Panels 1-3: TBH, Emp would have to be much, much more upset than this to possibly make such a verbal blunder, but what the heck; more likely, she would've worked up a hypothetical scenario along these lines, then immediately started worrying that said hypothetical might've been taken to apply to some real superhero.
Panel 4: And exactly who might be delivering "la deliverance" (if you'll pardon the missing l'accent aigu) to Emp in the future? Golly, who can guess?
On an art tip, I'm always amused when online critics ostentatiously claiming a sudden concern about (ahem) "realism" in superhero or fantasy artwork complain about, say, a heroine's "boobas"—if I might use highly technical vtuber jargon—not flattening out (ahem) realistically when she's prone, as with Emp in this shot. (UPDATE: That would be "supine," not "prone," of course.) As I can attest from doing 99% more life drawing than most online carpers, depicting the female breast in more unorthodox poses like this is really g-d tricky to pull off even semi-competently, even when using photoreference—which can often prove surprisingly if not alarmingly variable.
For my money, the only body part in the same league in terms of complexity and maddening variability is the high-mass pectoral muscle of the brawny "liftbro," which can change aspect to a truly amazing degree depending on the pose. Many artists draw what I think of as "the action figure torso," in that they depict the familiar image of the bulky, highly developed "liftbro pec at rest," then just move the figure's arms around without affecting the pectorals at all. Not so, you will find, if you ever do very much life drawing. (Unsurprisingly, rather fewer online critics complain about this particular bit of anatomic unrealism.)
UPDATE 2: As I will no doubt have to repeat ad nauseum when he appears again in a later story, Le Chevalier Blanc is spouting a bizarrely mangled melange of French and English, so don't bother wasting your time trying to correct (or interpret in detail) his intentionally f**ked-up French in the comments, okay? (Well, the "Franglais" is intentionally f**ked-up on my part, as a writer; whether it's intentionally f**ked-up on Le Chevalier's part is another issue altogether.)
Today’s Patreon update: In an attempt to scratch out more worktime to complete the long-gestating Empowered vol. 12, I've switched over to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday Patreon posting schedule that won't feature the fixed content format I previously used. However, my vast archive of years of Patreon posts—extensive Empowered previews, vintage con sketches, work stages on covers, "damsel in distress" commissions, life drawings & much, much more—remains available for Patrons' perusal.
-Adam Warren
