scariest R2R Route in the City, then finally abandoned the idea. (Cue yet another SIGH.)

Blushing with secret shame, I dolefully hopped along the winding, roundabout—and, notably, less mishappish—"scenic" R2R route across town.

I arrived at the Kilowatt Khan battle a little late, true, but not as late as I would've been if I'd botched the black-diamond-ish R2R run.

To evaluate roofjump routes, I personally prefer the très catchy French adjectival system for comparative mountain climbing difficulty. 

En Français, tough climbs are graded difficile, très difficile, extrêmement difficile, and—dig this, mon cheri—abominablement difficile.

Sad to say, a distressing number of R2R paths across this supposed Mecca For Capes are très difficile at best, if not downright extrêmement.

And a few R2R routes—such as the crosstowner I just mentioned—are so abominablement difficile, I almost expect to see yeti on the rooftops.

Given that bad guys are already all too prone to buttkicking me, I don't need a R2R route buttkicking me before I can even get into battle.

Ah, but even a less-than-difficile R2R run can be rendered quite difficile indeed by the wrong set of environmental complications, mon ami.

First, I must bitch—and moan, too—about the breezy bane of the superjumping set: Wind, in all its cape-thwarting, blooper-provoking glory.  

The average wind speeds at rooftopping level are roughly 10-12mph or so, quite often gusting a fair bit—or an UNfair bit, really—higher.

Hello, "urban canyon effect": Blocks of big ol' skyscrapers funnel airflow down city streets, jacking up wind speeds and air turbulence.

Combine the base wind speeds at 30-story-height with urban-canyon phenomena, and you have a none-too-tasty recipe for superswirly airflow.

The same hop-skip-jump route across a given few blocks can fluctuate from easy-peasy to difficult-ish to "WTF?!"-y, depending on the wind.

On a long-distance jump, a strong head wind can easily make you fall short.  A gusting tail wind? Oops, you just missed the landing entirely.  

A stiff wind from the side can throw you off just enough to turn a smooth, easy touchdown into a metal-mangling rendezvous with a HVAC unit.

Normal windspeeds are challenging enough, but the potential for superjumping fiasco srsly skyrockets when you're R2Ring in storm conditions.

Try a long-distance rooftop leap in a howling wind, and shortly you, too, will be howling, once a 50mph airblast sends you plummeting awry.

When freak weather hits this city—a frequent problem, given supervillainous microclimate manipulation—most R2Rers are effectively grounded.

In fact, every major cape-opolis boasts superhero-specific, localized wind advisories, tracked via apps like CapeAlert or HeroWeather.

A ranked series of advisories supposedly grounds the mere-human roofjumping hero, then the superdurable R2Rer, then the flight-capable cape.

For the smartphoneless super, a series of warning-flag displays are posted in high-visibility—and high-altitude—locations across this city.

Gotta love climbing up to a roof and seeing the double red flags of "GALE WARNING" in the distance, hinting you're about to get blown away.

(Unless you're an insecure young superheroine achingly desperate to prove her capeworthiness, in which case you blithely disregard 'em.)

 <END OF EXCERPT>

Wellp, if this actually worked, webcomic readers, I’ll try again next week with another excerpt from I Am Empowered continuing this very long and, eventually, action-packed chapter about superheroic rooftop shenanigans.

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