I Read This--EMPOWERED: HELL BENT OR HEAVEN SENT

 I've written about Empowered a lot here (so much so I've gone through and tagged all the posts for easy access for the next time I talk about Empowered) but haven't yet, to my knowledge (and the blog's search capabilities) said anything about the one-shots Adam Warren periodically runs in between releases of the larger book that usually riff on a piece of the universe he's built up around the titular bondage-prone heroine.

 Part of the reason I haven't is due to the fact that I've never thought to when I sit down to blog (and you would think, given how hard up I am for content, that it would be a "gimmie") and partly the other reason is that they're more entertaining in theory than in practice--technically accomplished (Warren chooses artists for these that match his style, but add some of their own to it as he tends not to draw the entirety of these one-shots).The first one-shot "The Wench With A Million Sighs" was ostensibly an analysis of Empowered by fan-favorite character Caged Demonwolf, who Warren had already overexposed and walloped into the ground in an earlier volume. The second, "Ten Question For The Maidman" featured his Batman riff in a featured role, and while in theory it should have been funnier than it was, it didn't quite get there.

 The most recent one-shot "Hell Bent or Heaven Sent" is the strongest of the one-shots so far, as it features an air-tight concept, some genuinely amusing conceits, and manages to make a pointed comment on the ever-present "male gaze" in superhero comics a literal story point, and if one were so disposed, one might also read guest artist Ryan Kinnard's (he of the quasi-infamous MAX Phoenix book that was blog-fodder a few years and that, all things considered, is best forgotten) presence as an added layer of commentary, if one so wanted to do that, though it might be carrying things too far.

 The plot of the story involves Empowered being introduced to the Superhomeys storage vault--one of the many places they teleport all their debris, junk, decommissioned weaponry and God only knows what else. The vault is overseen by legendary "douchemecha" (I love this book if only for coining that phrase) Mechanismo (who talks like Razor Ramon, which is just damn funny, no matter what), who got his powers from an alien female robot and can't understand the operating system that runs it all. This leads to him just randomly clicking on stuff just to accomplish something close to what he wants, which leads to the crisis this issue, because he exports his porn cache out and, since it's a nanotechnology plague, Empowered is alone against a very smutty version of a Grey Goo Bomb.

 There's a lot of good bits in here (apparently superpowered mechs spend all their time scanning bits of girls they like and merging them in Photoshop, which explains a whole lot about superheroes and Photoshop users, now that I think about it.) and allows Kinnard to do what he does best--draw sexy ladies attacking Our Heroine whilst shouting "SEXY TIME!"

 One must play to one's skill set.

 The whole thing is clever enough and manages (for the most part) to have it's smutty cake while commenting/eating it too, and it's clever without being too impressed with itself, which, in some points along the way with Empowered, Warren sis guilty of doing. Thankfully, things keep moving at a sufficiently brisk pace to where that's not an issue here.

 Which is good--however, the story doesn't "end" as much as "stops suddenly," It's odd, when you consider that the main books of Empowered are collections of short stories with common plot threads and seldom run for longer than the length of this book. I'm not sure what happened in this instance, but it's a shame the ending is stronger.

 But of the three one-shots, it's the best-realised so far, and the one that feels closest to Empowered's core preoccupations, and as such, it's well worth your time and four bucks in a way that say, Justice League, isn't.

I Read This--EMPOWERED Vol. 7

 Man, was it two years ago that I reviewed Empowered Volume 6? Yes, it certainly seems so. Looking back, I found it really troubling, full of a lot of spinning of wheels and larding on more subplots without really wrapping up the 4 or 5 he still had going in the main. So, with a substantial bit of time off, is Volume 7 the return to form I was hoping it'd be?

 Well, yes and no. Empowered Vol. 7 is a return to form in that we stick a bit closer to our main characters, advance one of the subplots began wayyyyy back in Volume 3, and get a slight advancement on some others in-between, but . . .

 I am under no illusion that Adam Warren would read anything I have to say on the subject of his work and do not presume influence that I do not and will never have. That said, that whole gimmick of having something major happen in the book only turn turn the page and have the legend "END COUNTER-FACTUAL SCENARIO" and find out it was all a fantasy or hallucination or something? That's really fucking annoying. You could probably get away with it once, but there's 3-4 of them in this volume and after the first couple, one feels like they're being jerked around to no good purpose.

 However, apart from that irritating stylistic noodling, this issue is quite solid (even if the title character is, for the most part, a spectator) featuring Ninjette, Empowered's best friend and drinking buddy, getting bloody revenge on the Ayakami ninja clan who nearly maimed her in Volume 3. It's good in that we move this along somewhat, have some time to get a sense of Ninjette's character (which raises some intriguing questions and explains a lot about why she's as screwed up as she is) and we even get an interesting bit (if slightly dubious, as Warren is so determined to continually deal in SHOCKING SWERVES (which, if you do it enough times, guarantees that no one really cares about anything that's happening anymore, which is the final death of your story) that he immediately walks back that one ends up not really trusting if any of this will count by the middle of the book) with the Caged Demonwolf, whose Kirbyesque long-windedness got way overused in previous volumes to the point where what had previously been a funny bit, I cringed and made my way through as it went on . . .and on . . .

 But this time, he drops the highfalutin' narration for a section of this volume and talks with Ninjette about mortality and how an infinite godlike being views time and memory. And it is fucking golden, completely subverting all expectations for the story, but in a way that feels totally in-character and natural and doesn't bullshit around with that "END COUNTER-FACTUAL SCENARIO" stuff--it's just a moment between two characters that we've come to care about and that we invest some emotion in it. Had Volume 6 had more of this, I would have liked it more.

 So the spine of Volume 7 is basically one big and bloody ninja-fight (hence this review is not a long one), punctuated with flashbacks, Counter-Factual Scenarios (grrrr . . .) Ninjette's rather irritating sidekick Oyuki-Chan, and a few bits and bobs that touch on various subplots that have been ticking over. And your tolerance of this will depend on how much you're invested in the characters and how much you like bloody ninja fights. I kinda do, but you probably might have guessed that by now.

 In all, this feels like a stronger volume than the previous one did, annoying Counter-Factual Bullshit aside, because the characters are foregrounded and the stories teased out in the earlier volumes feel like they might be moving toward some resolution, and the stakes are such that the fate of the characters are in some sort of doubt. If Warren can resist the temptation to continue swerving the readers and spinning his wheels, we'll get back to Empowered at its best--a superhero story that plays with the subtext and text of superheroes in interesting ways with very real, and very identifiable characters. I really hope Volume 8 is an even more definitive return to form.

I Read This--EMPOWERED VOL. 6

It's a good things these things are once a year because I am amazingly lazy ass. Once again the time has come to check in with our favourite super-hero parody/ genuine super-hero story, Empowered. Last year we looked at Volume 5, wherein it looked like the main plots of the story were starting to gel and converge--The romantic triangle with Ninjette/Thugboy/Emp was soon to reach critical mass, longtime boogeyman Willy Pete finally took center stage in a battle against the Superhomeys, and things ended on a down note that kind of let one know that from here on in thigs were going to be a bit more on the "serious" side and less on the "parody" side.

So, naturally, with the sixth volume here at last, one would expect that the plot would accelerate as we approached the finish line for these plots, things converge even more, secrets are told, and plot points are paid off.

Well, SPOILER, that ain't what happens here. In the wake of Volume 5's bloodbath Emp is blamed for it--again--her constant haplessness and getting tied up now assumed to be a mastermind in disguise and on the receiving end of more hatred and mistrust than ever before, and it's highlighted a number of times in the volume, but it never quite comes off because well, no one's really that afraid of Emp, because she's constantly been sold as a joke in the superhuman community the idea that she had something to do with it doesn't leaven the withering contempt they have for her so it doesn't really work as well as it should.

Meanwhile, in further fallout from Volume 5, Sistah Spooky, former nemesis of Emp, is shattered over the loss of her ex at the end of Volume 5, a painful realization made even more agonizing because, to better cushion her from the loss, she left a telepathic simulation of herself in Spooky's mind to make her feel better. Unfortunately, it only makes her feel worse, especially when her ex's fate is used as leverage against her, because hey, the demon that accidentally gave her her powers is looking for and he is pissed off.

Further simmering subplots include the truth behind the cape-killing massacre in San Antonio and Thugboy's role in said massacre, and Ninjette's rival clan now coming for her with every damn ninja in the clan ready to kill the hell out of her.

And all this is pretty cool. Unfortunately, these are stray threads shoved aside for the main plot of this volume--Deathmonger, his army of the dead superheroes, and what are called "Bargain babies."

This is actually quite a clever bit, really--Warren is always good for having solid ideas, even if the execution ends up wanting. Bargain babies are heroes who get their powers in some sort of contract, with the upshot that even when/if they die, their superpowers with cause them to live--sorta--even after that. Then Deathmonger comes along and enslaves your or weaponizes your superpower and enlists you into his army of the dead.

All of this is fine, and it leads to a hilarious incidental bit where we learn how Emp got her super-suit in the first place, but none of it really ties in with everything that's going on. Don't get me wrong, the actual story is sound, the fight at the end is cool, and everything seems to be humming on all cylinders, but . . .

. . .this is the first volume of Empowered I can say I didn't think was as good as the last one. Part of it, I suppose is that we're getting into formulas now (Oh look, here's another Caged Demonwolf feature where he describes something in verbose high falutin language, and that was funny . . . the first time) and given the fallout of Vol. 5 and the modus operandi of our main villain this time it just feels like the whole book is a heavy grind of death and morbidity (I hope to God when volume 7 comes out I don't look back on the scene where Thugboy and Emp are fucking while Death watches and sports a . . .uhm . . .boner and say "Yeah, that's the nadir, right there.") and it's just not that pleasant to read. Whereas before Warren balanced the pathos, drama and humour very well, I don't think it works so much this time. It actually takes some effort to slog through all this.

Warren does himself no favours by rolling out even more subplots before tying a few of the ones he already had going off. There's a limit to how long even the most gifted writers can keep all the various plates spinning--if you don't then everything collapses. And while the concept is fairly interesting, the time for a book-length digression is not when things are building to the final confrontation/resolution of whatever you had going before that. I think it might have ultimately been better saved for after the resolution of the Willy Pete thing--you probably still could have done it at a later point in time when it came time for a new story cycle, but I sure as hell wouldn't have done it when I was already in the midst of bringing everything else to a boil. It feels a bit . . .off, somehow. When one loads down a car with too much weight, ultimately you're left with flat tires and a car that's going nowhere. I hope this is not the beginning of that.

Bottom line is, taken on its own, it's not bad--like pizza, when Empowered is bad it's still pretty good. As an installment in an ongoing story it's rather po-faced. Here's hoping Volume 6 was an aberration that was borne out of writer's block in terms of the main plot and/or an idea he felt sufficiently moved to do at once. That said, my ultimate judgment is that this was a disappointment, and I hope Warren will do better with Vol. 7

I Read This--EMPOWERED, VOL. 5

Two years ago, it was gently suggested to me by someone that I read Adam Warren's Empowered, as it is (their words) "a great comic, but very smutty." As a comics fan and, craver of disappointment, I bought the first two volumes, actively seeking out disappointment and dashed expectations, as is my wont.

I wasn't disappointed. Despite being rather smutty (as advertised) and something I will surely go to Hell for reading, Empowered, born of Adam Warren's primal scream of "DAMN IT I CANNOT DRAW WOMEN IN BONDAGE ANY MORE FOR MONEY I DON'T CARE HOW MUCH I'M GETTING PAID PER COMMISSION" has, over the course of five volumes, become my favourite superhero comic being published.

That's not hyperbole.

I'm certain that the rest of the comics intelligentsia judge it on the surface and wrote it off long ago, relegating it to the rubbish bin with pseudo-porn/documents of personal debasement like Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose and God knows what else, but Empowered is so much more than that. The book functions as a parody of, critique on, and exemplar of the best qualities in the modern superhero comic.

Empowered posits superheroing as both a career and a subculture all its own, and worse still, imagines it as a hyperthyroid version of high school, wherein there are cliques, in crowds, out crowds, wherein whoring oneself out for the approbation has become so much of a thing that the whole idea of people being superheroes is, at best an after-afterthought. In fact, quite a few of the vast superhero community seem to have become superheroes for the benefits or, more likely, because they had nothing else going on.

Into this world comes our heroine, Elissa Meghan Powers, or Empowered (the classic name-as-destiny trope strikes again) Motivated by her generally good nature, a childhood dream of being a superhero, and a rather traumatic event, her ambition is to be the best superhero she can be.

Unfortunately, owing to her generally lousy self-esteem--aggravated by the one-two punch of having to wear a skintight outfit (thus magnifying her body-image issues into near-psychosis) and being the only genuinely selfless person in a group of dreadfully self-absorbed assholes who seem to delight in making her look like an idiot at every opportunity (thrown into sharp relief in the course of the story--her day job is having to cosplay as herself, and the actors posing as her teammates in the SuperHomeys are just as much obnoxious primadonnas as the originals) As we first come to know her, this constant derision and abuse has sunk her self-esteem (combined with her bad luck to draw almost every bondage-fetishist villain out there, all of which seem delight in humiliating her) that her self-image and her faith in herself is lower than a snake's ass in a wagon rut.

As we learn a bit later, this feeds into a problem she has with her suit--its strength is (apparently) directly tied to her self-confidence. Thusly, when she's at her lowest, its powers fail her and it rips like tissue paper. This drives her self-confidence even lower, and the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Later on, we (and she) discover that when she can muster the confidence neccessary to access the suit's full power, she's actually capable of pretty formidable stuff (there's still a lot of blanks that have yet to be filled in there) which . . .well, we'll get to that later. Maybe.

To run back for a moment, I should add that Warren does explain that most of the SuperHomeys tendency towards assholishness stems from their own mentally stunted origins. Sistah Spooky, Emp's co-worker and arch-nemesis hates Emp for no other reason than she's a blonde girl and Spooky spent most of her school years being tormented by haughty hot blonde girls and thus, is motivated by her prejudices (and, as someone in Vol. 5 points out, she's subconsciously patterned her behaviour exactly in the style of her tormentors) Spooky and Emp's feud is one of the central threads of the narrative, one which culminates in a very poignant (and earned) moment at the end of Vol. 5.

The other thread of the book is how Emp gains the confidence to become a Capital-H hero. The main way in which this happens is she gets people in her life who actually build her up. The first is Thugboy, low-level minion who, once upon a time, was part of an organised superhero-killing rampage that led to San Antonio Texas being wiped out (we are led to beleive that Thugboy was one, if not the only, survivor). Thugboy went on from there to form the Witless Minions, a group that pretended to be faithful henchmen to super-villains, only to steal all their cool technology and sell it on eBay. This works like gangbusters until they try it with (Dan DiDio's dream villain) the cannibalistic fire elemental Willy Pete, who kills all of them save Thugboy.

But Thugboy's great contribution is his unwavering love for, and belief in, Emp. That this comes from someone with his history is especially significant, of course, but their relationship, founded on his complete acceptance of her as she is and not how she sees herself (or how she assumes she should be) actually positions the two of them as possessing one of the most honest and functional relationships in superhero comics (this despite, y'know, taking place in a comic that has so many bondage panels I'm occasionally shocked John Willie didn't write it, never mind that Emp and Thugboy have one of the most hilariously ridiculous sex lives imaginable. One does not imagine genuine emotion would survive through all that smut, but hey) that manages "sweet" without being "saccharine."

Ninjette, Emp's kidnapper-cum-drinking buddy-cum-best friend, is the next piece in the puzzle. Like Thugboy, Ninjette shares his beleif in Emp, and she should--Emp rescues her at the end of Vol. 3 in a vignette wherein she shows off the suit's full power (though, curiously, Emp doesn't remember) While at times it seems that Ninjette may come between Thugboy and Emp, closer reading indicates that *ahem* something else may be going on there.

The third member of Emp's supporting cast/pep squad is the Caged Demonwolf, one of the most hilarious supporting characters in any book, ever. A world-destroying god-beast trapped in alien bondage gear, the Caged Demonwolf now spends his time on Emp's coffee table (the SuperHomeys aren't cleared to hold anything that dangerous on the premises) and contents himself with watching DVDs and ranting to anyone who will listen (in mighty Kirby-esque Kirbyese) often to Ninjette or Emp's supersuit (which is somehow alive, in a weird way) about whatever's on his mind (often things that haven't happened yet) Usually stories wherein the Caged Demonwolf gets to himself are funny little breaks in the action, and, in one special case, the only thing that cheers Emp up when she's at a low ebb.

While the characters that make up Emp's world are a big part of why the series works so well (as, in the face of the indifferent and openly hostile SuperHomeys, they provide a counterbalance that show Emp that while she may not be a hero to everyone, she is a hero to a few, who accept and love her as such) This is ultimately Emp's story, and Emp's story works because we give a damn about Emp, and having come in when she's at her lowest, following along through the steps forward and backwards, we're happy when she actually develops (unconsciously, at first) a supportive circle of friends, and so we come to want her to succeed, so when (as in the end of Vol. 4) she has a Crowning Moment of Awesome, it's earned, and we're right there with her, cheering her on. Most of Empowered's, er, power is come from the fact that it's written with real heart and honesty and a great affection for both the titular character and the world in which she inhabits. Or, to borrow a quote from TvTropes:

"Hey, think for a second — would you keep going in her position? Hell no. Anyone with any sanity and her issues would have incinerated the suit long ago and gone back to a superpower-free, clothing-undamaged lifestyle. What keeps her going (day after day, as opposed to during any one outing) is anyone's guess, but it CANNOT BE STOPPED."

If that isn't superhero comics at its best in a nutshell, I'll eat my hat. But I'll have to buy one first.

Earlier on in this article, I touched on Empowered as a gestalt parody/commentary/loving homage to superheroes. All too often, superhero parodies or commentaries on same are awful, hateful, things, so desperate to prove how "over" superheroes they are that they can't tear down the concevntions (or the people who may enjoy those conventions) fast enough. I don't need to pithily slip a link into this sentence--I'm sure anyone reading this can name at least three off the top of their head.

Empowered works around this by working in a very peculiar kind of story logic that slips effortlessly from parody to commentary to affectionate homage effortlessly. There's no way I can possibly do it justice sooooo . . .I'll just synopsise a bit from Vol 5:

Empowered shows up on Ocelotina's (a girl who once kidnapped Emp for ransom, then decided to be a superhero so she could sell bondage-themed videos on the web--that she's more of a success as a fake superheroine than Emp is as a real one is a recurring source of annoyance) show, and ends up getting bound up in duct tape, while Ocelotina explains why it's ideal for that purpose. The upshot of this is Emp is exasperated and humiliated by her, and yet . . .

. . .Later in the story, it's because of that that she can carry a fallen comrade across the hull of a disintegrating space station (the SuperHomeys never spend money for repairs, so a LOT of things get patched up with duct tape) by duct-taping said comrade to herself and marching across the hull.

That such a moment can begin as comedy and end as a superheroic moment later on is a rather deft trick and thus elevates Empowered above other, ruder satires that never seem to get beyond the "superheroes are incipent perverts/assholes/fascists" stuff that's been done right to death.

Lest this become a one-entry Theme Week, let me sum thusly: Empowered manages to be a better superhero parody and a better superhero book than a good 90% of the superhero books its parodying. I don't care if you hate manga, it's well worth gutting out your antipathy for the style to appreciate what's within. I very much enjoy this book, and would rather everyone get on the bandwagon as well.

PS: You may be unware of this, but there is a lot of bondage in this book. If that's your thing and the main reason you read the book, please disregard the pompous bloviating above. All my talk of storytelling logic and characterisation will obviously mean little to those who get all tingly at the site of women bound in hemp. Takes all kinds to make a world and all that, I guess.