Panel 1: “VORPP” is easily my favorite sound FX among the scant handful I actually created myself, as opposed to borrowing from l’oeuvre de Frank Miller (such as KLUDD, in the next panel). This FX dates back to my childhood, as VORPP is what a Star Wars lightsaber sounded like to my youthful ears circa the late 70s. However, I only recently remembered where I (probably) first used the FX in my comics work: VORPP was the sound of the so-called “XTC gun” in my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious*, which was supposedly an incapacitation weapon that functioned by massively overstimulating the “pleasure center” of a human target’s brain via electromagnetic fields. (Yes, an “orgasm gun,” and no, I wasn’t aware of the not dissimilar “Orgasmorator” from Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s early flick Orgasmo, which came out a few few years after Fatal but not Serious.)

So, ah, try not to think of VORPP’s slightly skeevy history when it appears in Empowered; then again, given the series’ own slightly skeevy history, perhaps that’s appropriate.

Panel 4: Here, another example of why I later switched over to only partially censoring profanities, as I have no clear idea what Emp is calling Fleshmaster in this panel. 

-Adam Warren

*Currently out of print, but I'm hoping to have my DP work reprinted in the near-ish future.