EMPOWERED vol.12's "afterword" text piece, illustrated by the book's obnoxiously meta TITANIC scene!

[Please note that the Empowered vol.12 scene above has been posted here before, years ago; alas, I had to remove this scene from the book for pagecount purposes. As I noted back during the original post (which I don't care to look up), this incredibly meta sequence was originally a joke written for 1998's Gen13: Magical Drama Queen Roxy, likewise unused in that Wildstorm miniseries to scrape out precious pagecount. Ah, but what would've been just another whimsical bit of postmodern japery in MDQRoxy hits quite a bit differently in a present-day context involving the unfortunate fate of Empowered...]

So!

As you're probably aware, dear Patrons, Empowered vol.12's release has endured a maddeningly long series of delays. The book is currently slated for a March 2024 ship date, but I wouldn't care to bet very much money on that occurrence.  For the record, I wrote and drew my final EMP12 pages in March 2022, but production and distribution challenges aplenty have plagued the volume ever since. 

Anyhoo, I wrote a concluding two-page text piece as an afterword for both Empowered vol.12 and for the series overall, at least in its current form. As you'll see shortly, the essay discusses how Empowered in its 200+ page Original Graphic Novel form—dating from from 2007 to the present—is no longer viable for a number of unfortunate reasons. What I failed to grasp when I wrote this afterword in summer 2022, howeva, was that the Empowered OGN format was even less viable than I had thought, as these ongoing delays in release are demonstrating quite clearly.

Wellp, here's my Empowered vol.12 afterword, dear readers, with a follow-up paragraph or two tacked on afterward (pun unintended):

AND NOW, A WORD FROM THE GUY WHO DID THIS COMIC

So, yeah, as the text on the closing title spread just indicated, this is the final volume of Empowered in the rather peculiar graphic-novel format that’s been the series’ basis since vol. 1 debuted way back in 2007.

To be blunt, in its current format this series hasn’t been financially viable for me for quite some time. Even before COVID-19’s impact, sales figures for successive Empowered graphic novels and side projects had been dropping off steadily, if not precipitously. I can’t say for certain that the lengthening gap between releases was the main reason for the series’ plummeting sales, but that factor definitely didn’t help matters. Early on, remember, when the series’ writing and artwork were much simpler, spontaneous, and easy to produce, I was able to crank out volumes of over 200 pages apiece at a ridiculously fast pace—every six months for the first few installments, a production rate which now beggars belief.

Back then, the series was quite successful, often landing in the monthly top 10 sales lists of graphic novel releases—albeit in a notably less crowded market for such books than one sees nowadays. Alas, as Empowered improved considerably in art and storytelling quality (IMHO) in later volumes, my increasingly glacial production speed coincided with inexorably deteriorating sales figures.

On the other hand, fifteen years is a very long run for any comic series in the North American market. The comic market’s dreaded “standard attrition” might well have driven down the series’ sale figures over such a protracted timeframe regardless of the volumes’ frequency of release.

Beyond that, other issues of a more creative nature with the existing Empowered format have come to head in recent years, further convincing me that vol. 12 would be a good place to put the series “on pause” while I reevaluate how I write and draw the books.

For example, I’ve been banging my head against the limitations of the “analog media” format for almost a decade now, from the tragic lack of an “Undo” button to the fact that my deteriorating eyesight makes detailed inking challenging at best and almost impossible at worst. In fact, several visual riffs in this final pencil-and-paper-drawn volume are directly based on techniques I’ve used in recent years of part-time digital experimentation—the white-line overlays for the sabertooth cat’s whiskers, say, or the slew of lettering-related flourishes seen throughout the narrative. With future comics that I’d be drawing as well as writing, I’m planning to work entirely in a digital medium, as much as the prospect unnerves me. Onward, Wacom Cintiq Pro and Clip Studio Paint! (And this way, long-suffering Dark Horse Production wizard Chris Horn will at last be spared the pain of skillfully tweaking and massaging 200-page overloads of my penciled originals into print-quality files!)

Speaking of limitations, when I restart work on Empowered down the road, the future series will need to be produced in a more flexible format than this first run of ginormous “Original Graphic Novels” allowed. I’m unsure at present what that format might end up being, though some more conventional form of chapter-by-chapter serialization might well be worth considering, given the “out of sight, out of mind” lack-of-reader-attention issues inherent to the format of “big ol’ graphic novels every few years” that’s pretty much driven this series into the ground. In any event, the next writing-and-drawing project I’m eyeing—a fantasy-based comic pitch that might bear a bit of a resemblance to this volume’s “Elven Paladin Elissa” sequence, only considerably more bats**t crazy—should serve as a helpful test bed for how Empowered production will operate when I eventually return to the series.

To repeat, I definitely do intend to continue Empowered someday, assuming I can puzzle out some viable combination of format and finances in the future. Believe it or not, after fifteen years I feel like I’ve only barely scratched the surface of these characters, let alone fully explored the bizarre, terrifying, and/or mind-blowing implications of life within the deranged and psychedelically unhinged setting of a superhero universe.

In fact, parts of Empowered vol. 12 changed the entire way I look at the series, as I found myself quite eagerly questioning all my hidebound assumptions and unimaginative storytelling approaches once I decided to abruptly switch over to the reality-hopping “Never-Ending Reboot” narrative to finish off this first phase of the franchise. (Note that the Emp/Spooky “This Calloused Damsel” story was written well before I decided to throw out everything else I originally had in mind for the volume.)

I didn’t quite fulfill my lofty aspiration to “try something new on every g-d page,” but I did get a kick out of thinking outside the proverbial box when addressing each of the Reboot scenes’ variant narratives. Honestly, after 34 years in the field, I probably don’t have a whole lotta time left in my comics career in which I’ll be both functional and employable, but I nonetheless feel “all fired up” at the prospect of trying as much out as much “new s**t” in comics storytelling during whatever years remain to me.

So, consider this temporary hiatus of the series as a “TO BE CONTINUED” situation, as opposed to “THE END,” given that Empowered will one day return. I hope, dear readers, that you too will return when that day comes.

Thanks much,

Adam Warren

<END OF AFTERWORD>

I'm hoping you'll get to read that text piece in its originally intended context sometime next year, folks, along with the rest of Empowered vol.12. "Fingers: crossed," to quote an old Meta Emp turn of phrase.

So, yeah, I do hope to return to Empowered someday in the future, but in a very different context. Kickstarter, maybe? Shorter installments, for sure.  Digital art, possibly, though I still have a very, very long way to go before I can produce anything approaching acceptable finished art. (More on this matter later, as I'm presently working up an even longer text piece blithering about how my quest for artistic improvement has been an utter disaster in terms of productivity, and how I may need to completely reconceptualize my artistic approach—pls pardon the jargon—if I want to continue drawing as well as writing comics.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?