Adam Warren - "Empowered Volume 5"

Just a quick overview for new readers: Empowered is about the titular heroine, a smart but rather meek and screwed-up young woman who wears a supersuit that is, to put it kindly, unreliable. It gives her a bunch of powers, but it also rips almost when people look at it, thereby removing most of those powers and rendering her this close to naked. And what happens then? She gets tied up by just about everyone. (Bondage is a major theme of this comic. So is sex, and the enjoyment thereof.) Her teammates in the Superhomeys, jerkasses nearly to a person (particularly Sistah Spooky, who has a ... thing ... about blondes), torment the crap out of her. But she endures, thanks partially to her boyfriend, a former thug named Thugboy, and her best friend, Ninjette. The Caged Demonwolf, an entity trapped in alien bondage gear, is also surprisingly supportive of her, though mostly his mind is on sex.

Published volumes collect the individual issues of the Dark Horse comic, and so the story can be somewhat fragmented, since at the beginning Empowered was more of a joke title than anything. However, as the characters began to develop personalities, the plotline became more important. In fact, Empowered Volume 5 is easily the most plot-driven book so far.

So! When last we left our intrepid and beleaguered heroine, she had just poured a major can of whoop-ass all over the baddie responsible for the attack on the Capeys (the annual superhero award ceremony). Unfortunately, as the only two witnesses to this crowning moment of awesome have vanished, Emp must defend herself against the furious accusations of teammate Major Havoc, who goes as far as intimating that Emp pulled off the attack herself! No matter that the telepath Mindf*k (spelt as it is written in the book) believes her, because she's been known to be wrong about people. Ultimately, Emp has a gag order put on her not to discuss the incident outside the Superhomeys' HQ until the mess is straightened out.

So with that hanging over Emp, we move into what is really the only chapter not part of the overall plot - “When Titans Fornicate” - where the Caged Demonwolf narrates, as only he/it can, the results of a double cosplay between Thugboy in his Spartan 3000 uniform and Emp in her Sexy Librarian outfit, with Ninjette listening and growing more than a little overheated herself. The serious stuff starts right afterwards.

First we get a flashback that covers Mindf*k and Sistah Spooky's former couplehood, which lasted somewhat less than two years, was mostly mental, and hasn't quite ended despite their having broken up. Spooky, whom we know is incredibly insecure despite her awesome power, hates herself to the point where she can't believe that anyone could love her, and ended up rejecting Mindf*k's love. From there the story shifts to Emp at her crappy part-time job cosplaying as herself. (As a junior member of the Superhomeys, she doesn't get paid very well.) The whole bunch of fake Superhomeys is scooped up by a gang of thugs led by the hallucination-inducing supervillain Anglerfish. Emp, who prudently wore her real supersuit under her fake one, rescues everyone, beats the shit out of the baddies, and demands to know why Anglerfish would waste his time with these “spectacularly inept cosplaying losers.” The villain explains that several weeks ago, his son was murdered by another supervillain but the Superhomeys wouldn't bother to investigate.

And who killed Kid Anglerfish?

Willy Pete, the fire elemental for whom Thugboy once worked, with disastrous results. We saw this murder take place in book 4, where ol' Willy Pete also ate his three would-be teammates. Emp, who of course has heard all about this villain, promises to try to get the Superhomeys to investigate.

We cut to two chapters of tangential material. The first has the only major bondage action in the book, “The Powaaah of the Duct Side”, where the “heroine” Ocelotina invites Emp onto her Internet talk show, ambushes her, and spends many panels wrapping her in duct tape — and, incidentally, explains Emp's side of the Capeys fiasco to her audience since she's not a Superhomey and can speak freely about what she witnessed. After that, Ninjette has an informative encounter with “humble fucking genin” Oyuki-Chan, who would like nothing better than to eviscerate their clan's traitor but has an unrevealed debt to Ninjette so extreme that she pretty much has to do whatever Ninjette asks.

Then we move back to what I think is the longest unbroken plotline in the collected books. The Superhomeys have agreed to track down and take out Willy Pete. They interview Thugboy for his experiences but privately laugh off his dire warnings, since they deal with flaming supervills all the time. The mission coincides with a large meeting to discuss the Capeys mess, which requires a majority of Superhomeys to attend. Still, Major Havoc pulls together ten badass individuals to deal with their foe, confident that they won't need backup. Mindf*k is mentally and visually in touch with all of them. Emp, who expected to be one of the ten, is relegated to watching the action in the Superhomeys' satellite, alongside Mindf*k.

Which turns out to be a good thing ... relatively speaking, given what Emp witnesses and what she ends up having to do.

Because what happens next is shocking, immensely tragic, and so different in tone from the series up until now that it's odd to look back at the jokey early volumes, knowing what's to come. There were hints of this kind of darkness lying in wait — Thugboy's horrible dreams, Ninjette's narrow escape in the park — but most of the harder moments were treated humorously or at least with sick humor. The attack on the Capeys, for example, wasn't nearly as grim as it could have been. Even the incident when Emp discovered the incipient aneurysm in a thug's head had its light moments ... but there aren't any light moments for nearly the last fifty pages of Volume 5. (In the afterword, even Emp says “Well, jeez. That was kind of a downer, wasn't it? Here's hoping that next volume'll be a bit less death-y and a bit more tee-hee/chuckle-y, huh?”)

I, for one, appreciate it. Had the title stayed a series of silly vignettes about Emp and her crappy unreliable suit, existing mostly to display bondage scenes, I wouldn't have gotten past the first book, much less eagerly bought the rest. I mean, you can easily get bondage art, but well-thought-out plots and characters are much harder to find, and are consequently more precious. And those last fifty pages ... damn, what a page-turner!

I really, really like this series. It's (mostly) funny, sometimes hysterically so, yet dramatic in all the right places. I'm not into bondage, so I find that aspect of it dull, but it's nice to see people having a lot of sex and unashamedly enjoying themselves. In fact, Emp often takes the initiative with Thugboy, which is pretty rare in comics. There are a number of frank discussions about and depictions of sex, though no direct frontal nudity. (I'd give the book a heavy R or NC-17 rating if it were a movie.) The main characters are attractive and surprisingly complex, as are the better of the secondary characters, notably Mindf*k and Sistah Spooky in volume 5. There are plenty of mysteries to keep the reader going. The ones left us in Volume 5 include: What (or who) is Emp's supersuit? Who (or what) is Willy Pete? What big secrets is Thugboy keeping from Emp? What did Ninjette do for Oyuki-chan? My tragedy senses are tingling.

Adam Warren is notable for the English-language Dirty Pair books and was one of the first American artists to draw in manga style (thus paving the way for a whole bunch of crappy imitators). Empowered is done in black-and-white and sourced from the original pencil drawings, with no inking, so it has a very striking and unusual look. I'm not partial to manga style on the whole, but I do like this book, in large part because it avoids most manga visual cliches and is a hell of a lot clearer and easier to follow than typical manga. All his characters are visually distinctive, which is a huge plus. He really rips the hell out of superhero conventions, too. Never have highly powered people come off as so patently ridiculous, whether they're deadly or not.

There are only two things I don't care for in the series. The first is the annoying speech pattern of the Caged Demonwolf. It's funny in small doses, tedious in large ones. The other is the blacking out of the swear words. Um, this comic is filled with sex and kink and has a parental advisory sticker on it so why does Dark Horse feel the need to black out fuck, shit, and the other heavy words? (Not to mention bitch, which seems excessively delicate of them.) All it does for me is place unnecessary emphasis on the words and interrupt the flow of reading a little.

Overall, I give this book a solid 9.5 Hellbombs. It's much, much more than a guilty pleasure; it is one of only a few superhero titles that I feel extends the genre to something beyond fanboy soap opera.