Panel 2: Ughh. No idea why I kept using the old-school visual shorthand of what I call “the reflection squiggles,” those open lines across the glass that helpfully inform readers that you’re looking at a mirror, okay? Otherwise, perhaps readers might have thought they were looking at a dimensional portal or Spooky had cloned herself, right? Ughh, again.

Up-to-date readers will note, of course, that the magic-mirror sequence in Empowered and Sistah Spooky’s High-School Hell #3 read just fine without this hand-holding visual motif. I should say that I first picked up this “reflection squiggle” goofiness from old American comics I read as a kid, then had the riff reinforced to me by the work of Rumiko Takahashi, who used it extensively. Again, that’s excusable for the 20-year-old artistic naïf I was back when I first read Urusei Yatsura, but rather less so for Decade-Ago Me.

-Adam Warren