Adam Warren has spent a large part of his career known as a manga-influenced comics artist. Nowadays thats a meaningless term as comics, illustration and fine art have absorbed influences from Japan and elsewhere, but when Warren began his career in the late 1980s, it was very different. The Dirty Pair was based on a book series that Warren turned into comics series published by Eclipse Comics and later Dark Horse. Besides the many Dirty Pair books, Warren has done a lot of work for Marvel and DC and Wildstorm over the years, writing and drawing books like Gen13, Livewires, Iron Man: Hypervelocity and Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone.
His current project is Empowered, an ongoing series of graphic novels being published by Dark Horse Comics. The books are printed directly from Warrens pencils which means they have a very different look and feel from other comics on the stands. The series is about a young heroine, the titular Empowered, who gets her powers from her skin-tight suit, though as the material becomes frayed and torn, she loses her strength. Its blatantly sexual, featuring a protagonist who when shes not being gagged and bound by villains, has a vigorous sex life with her boyfriend. Its funny and profane, but its also one of the smartest superhero comics around. Its dark and violent, but it also features characters like Maidman and Mindf**k, so it has a good sense of humor. Some of the concepts and ideas in the book are novel and his universe is simultaneously stranger and more logical than other superhero universes. The sixth volume of Empowered was released at the end of 2010 and we spoke with him over e-mail about the books.
ALEX DUEBEN: So what was the initial idea of Empowered? Did it begin with the character, the scenario or how do you work?
ADAM WARREN: Well, back in the middle of the last decade, a prolonged bout of underemployment led me to take on a large number of commissioned sketches, many of which were of the, ah, "damsel in distress" variety. I eventually became bored with drawing these repetitive, narrative-free illustrations, and instead began cranking out very brief, very goofy comics pages about the indignities and travails of a hapless, bondage-prone, deeply insecure superheroine. Long story truncated, these wacky little one- or two-page throwaway gags morphed into a series of ever-lengthening short stories, which in turn gained complexity and evolved into the current, ongoing series of 208-page (ahem) "graphic novels."
So, yeah, I'd have to say that the project began with a basic scenario"damsel in distress"then progressed to the characterbeleaguered superheroine with self-esteem and body-image issuesand rolled merrily on from there. This is quite a bit different from how I work on the book nowadays, which is a rather less spontaneous matter of planning character arcs, working up new riffs and story ideas, coordinating multiple ongoing plotlines, dropping hints about new plotlines, etc., etc.
AD: At what stage in thinking about it did you decide on the approach, printing the book from your pencilled pages?
AW: From the very beginning, reproducing the book from hastily penciled B&W pages (scrawled on cheap, 8" X 11" copy paper, no less) was the only way to go. I couldn't possibly afford the time or effort of producing the series via more conventional comics pages with separate inking, lettering and coloring stages. It's far fasterand far less tediousto work "quick and dirty" the way I do, even if the results aren't quite as polished and pretty as the best of my mainstream comics work. Then again, Empowered's artwork often has a verve and energy that might have been lacking in said mainstream comics work, or so I'm occasionally told.
AD: There are a lot of concepts in the books that we dont see much of in superhero books but have clearly come out of years reading them and working on them. Have these ideas been on your mind for a while?
AW: Oddly enough, not really... So far, most of the wackier concepts in Empowered have come about strictly from me musing over and/or overthinking the very basic and simple premises of the first few storieshow much it would suck to be a damsel in distress, say then thinking up new ideas based on those extrapolations, and so on, and so on. One (conceptual) thing has led to another, for the most part.
On the other hand, I've now considered "repurposing" concepts that were originally meant for use in my many, many failed pitches for mainstream projects... Fo' example, I have a multiply rejected proposal for Marvel's Shang Chi: Master of Kung Fu that riffs extensively on the role of the martial artist in a superheroic, ultra-high-tech milieu. I might end up using plot points from this ill-fated pitch in Empowered down the road, as many of the ideas could be easily retasked for resident martial artist Ninjette. Or some of the more outr ideas I once worked up for weather-control characters like X-Men's Storm or Gen13's Rainmaker could be used in the book, generously assuming that I could cope with the artistic heavy-lifting required to depict epic-scale weather shenanigans.
AD: The first volume feels a little different from the others, but everything in the series is all right there. The way Emp suggests a different approach to fighting. The villains railing against superheroes and how they look down on people. Thugboy and the Witless Minions and Willy Pete. Sistah Spooky and her deal. And they all came to payoff later. The first volume feels different because comparatively it comes off more as a collection of related short stories than a bigger story with some side stories as the other volumes do. Is that how you think of them and how effective do you think this has been?
AW: Yeah, I'd prolly agree with that view of the first Empowered volume, as it unquestionably did start out as a series of vignettes ever so slowly evolving into an ongoing storyline. I have to admit, this makes for a rather choppy reading experience at first, as the initial slate of short stories were very short indeed. (In fact, in their original versions, the first few stories were even shorter stillas in, one or two pages, topsbut wound up being elaborated a fair bit when I redid their crude scrawls for the published version.) Still, in retrospect, I'm pleased with the organic and freeflowing manner with which the series developed. This is an approach that I've never had the luxury of using on any other project, all of which have had to extensively outlined, plotted, scripted and squeezed into fixed page counts long before pencil hits page.
AD: Do you have a big picture long term idea for the characters and this world over many books and do you see an end in sight?
AW: Yeah, nowadays I definitely have a "big picture" in mind for the characters and their assorted arcs, whether in regards to a few volumes out or much further down the line. I might well change my mind about some of 'em, though, as new directions often suggest themselves while I'm working on the book. Case in point: The ill-fated telepath Mindfuck was originally intended to be an almost literal "throwaway character," but wound up being a critical part of several ongoing, long-term plot threads.
I do indeed have an end in sight for the series, though said ending is far enough into the distant future that I'd need figurative binocularsor a figurative low-powered telescope to see it clearly. Then again, economic necessities may dictate otherwise, as Empowered isn't exactly a stunningly lucrative endeavor... Still, I'm keeping my fingers crossedthough not when I'm drawing!that I can keep cranking away on the book long enough to wrap it up in the manner I have in mind.
AD: One of the reasons I ask as because when the idea that the suit was sentient came up I admit I had never thought of it and I really had to go back and rethink the book and everything to date and it was there from the beginning.
AW: Well, that's one of the fun parts about working on a long-term, ongoing project, as opposed to the miniseries and brief arcs I've written for mainstream comics: you can plant as many seeds for future narrative hooks as you like, without having to worry about paying them off immediately.
AD: So why dont you swear in the comic? I mean, theres lots of profanity but its covered up with black boxes. I mean the book already has a parental advisory sticker and comes shrinkwrapped.
AW: Well, for one thing, the book wasn't originally planned to be shrinkwrapped... Back when Empowered Vol. 1 was about to hit the presses, the decision to shrinkwrap happened at pretty much the last possible moment, as Dark Horse's legal department grew antsy at the prospect of a book mixing superheroes with sexual situations quite as frequently as Empowered did. Hard to say that this was an overcautious move, given that it became commonplace around this time for manga titles with any degree of sexual content to be shrinkwapped... and the book does vaguely resemble manga, I suppose.
That being said, the language was never really an issue in the book being shrinkwrapped, as far as I know. The main reason I use black-box censoring is, well, because I find it amusing, if mainly in a goofily contradictory fashion (as, paradoxically enough, the black boxes often make it very clear indeed what profanity they're theoretically hiding). I used the technique quite extensively when I wrote the teen superteam book Gen13 for DC's Wildstorm line, and later on when I drew an ongoing comics feature in the now sadly defunct videogame magazine PSM. Around the time I started up Empowered, though, I'd been doing a bit of writing for Marvel Comics, and my editors there took a rather dimmer view of the practice... So, what can I say, I was eager to revisit my beloved censor boxes when I switched over to non-Marvel work. Plus, well, the censoring is part of the Empowered format now, for good or ill.
AD: Is the Caged Demonwolf as much fun to write as he is to read?
AW: For the most part, I'd say "yeah"or "aye", more relevantlysave for the fact that some of the infamously verbose character's more elaborate flights of compounded alliteration require extensive abuse of my already battered copy of Roget's Thesaurus. Consequently, I'm trying to wean myselfand the Fusion-Phallused Violator of Worlds, by extensionfrom such alliterative overuse, though it always seems to creep right back into his dialogue. Note that this practice has also proved extensively abusive to some of Empowered's readers, who find his somewhat elaborately florid vocabulary hard to follow at times, especially during his more abstrusely alliterative perorations... So, yeah, definitely gotta tone that stuff down a little. (Or a lot.)
AD: Will we be seeing more short pieces like The Wench with a Million Sighs?
AW: That's the plan, at present. I'm hoping to release several one-shot comics during the gap between each new volume of Empowered, though I've only managed to get one such book approved so far. Tentatively titled Empowered: 10 Questions for the Maidman, the next one-shot's slated for release as a "floppy" (that is, a single issue in regular comics format) in mid-2011. It features script and framing-sequence art by meI'm finishing up my last page from it today, in factand luxurious, full-color artwork on the main Maidman story by the awesomely talented Emily Warren, who's painted the last few Empowered covers for me. (You can check out her excellent work at frozenlilacs.com, BTW; and nope, we're not related.)
Like I said, I'm hoping to make these one-shots a regular occurrence between volumes, working with another excellent artist each time. Even with the 208-page installments I draw, I never have enough space or timeor space-time, even! to properly address as many peripheral Empverse characters and concepts as I'd like. So, I'm hoping that a future series of one-shots or even (gasp!) a miniseries, far less likely would allow me to explore some of these "side stories." That, and deliver straight-up, pure-fun Empowered humor, hilarity and hijinks, without having to worry about servicing the long-term plotlines that make the regular Empowered volumes a necessarily mixed bag of humor and heavier matters.
AD: Any chance the next book will be a bit less death-y?
AW: Sadly, I can't quite make the claim that Empowered Vol. 7 won't be less "death-y" than the previous two books, due mainly to the fact that a long, bloody, grueling ninja fight runs throughout the entire volume. (Note that this is a much longer, bloodier, "grueling-er" fight than Ninjette's previous skirmish with the Ayakami clan at the end of vol. 3, not to mention featuring much worse odds as well...) Needless to say, expect generous servings of death to be doled out during this martial-arts-and-mayhem-intensive sequence. But, hey, the rest of the book should be pretty much death-free! (Well, more or less.)
His current project is Empowered, an ongoing series of graphic novels being published by Dark Horse Comics. The books are printed directly from Warrens pencils which means they have a very different look and feel from other comics on the stands. The series is about a young heroine, the titular Empowered, who gets her powers from her skin-tight suit, though as the material becomes frayed and torn, she loses her strength. Its blatantly sexual, featuring a protagonist who when shes not being gagged and bound by villains, has a vigorous sex life with her boyfriend. Its funny and profane, but its also one of the smartest superhero comics around. Its dark and violent, but it also features characters like Maidman and Mindf**k, so it has a good sense of humor. Some of the concepts and ideas in the book are novel and his universe is simultaneously stranger and more logical than other superhero universes. The sixth volume of Empowered was released at the end of 2010 and we spoke with him over e-mail about the books.
ALEX DUEBEN: So what was the initial idea of Empowered? Did it begin with the character, the scenario or how do you work?
ADAM WARREN: Well, back in the middle of the last decade, a prolonged bout of underemployment led me to take on a large number of commissioned sketches, many of which were of the, ah, "damsel in distress" variety. I eventually became bored with drawing these repetitive, narrative-free illustrations, and instead began cranking out very brief, very goofy comics pages about the indignities and travails of a hapless, bondage-prone, deeply insecure superheroine. Long story truncated, these wacky little one- or two-page throwaway gags morphed into a series of ever-lengthening short stories, which in turn gained complexity and evolved into the current, ongoing series of 208-page (ahem) "graphic novels."
So, yeah, I'd have to say that the project began with a basic scenario"damsel in distress"then progressed to the characterbeleaguered superheroine with self-esteem and body-image issuesand rolled merrily on from there. This is quite a bit different from how I work on the book nowadays, which is a rather less spontaneous matter of planning character arcs, working up new riffs and story ideas, coordinating multiple ongoing plotlines, dropping hints about new plotlines, etc., etc.
AD: At what stage in thinking about it did you decide on the approach, printing the book from your pencilled pages?
AW: From the very beginning, reproducing the book from hastily penciled B&W pages (scrawled on cheap, 8" X 11" copy paper, no less) was the only way to go. I couldn't possibly afford the time or effort of producing the series via more conventional comics pages with separate inking, lettering and coloring stages. It's far fasterand far less tediousto work "quick and dirty" the way I do, even if the results aren't quite as polished and pretty as the best of my mainstream comics work. Then again, Empowered's artwork often has a verve and energy that might have been lacking in said mainstream comics work, or so I'm occasionally told.
AD: There are a lot of concepts in the books that we dont see much of in superhero books but have clearly come out of years reading them and working on them. Have these ideas been on your mind for a while?
AW: Oddly enough, not really... So far, most of the wackier concepts in Empowered have come about strictly from me musing over and/or overthinking the very basic and simple premises of the first few storieshow much it would suck to be a damsel in distress, say then thinking up new ideas based on those extrapolations, and so on, and so on. One (conceptual) thing has led to another, for the most part.
On the other hand, I've now considered "repurposing" concepts that were originally meant for use in my many, many failed pitches for mainstream projects... Fo' example, I have a multiply rejected proposal for Marvel's Shang Chi: Master of Kung Fu that riffs extensively on the role of the martial artist in a superheroic, ultra-high-tech milieu. I might end up using plot points from this ill-fated pitch in Empowered down the road, as many of the ideas could be easily retasked for resident martial artist Ninjette. Or some of the more outr ideas I once worked up for weather-control characters like X-Men's Storm or Gen13's Rainmaker could be used in the book, generously assuming that I could cope with the artistic heavy-lifting required to depict epic-scale weather shenanigans.
AD: The first volume feels a little different from the others, but everything in the series is all right there. The way Emp suggests a different approach to fighting. The villains railing against superheroes and how they look down on people. Thugboy and the Witless Minions and Willy Pete. Sistah Spooky and her deal. And they all came to payoff later. The first volume feels different because comparatively it comes off more as a collection of related short stories than a bigger story with some side stories as the other volumes do. Is that how you think of them and how effective do you think this has been?
AW: Yeah, I'd prolly agree with that view of the first Empowered volume, as it unquestionably did start out as a series of vignettes ever so slowly evolving into an ongoing storyline. I have to admit, this makes for a rather choppy reading experience at first, as the initial slate of short stories were very short indeed. (In fact, in their original versions, the first few stories were even shorter stillas in, one or two pages, topsbut wound up being elaborated a fair bit when I redid their crude scrawls for the published version.) Still, in retrospect, I'm pleased with the organic and freeflowing manner with which the series developed. This is an approach that I've never had the luxury of using on any other project, all of which have had to extensively outlined, plotted, scripted and squeezed into fixed page counts long before pencil hits page.
AD: Do you have a big picture long term idea for the characters and this world over many books and do you see an end in sight?
AW: Yeah, nowadays I definitely have a "big picture" in mind for the characters and their assorted arcs, whether in regards to a few volumes out or much further down the line. I might well change my mind about some of 'em, though, as new directions often suggest themselves while I'm working on the book. Case in point: The ill-fated telepath Mindfuck was originally intended to be an almost literal "throwaway character," but wound up being a critical part of several ongoing, long-term plot threads.
I do indeed have an end in sight for the series, though said ending is far enough into the distant future that I'd need figurative binocularsor a figurative low-powered telescope to see it clearly. Then again, economic necessities may dictate otherwise, as Empowered isn't exactly a stunningly lucrative endeavor... Still, I'm keeping my fingers crossedthough not when I'm drawing!that I can keep cranking away on the book long enough to wrap it up in the manner I have in mind.
AD: One of the reasons I ask as because when the idea that the suit was sentient came up I admit I had never thought of it and I really had to go back and rethink the book and everything to date and it was there from the beginning.
AW: Well, that's one of the fun parts about working on a long-term, ongoing project, as opposed to the miniseries and brief arcs I've written for mainstream comics: you can plant as many seeds for future narrative hooks as you like, without having to worry about paying them off immediately.
AD: So why dont you swear in the comic? I mean, theres lots of profanity but its covered up with black boxes. I mean the book already has a parental advisory sticker and comes shrinkwrapped.
AW: Well, for one thing, the book wasn't originally planned to be shrinkwrapped... Back when Empowered Vol. 1 was about to hit the presses, the decision to shrinkwrap happened at pretty much the last possible moment, as Dark Horse's legal department grew antsy at the prospect of a book mixing superheroes with sexual situations quite as frequently as Empowered did. Hard to say that this was an overcautious move, given that it became commonplace around this time for manga titles with any degree of sexual content to be shrinkwapped... and the book does vaguely resemble manga, I suppose.
That being said, the language was never really an issue in the book being shrinkwrapped, as far as I know. The main reason I use black-box censoring is, well, because I find it amusing, if mainly in a goofily contradictory fashion (as, paradoxically enough, the black boxes often make it very clear indeed what profanity they're theoretically hiding). I used the technique quite extensively when I wrote the teen superteam book Gen13 for DC's Wildstorm line, and later on when I drew an ongoing comics feature in the now sadly defunct videogame magazine PSM. Around the time I started up Empowered, though, I'd been doing a bit of writing for Marvel Comics, and my editors there took a rather dimmer view of the practice... So, what can I say, I was eager to revisit my beloved censor boxes when I switched over to non-Marvel work. Plus, well, the censoring is part of the Empowered format now, for good or ill.
AD: Is the Caged Demonwolf as much fun to write as he is to read?
AW: For the most part, I'd say "yeah"or "aye", more relevantlysave for the fact that some of the infamously verbose character's more elaborate flights of compounded alliteration require extensive abuse of my already battered copy of Roget's Thesaurus. Consequently, I'm trying to wean myselfand the Fusion-Phallused Violator of Worlds, by extensionfrom such alliterative overuse, though it always seems to creep right back into his dialogue. Note that this practice has also proved extensively abusive to some of Empowered's readers, who find his somewhat elaborately florid vocabulary hard to follow at times, especially during his more abstrusely alliterative perorations... So, yeah, definitely gotta tone that stuff down a little. (Or a lot.)
AD: Will we be seeing more short pieces like The Wench with a Million Sighs?
AW: That's the plan, at present. I'm hoping to release several one-shot comics during the gap between each new volume of Empowered, though I've only managed to get one such book approved so far. Tentatively titled Empowered: 10 Questions for the Maidman, the next one-shot's slated for release as a "floppy" (that is, a single issue in regular comics format) in mid-2011. It features script and framing-sequence art by meI'm finishing up my last page from it today, in factand luxurious, full-color artwork on the main Maidman story by the awesomely talented Emily Warren, who's painted the last few Empowered covers for me. (You can check out her excellent work at frozenlilacs.com, BTW; and nope, we're not related.)
Like I said, I'm hoping to make these one-shots a regular occurrence between volumes, working with another excellent artist each time. Even with the 208-page installments I draw, I never have enough space or timeor space-time, even! to properly address as many peripheral Empverse characters and concepts as I'd like. So, I'm hoping that a future series of one-shots or even (gasp!) a miniseries, far less likely would allow me to explore some of these "side stories." That, and deliver straight-up, pure-fun Empowered humor, hilarity and hijinks, without having to worry about servicing the long-term plotlines that make the regular Empowered volumes a necessarily mixed bag of humor and heavier matters.
AD: Any chance the next book will be a bit less death-y?
AW: Sadly, I can't quite make the claim that Empowered Vol. 7 won't be less "death-y" than the previous two books, due mainly to the fact that a long, bloody, grueling ninja fight runs throughout the entire volume. (Note that this is a much longer, bloodier, "grueling-er" fight than Ninjette's previous skirmish with the Ayakami clan at the end of vol. 3, not to mention featuring much worse odds as well...) Needless to say, expect generous servings of death to be doled out during this martial-arts-and-mayhem-intensive sequence. But, hey, the rest of the book should be pretty much death-free! (Well, more or less.)