Commentary on EMPOWERED vol.11's tower-crane fight

Empowered vol.11 was, as you may know if you read the book, jampacked and veritably chockablock with cape-on-cape fight scenes. To quote the book's solicitation copy:

Costumed crime fighter Empowered finds herself the desperate prey of a  maniacal supervillain whose godlike powers have turned an entire city of  suprahumans against her. Outnumbered and under siege, aided only by a hero's ghost, can Emp survive the relentless onslaught long enough to  free her enslaved teammates and loved ones? 

Wellp, one of my favorite battles from the volume-long action epic was the fight in and around a rooftop construction site's tower crane, so I thought I'd post most of that sequence here and add some commentary on each page.  Let's get started, shall we?

Not being an insane person, I traced the tower crane's outline from a series of printouts of a CG model rotated and zoomed-in (or -out) as necessary for each shot. I further treated the crane as a silhouette each time in a bid to make the task reasonably manageable; the "all-black" crane still looked pretty neat, so this time-saving effort worked out well (IMHO).

Country Strong's frankly goofy-looking extended leg in panel 1 still amuses me to no end. Howeva, I find myself annoyed by panel 3, as I should've drawn his punching arm in a more notably curved arc; the current, straight-line version doesn't work as well as it should.

I quite like the two different images in panel 2's semi-montage, as Strong hurls Stigmata Hari right at the camera. Holds up nicely!

Also, note the L-shaped panel 5 (per Frank Thorne) around the insert close-up of Emp in panel 4. Gotta love those Ls, folks!

Stigmata Hari's "blood weapon" layer wound up resembling Emp's supersuit more than I intended, but what the heck. The layering of the smaller WHOOOSH sound FX in front of the larger WHOKK FX was an unusual approach, but I'm glad I tried it. However, keep an eye on Emp's hand position in the last panel...

...because I screwed said hand position up when we see her again in panel 1 of the next page. I just couldn't visualize the rotation correctly, sad to say.

Panel 6: Note the uncorrected glitch in the first E in the word ALLEGED. A ton of corrections have to be done by the geat Chris Horn in Dark Horse production to clean up my often-wonky lettering, to put it mildly.

Panel 1: The wobbly reflections of city lights in the side of that office building at right are based on something I noticed from a helicopter flight scene in Michael Mann's Heat. However, note that after this shot we never see any buildings taller than the one that Mindf**k's brother is perched on, as I changed my mind about the city layout.

While I do still love this panel, the shot of Mindf**k's telpathic monster brother kinda got away from me; looks better in the rough version, I think, though I seem to have lost my jpeg for that sketch. Whoops!

Still, this page might've been the most time-consuming page in a book full of maddeningly time-consuming pages.

Note that the contrast level on these jpegs is nowhere near as crisp and intense as the published version. That's because I use a simple Photoshop level adjust on these quick and dirty reference jpegs, whereas Chris Horn in Dark Horse production does a much more complex and successful process of using selections and curves to turn the original artwork's uneasy combo of pencils and Sharpie inks into a pleasing whole.

Behold, another (kinda) L-shaped panel! 

Back on the Photoshop tip, with my meager PS skills, in these working jpegs I can't boost the contrast on the Sharpied inks dark enough to reach 100% black without turning the pencils way, way too dark in the process of doing so. Again, this is something that Chris at Dark Horse does a superlative job in handling; hats off to Chris again!

I find myself surprised by how well the "silhouetted crane hardware" riff worked out visually, even it this was a blatant attempt to save worktime.

So, there ya go, folks; a li'l commentary on an Empowered vol.11 fight scene that, I think, worked out pretty well. Hope you liked it, too!

Tomorrow on this here Patreon: The high-tech damsel-in-distressing of the commissioned story "When Shortie Attacks" (with a very familiar damsel) continues, this time featuring a surprisingly solid fight scene! (It's no tower-crane battle, though.)