Panel 1: Down the road, I stopped fully censoring the profanities in Empowered, and instead would leave the first and last letters of a blacked-out cussword visible, so as to make clearer (to occasionally befuddled readers) exactly what that word might be. Plus, that later approach has the added benefit of making the censoring all that much more pointless, which only adds to the amusement value for me.

Panel 2: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s our old buddy Wet Blanket, as first seen back in the vol. 4 story “Of Maids and Wet Blankets.” By the way, you have to appreciate the unseen announcer’s solicitude on stripping WB otherwise naked, but leaving his distinctive headpiece on; why, it’s almost as if this is an unlikely decision made solely to facilitate clearer, easier-to-follow storytelling!

Panel 4: Ouch! “That’s not what you would hope for,” as Jim Rome used to say, back in those bygone days of yore when I still listened to his old sports-talk show The Jungle. 

-Adam Warren