Panel 1: As I mentioned earlier, King Tyrant Lizard’s head is based on a Triassic Era nothasaur rather than the Cretaceous Era Tyrannosaurus Rex, despite the character’s name. Not quite sure why I went the nothosaur route, other than the fact that it would’ve represented a visual change of pace from the more familiar T-Rex. (Side note, for readers of Empowered vol. 8: My excuse for this odd choice is that Jerome’s best effort to draw a T-Rex head without reference wandered off-model into nothasaur-ish territory by accident.)

Panel 2: I’m fairly sure that I referenced Emp’s pose, here, from a photo of tennis player Maria Sharapova vehemently protesting a line judge’s call. (Presumably, fewer chunks of airborne concrete debris appeared in the original photo.)

Not sure that panel 3’s shot of poor Syndablokk getting whipped up into the air by King Tyrant Lizard properly conveys the motion I intended, as it appears almost as if ’Blokk’s body is absolutely rigid and “KTL” is raising him by that grip on his leg. I needed to get across more of a limp, “ragdolling” feel to his pose, perhaps by crooking his leg or adding more “motion blur” speedlines streaming off his body. The panel still gets my storytelling point across, but what can I say? As much as Empowered is all about living with imperfection, I’m still a bit of a perfectionist in terms of action-scene choreography.

Panel 4: While I rarely screw up the placement of sound FX—he typed, all modesty aside—gotta say that I do not like where WHOOSH ended up in this panel. Having the FX adjoining both Syndablokk’s “hand” and that costume tatter flapping from his leg was a bad choice on the part of 2006 Me; much better to have placed WHOOSH in the open space framed by KTL’s head and the cinderblock hand. I probably wanted to preserve the arc of that one speedline pair—the one that curves down from the word “JACKATH” in KTL’s word balloon—that a better-placed WHOOSH would have interrupted, but this now seems a misplaced priority. Sound FX ProTip: Whenever possible, best to try and keep your FX clear of key figures or faces in the panel.

-Adam Warren