Let the Overdialoguing Alert sound, and sound loudly!

Should’ve either dispersed the existing dialogue over two full pages instead of one, or ruthlessly trimmed the hell out of the text in a single-page format. The impulse to not burn through pagecount often drives my Overdialoguing of this era, as I rather desperately tried to cram a whole scene’s (theoretically) witty banter into too little space. Then again, I had 200-odd pages to fill, so what was the rush, here? Oh, well.

Another key Overdialoguing impulse, by the way, is the fact that the more text an Empowered page features, the faster it is to produce—and being able to crank out pages at a brisk pace is a seductive concept indeed for a comics creator, especially for one such as myself who was definitely not known for my speediness back when I wrote and drew more conventionally formatted comics.

To clarify, talky pages are faster because all the blabber in Empowered is hand-lettered directly on the original page, relieving me from having to draw backgrounds—or “environments,” as some prefer—where all those word balloons go. Gotta say, the demise of on-the-page lettering is one key disadvantage that modern comics creators face; poor sods nowadays have to draw a whole lotta material that winds up being obscured by software-based lettering. You have my condolences, oh poor sods.

-Adam Warren