Love the two-part progression of panel 4 and 5, with the visual riff of Emp holding the hand of Crossword Mook’s daughter being a nice touch. I like the idea that Emp really is a different kind of superhero, that her experiences make her a more compassionate and empathetic “cape” than most of the other costumed badasses. 

An issue that arises from this story—but one that I never quite got around to addressing in subsequent volumes—is that Emp uses her suit’s scanning powers to look into the brains of those around her on a regular—if not constant and obsessive—basis. That is, so traumatized was Emp from her father’s death from a cerebral aneurysm that, nowadays, she’s always on Aneurysm Patrol with her Suitvision. I liked the idea that she maintains a paranoid vigil on the brains of her loved ones, literally peeping into their heads from week to week, if not day to day, looking for the foe that slew her father. So, in fact, she almost certainly didn’t need the word “aneurysm” to pop up in a crossword puzzle to trigger a “suitscan” of Hapless Mook’s brain, though perhaps that coincidence just reminded her to do so. I admit that, as a commenter opined, that particular bit of happenstance seems more than a tad contrived; without question, that story twist could’ve been handled more gracefully. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

An interesting story, in fact, would explain exactly how Emp trained herself to recognize such aneurysms. Though I hadn’t yet created the Purple Paladin Memorial Hospital’s wacky and bizarre Suprahuman Treatment Wing, presumably her peculiar expertise is connected somehow to Dr. Big McLarge Huge and his fellow supramedical personnel.

One lost opportunity from this plotline, by the way, is that Emp very likely would’ve trained herself to use “suitvision” to scan for other medical issues, from tumors to heart issues to god knows what else. At the very least, she would’ve developed “emergency medicine” techniques to scan for broken bones or the like, which would be handy for rescuing civilians. Then again, Emp should’ve been depicted in far more rescue scenarios than I ever bothered to show, given the omnipresent dangers of her trouble-plagued city. (In fact, the unpublished Empowered prose project goes into great detail on this subject.) Ah, but I deliberately eschewed the complex drawing issues attendant to such rescue scenarios in favor of fun, easy-to-draw Supervillain of the Week (or Day) incidents. The contrast between just scribbling some goofy-ass supervill and illustrating, say, an overturned train with dozens of civilians in need of rescue is stark, given the vastly higher degrees of environmental rendering required. If I were being paid a handsome Mainstream Page Rate for Empowered, I might well have considered such feats earlier—but for a series imagined as a low-page-rate act of whimsy, I was disinclined towards strenuous artistic effort.

-Adam Warren