Writer/Artist: Adam Warren
Publisher: Dark Horse

In all honesty, I don’t know where to begin with Empowered. So let’s start at the start.

The story centers around our femme-fatal heroine named, of course, Empowered. She cruises around with a JLA-style team called the Superhomeys, her former villain-minion-for-hire boyfriend named Thugboy, and her best girlfriend, a hard-drinking Ninja named Ninjette.

Empowered’s misfortunes don’t end with her name, however. All of her super-powers are as a direct result of her supersuit. Her impossibly tight supersuit, that has a habit of getting torn to tatters at the slightest touch, leaving her powerless. In fact her best superpower seems to be getting captured, something that her Superhomeys teammate and arch nemesis, Sista Spooky, never let’s her forget.

I can see why Adam Warren might have caught some flack for this manga-style collection. At first glance, his characters seem to be somewhat misogynistic. The women are mostly big-breasted, thin waisted beauties, and are always put in positions (storytelling wise) where their sexuality is exploited. I think what Warren has actually done is written one of the smartest pieces of Superhero Satire that I have ever read.

Empowered, as a book and a character, is full of innocence and charm. From her “meta-textual” story breaks, to the body image issues she struggles with as a result of her extremely revealing supersuit, Empowered easily becomes a far more relatable character than most “serious” superheroines. She just wants to do well, and struggles to make a difference. Warren draws her a both someone you empathy for and someone you want to cheer on to win, just because she’s so darn nice! Warren designed Empowered in reaction to some less-than-innocent sketch requests he got, and that tounge-in-cheek attitude is all over this book.

By taking the most obvious of superheroine stereotypes (tight costumes, always getting captured, unable to have a normal relationship, etc) to an infinite level, we find something within the satire that I wonder if even Adam Warren realized he was going for. We find innocence. We find characters we can love and cheer on because they aren’t flawed, but the world they live in is.

Empowered really is a book unlike any other I’ve read. The Boys comes close to this, but innocence isn’t in The Boys vocabulary. Warren’s pencil-style renderings will make you think weather you like it or not, and they will also make you laugh out loud.

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Tags: Dark Horse, Empowered, Graphic Reccomendations

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Graphic Recommendations, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.