Distressed damsels: More EMPOWERED vol.12 preview pages!

After posting the last clump o' pages a few weeks back, I wasn't planning on previewing any more pages from Empowered vol.12's first story—until I belatedly realized that, hey, I could show the rest of the DiD-intensive pages as a post for the $5 and $10 tiers. Yay!

Gotta say, I've gotten really, really sick of drawing these goons' uniforms, even though they're not particularly difficult or challenging.

After the experiment of this initial story, I rather doubt I'll be keeping Emp's hair back throughout the rest of the volume, as you'll note that her chest is extraordinarily prominent without the default placement of her camouflaging hair.

The final page of the preview above turned out to be quite painful for me—and I mean that quite literally, as my drawing arm's been messed up ever since I ground my way through that first panel.  I hadn't drawn any EMP12 pages in a few weeks, and could feel a burning irritation in my forearm building up in intensity throughout the morning shift as I applied the high-contrast pencils. 

I haven't drawn a g-d line since, and my arm is still burning,  which is why I haven't made any progress on July's art requests since that Hopper piece.  I'm gonna try some digital sketching today, to see if lower-pressure sketching in Procreate is still viable for me.

Meanwhile, here are the initial roughs for the pages:

To be honest, in a few of these shots I'm arguably going a bit overboard with Emp's modern-era, heavier-bodied softness and plumpness, as a few times her figure proportions are (unintentionally) slipping into almost Robert Crumb-ish "small head, big body" territory. (Let's ignore the fact that this is a flashback scene, and she absolutely should be canonically skinnier—but screw it, this my g-d comic, so I'll mess with "physique continuity" on occasion if I want to.)

Finally, that last incomplete page featured a pose derived from a montage page of fairly generic "distressed Emp" sketches:

You'll be seeing more of these loose sketch sets in the future, as I used to have a kindly client who liked to commission plenty of these montages; also, these came in pretty handy down the road, as I reused many of the sets' poses for actual Empowered story pages.

Wellp, that's it for Empowered vol.12 for a while, at least until my arm recovers. Hope you liked this final preview for the time being, big spenders!