Woo,hoo! Taking a break from laying out the double-sized first issue of an in-development new fantasy comic (which, thankfully, I won't be drawing) to knock out these commentaries late on a Sunday night. This has been a fun weekend indeed, folks! The last 10 pages of the issue are gonna be rough, though, as I have to cram a very complex fight scene involving eight g-d combatants into that limited pagecount; I strongly suspect that the resulting battle is gonna be a whole lot less complicated than I had originally hoped, alas. (That happened to me a lot back in my old conventional-comics career.)

A clear sign of the fight scene's layout difficulty is that I've broken out my copies of Shirow Masamune's manga Appleseed vol. 4 and his Appleseed Databook, which both feature complex action crammed into relatively few pages and very high panel counts; as I've enjoyed pretty wide-open pagecounts throughout Empowered, I've rarely had to consult his high-density approaches to fight scenes in the last decade or two.

Speaking of Shirow, by the black spaces at lower left and upper right on this webcomic's art, you can see that this was a partial bleed page in that only the last panel extended out to the edge of the printed page; this approach was something that Shirow very much favored, I should note.

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, such as updates on fantasy test project The Chaste and the Chained. Golly!

-Adam Warren