DISTRESSED DAMSELS: Mysterious (& unpublished) early EMPOWERED pages!

Here are some recently unearthed pages that would've been drawn very early on in the genesis of Empowered, if not almost certainly predating the nascent project's evolution from a bunch of random DiD sketches into what would even be recognizable as Empowered as such. 

(Side note: Belatedly occurred to me that I could post some of the bonus material from Empowered Deluxe vol.1 here; that stuff featured some proto-Emp material drawn well before anything ever seen here, including an early version of our heroine that was, pretty straightforwardly, a ported-over Cory Emerson from my Dirty Pair wearing a skintight superheroine outfit.)

I have no idea what these first two pages in proto-Emp pencil-drawn format were, but they seem to be excerpted from a longer story. The premise is halfway interesting, in that the hooded figure tying up Emp (long before proto-Elissa ever had that supranym, by the way) is clearly babbling about some kind of childhood trauma that he or probably she endured, and is apparently recreating said incident with our hapless heroine:

However, the hoodie's dialogue was awkward at best, sketchy and/or creepy at worst, so I deleted almost all of it from these scans.

Come to think of it, this story fragment probably never made it into Empowered proper because I felt like I couldn't repurpose the material into humor or superheroic shenanigans suitable for inclusion in the series.

Also found a pair of high-contrast sketch sets of (proto-)Emp getting distressed, possibly as tests for a Sharpie-drawn story that appeared later on in Empowered vol. 3:

The other one's a tad more mysterious, as Emp is depicted wearing an odd outfit not unlike the fantasy-milieu underwear worn by the equally hapless Hushed Half-Elf many years later:

If I find any more unused DiD-content pages from this era, I'll be sure to post 'em, okay?

NEXT WEEK ON DISTRESSED DAMSELS: We will prrrrobably be leaping from the very earliest days of Empowered to the brand-newest days of Empowered, as I'll likely next be posting some hot-off-the-Cintiq artwork based on a recent Biggest Spender art request. (An exploration of a throwaway bit from the old Empowered: Extra Sketchiness sketchbook spun out of control into an increasingly outlandish Emp & Thugboy bedroom cosplay scenario, as you'll eventually see.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure, TBH, but something will be going up on Wednesday, never fear.