Part one
Between the last
Dirty Pair series and the first volume of
Empowered, Warren survived on freelance work such as a comic for a videogame magazine, a
Livewires miniseries for Marvel and a run on
Gen13 for DC/WildStorm. Warren accepted commissions, and found that a number of them were requests for superheroine bondage illustrations.
1 As a lark, he began penciling the adventures of one such heroine and distributed these shorts via the Internet to friends and colleagues. She developed a personality and was christened Empowered (or "Emp" for short) with the help of another old-school-OEL-manga artist, Lea Hernandez. These short comics caught the attention of Dark Horse, Warren's post-Studio-Proteus DP publisher, who chose not only to put out a collection but also heavily promote the book by taking out a cover-page ad in
Diamond Previews.
Empowered debuted in a radically different Direct Market than DP had 18 years earlier. In the wake of OEL-manga successes such as
MegaTokyo, comic shops were finally primed for Warren's fusion of superhero and manga modes, inspired equally by cartoonists such as Jack Kirby and Rumiko Takahashi. Warren's intimate knowledge of not only the conventions of each form but also their fandoms is encapsulated in a pitch-perfect sequence in which Emp and Ninjette snark on slash fiction starring the former.
Still, the seven years in which Warren "hadn't written AND drawn a complete project […] before
Empowered hit the shelves" had a profound effect on the thematic role of failure in the series. Warren explained, "Well, one often hears the tiresome adage that 'you should write what you know,' and indeed, after years of banging my head against the figurative walls of the comics field, two concepts with which I have great familiarity are failure and low self-esteem! (As Emp herself once put it: 'Yay, me!') I thought these were interesting and personally relevant topics, particularly if I could handle them with humor and some degree of reliability... and avoid producing a completely depressing and downbeat narrative in the process, which I believe I managed to do. Besides, I've always been more interested in deeply flawed and considerably less-than-perfect characters than the flawless, perfectly self-actualized, ideal-role-model paragons that some readers (and writers) might prefer. […] Not that I'm especially eager to trumpet
that particular aspect of the comic far and wide... "Check it out, I'm writing a book about failure and low self-esteem! Doesn't that sound entirely awesome and sexy? Hello? Hello?"
However, I would argue that this aspect is one of the most vital components, if not the engine, that drives the graphic novels' appeal: in a
Newsarama interview, Warren was pleased that
Empowered has been compared favorably with the cartoon
The Venture Bros., and while it's true that both works share the propensity for pop culture references and genre deconstruction, they also tap into the same "comedy of failure" zeitgeist. On a commentary track, TVB co-creator Doc Hammer observed that it's "about the beauty of failure. It's about that failure happens to all of us... Every character is not only flawed, but sucks at what they do, and is beautiful at it and Jackson and I suck at what we do, and we try to be beautiful at it, and failure is how you get by. It shows that failure's funny, and it's beautiful and it's life, and it's okay, and it's all we can write because we are big fucking failures," which echoes Warren's sentiments.
The key of the last quotation, however, is that failure is "how you get by." Despite her difficulties, Empowered keeps on keeping on, and so when she does experience a victory, whether personal or professional, it tends to have more weight than your average cape 'n cowl triumph that "will change the [insert one or the other Big Two universe] forever™." Although it's somewhat of a cliché of the genre that a hero's bravery is in direct proportion to his or her vulnerabilities, when Thugboy gives a sincere pep talk to Emp telling her as much, it has the ring of truth (notwithstanding the fact that he's literally getting into her supersuit at the time).
Previous article:
Adam Warren, part one
Next article: Adam Warren, part three
1 According to Warren, the original commissioners' responses to Empowered have "been mixed, really... One of the original 'commissioners' seems to enjoy the book a fair bit, but the others are less than thrilled with Empowered's current direction. To characterize the consensus of opinion from The Commish(es): 'You need more bondage in this book: a lot more, in fact.'"
Art:
Christened: Empowered Vol. 1 [© 2007 Adam Warren]
Slash: Empowered Vol. 1 [© 2007 Adam Warren]
Bravery: Empowered Vol. 1 [© 2007 Adam Warren]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
