Panel 2: Folks, feast your eyes on one of the most artistically important panels from this entire volume! “Why,” might you well ask, “is this seemingly random Emp drawing such a big deal?”

Wellp, the answer is that, prior to this sketch, I had been thinking about making some kind of belated attempt to differentiate Emp’s physique from that of the other heroines in the series. In theory, I speculated, she shouldn’t quite have the same look as an athlete like Ninjette or a magic-sculpted idealization like Sistah Spooky.

Keep in mind that, throughout the series up to this point, the work process of Empowered had been all about getting on the page quick and knocking out as much pagecount as possible, cutting out all the time-consuming prepwork and preliminary stages that had slowed my conventional comics work to an excruciatingly slow crawl. Significantly, that streamlining removed the use of pre-established character designs, as early on I was just slapping drawings down without any preparation whatsoever; I never worked up prelim design sheets for any characters until, I think, maaaybe F**king Oyuki-chan in Empowered vol. 5. Fer chrissakes, I’ve still never drawn a g-d height comparison chart for the Empverse cast, which has been something I’ve done for practically all of my other comics.

Anyhoo, in a belated stab at mixing up my artistic approach as opposed to "just wingin' it" as I'd been doing for a thousand-odd pages, with this particular panel I decided to draw Emp's physique a wee bit softer, heavier and, well, "fleshier" than I had been doing, even though this figure drawing might not look all that different from previous ones. Emp might be physically active AF, but her body's not that of an elite if not unearthly athlete (Ninjette) nor is she rocking an eldritch algorithm keeping her model-hawt (Spooky), so I elected to go "curvier" with her look after experimenting with this shot.

The results, I thought, looked pretty cute and helped to differentiate Emp a wee bit, so I kicked off a gradual, long-term shift in how I was drawing our heroine. TBH, you won't start seeing truly notable differences with Emp's physique until later volumes, when—belatedly, again—I even got around to working up in-universe rationales for why she was growing ever more zaftig (if not Rubenesque) over time.

Alas, the tragedy here is that, after I began getting more and more artistically ambitious with my approach to the series in the next few volumes—with Empowered vol.11 IMHO representing the best combo of work I've ever done as an artist and writer (note the credits order)—modern-day Empowered production speed has ground down to just as much of an excruciatingly slow crawl as any of my older, conventionally formatted comics work, if not worse. Whoops!

Next week on the webcomic, we wrap up this wacky scene before moving on to the final anecdote of Empowered vol. 8's anthology-format opening story, which sets the stage for the book's epic, action-packed, tearjerkery-intensive rollercoaster of a second half.

Today’s Patreon update: Probably another dose of Vintage Con Sketches, from the late-90s/early-2000s era when I was cranking out a ton of ’em.

-Adam Warren