Empowered is an ironically named superheroine who comes across as a more shapely version of Ally McBeal. She’s a got a superhero physique, but tragically low self-esteem, almost pathological neurosis and trouble being taken seriously by her peers in the Superhomeys.
Her powers come from her costume, a body stocking that gives her super strength and the ability to shoot lasers from her hands, but also tears very, very easily, and the smaller her costume gets, the weaker her powers get. So 75 percent of her adventures end with her barely clad in a badly Swiss-cheesed costume, bound and gagged by the bad guys, awaiting rescue from some other superhero.
It should come as no real surprise that she got her start in a series of fetish sketches by Adam Warren, one of the first U.S. artists to fully embrace Japanese animation and comics storytelling styles and techniques, and one of the sharper writers when it comes to integrating sci-fi technology and fourth-wall-abusing metatextual meaning into comics.
Over the course of 240 pages, Empowered quickly grows from three-page parody stories to a much more complex narrative involving Emp, her semi-reformed villain/boyfriend Thug Boy, her villainess-turned-best friend Ninjette and an interdimensional Lovecraftian monster god that they’ve trapped in a set of “Cosmichains” and made their prisoner/slacker roommate.
A sort of R-rated sitcom exploring geek culture from the inside out, Empowered has its cake and eats it too—it’s full of exploitative, titillating imagery, but it also features the healthiest and most realistic romantic relationship in any comic book featuring capes and masks.
Red Eye, Black Eye
Alternative Comics
In the first two pages of K. Thor Jensen’s debut graphic novel, a sort of carnet de voyage of his travels around the country, we see him receive one piece of really bad news after another in rapid-fire succession. The NYC-based cartoonist loses his day job, gets dumped by his girlfriend, gets kicked out by his landlady, is told his grandmother died and witness the September 11th attacks.
Jensen, or at least the black and white drawing of him who stars in this book, deals with all of this in the most rational possible way. He puts his possessions in storage, purchases a Greyhound pass that will allow him to ride as many of their buses wherever he wants over the course of two months and hits the road, staying with friends in cities all over the country, quite a few of whom he only knows from the Internet.
After just five pages to set all of that up, the book plunges into a chronicle of Jensen’s travels, with each chapter covering a stay in a different city with a different friend or acquaintance. From each of these Jensen solicits a story, which he then recreates within the comic, and some of these are incredibly, hilariously deranged, in the way that only true stories could be. The result is that while Red Eye, Black Eye is in a sense an autobiographical comic, it’s also a bit of a biographical anthology.
The second half of the title comes from Jensen’s boast that he doesn’t want to go home without a black eye, and that desire coupled with a nothing-to-lose attitude that comes from being a drifter passing through liberates him to say some pretty outrageous things to total strangers, but none of them results in the desired fight. Nor does he ever get any kind of meaning-of-life epiphany, unless the subject matter for a fantastic graphic novel counts as an epiphany.
I’m sorry to report that Las Vegas doesn’t come out looking too great here. Jensen stays in Vegas for just one day, during which time he steals pennies from a fountain to pay for a meal at Denny’s, is chatted up by a bum and a guy looking to party and gets beaned by a handful of nickels thrown from a speeding car.