So, I just found out Empowered (or at least the first volume) is now online as a webcomic.
Empowered is a comic about a superhero who gets her powers from her suit, which unfortunately is incredibly sheer and revealing, and double unfortunately can be torn apart by basically anything, so she generally ends up getting depowered and tied up in sexually suggestive ways while people make sexually suggestive or just flat out sexual comments. And every time I try to figure out how to explain how this is true but at the same time it’s actually really good and it’s got characterization and reasons and decency to it, I can’t. But I don’t have to now because you can just look at it yourself thanks to the magic of internet links.
Empowered: it’s way better than it sounds, and not just because it sounds incredibly awful!
Ah, so it’s like trying to explain Kill la Kill to somebody.
Ah, I’ve been wanting to read this but the volumes are so expensive.
Wary about the “dude drawing highly sexualized woman to make point about the indsutry” thing, but a) I trust you and b) wow the art is really good what industry is this it can’t be American comics.
b) wow the art is really good what industry is this it can’t be American comics.
If you read the commentary, you’ll discover he started working on this because he couldn’t get work in the main industry. He also regularly apologizes for drawing the main character impossibly narrow-waisted, which I didn’t even notice because I’m used to them being a wasp’s humansona.
Yeah, wow, an American artist who’s actually willing to talk about human proportions and the effect time constraints have on the final product. I want to hug the man.
Warren is very inspired by manga art.
One other aspect of the comic I think you’ll like is the close look it gives at traditional super-hero tropes.
Oh, it’s being published as a webcomic, now? Nice! I hope this leads to an increase in sales for the volumes.
I’m not hooked. I’m probably missing out on some awesome meta-commentary about the superheros genre though.
Nah, the first volume doesn’t have that much metacommentary yet.
The comic really gets a lot better once it stops being a series of mostly standalone stories and starts developing long-term plots. Off the top of my head, I think that’s around the middle (possibly the end?) of volume 2.