Adam Warren is probably best known by SuicideGirls as the writer and artist on the American version of the Manga, Dirty Pair. But in more recent years he has turned to more mainstream work for companies like Marvel and DC. In fact he is writing and drawing an Iron Man miniseries, called Iron Man: Hypervelocity which has its third issue coming out this month. But Warren is currently most passionate about his original graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics called Empowered. The book is about a body image conscious superheroine who is constantly getting her supersuit torn off while trying to manage a relationship with her boyfriend and her hard-drinking ninja girlfriend.
Buy Empowered
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Adam Warren: Right now Im finishing a cover for a role playing game by White Wolf.
DRE: What was the inspiration for Empowered?
Adam: I havent had a regular job in comics for a while. But I took on a lot of art commissions and a fair chunk of them were so-called damsels in distress commissions better known as bondage. I had a wad of them to do. Im not a big illustrator guy to begin with, so I got sick of just doing the pinups so I started doing very short run of one to three page stories about a distress prone superheroine. Somewhat to my shock, it evolved into a real comic after a while. I started thinking about random stuff like What if she met a boyfriend on the job? Just random small story ideas that built up and I kept rolling with it until I eventually had an actual comic albeit one with fairly strong fetish overtones.
DRE: I read that originally the short stories were just being emailed around.
Adam: Yeah, I emailed them around to a list of friends, pros and editors. Eventually a couple of the publishers expressed interest in it after there was about 100 or 200 pages of it. I didnt really think of it as a real comic so I ignored all the things I normally do for a real comic like a lot of storytelling devices and obsessing over story structure. I didnt really think about that.
DRE: Is that why it has that scratchier, less clean feeling?
Adam: I decided to reproduce it from pencils because I really hate inking. I hate it with a passion. Normally I do very tight layouts for my books and almost everyone who has seen my layouts, which Ive been doing since the Dirty Pair vastly prefers them to my finished work. That was actually aggravating for a while there. But I decided to make it work in a tighter form of the layouts. Go straight from the pencils and it is even lettered by hand as well. It works pretty well.
DRE: What kept bringing you back to doing these three page stories?
Adam: I really liked the characters and the format itself was the attraction. I could just think up a story in a day or two and do about two or three pages a day. From start to finish I could have a complete story done and not have to sweat over it. Normally when Im doing comics, I have to break stuff down into individual issues, then cover how many plot points I wanted deal with in each issue. I like to think of my comics work as energetic and freewheeling but the actual process is laborious. So the fact that this was so easy to come up with a story and put it on paper and be done in a day was the main attraction.
DRE: Why is the book being shrink-wrapped for the release in stores?
Adam: Theres no actual nudity in the book which I was very careful about. It comes down to that the heroine and her boyfriend are obviously having sex on many occasions in the comic. The Dark Horses lawyers basically said, This would be a problem. People assume that all superheroes are for kids which this is rather emphatically not. But Ive already gotten people already saying Why didnt you just do actual nudity and go straight for more of a porn thing, but I feel were very close to the edge on this. Its not that raunchier than what I was doing on Gen-13 back in the day.
DRE: It seems bizarre. I know that there are some librarians that wanted to ban Blankets [by Craig Thompson], is this being shrink-wrapped as a result of stuff like that?
Adam: Yes, I think it is that and also there have been a lot of issues with Manga. If you check your local Borders or Barnes & Noble or something, a seemingly random number of Mangas are shrink-wrapped to hopefully avoid problems. I think this is connected more with the Manga issues than anything else.
DRE: Do you even mind that its shrink wrapped or are you worried its going to get the raincoat crowd in there?
Adam: No, I dont mind if the raincoat crowd picks it up. Im more worried about the more casual reader not knowing what the interior looks like. So Im more worried about losing the more casual reader but ironically, its the most accessible work Ive ever done.
DRE: Yeah, its almost like real people with superpowers.
Adam: Pretty much. In a lot of ways, its not really a superhero book. Only the lead character is one and its more about mundane issues than actual superhero continuity of saving the world.
DRE: Is this the kind of stuff you have always wanted to do?
Adam: Yeah, pretty much. Ive actually thought that Id like to work an autobiographical element into my superhero or science fiction stuff. I wouldnt want to do straight autobio because Im just not that frigging interesting. I do like the idea of using real life elements in it and then building something fairly fantastic.
DRE: What are the autobiographical elements?
Adam: It is the different characters and how they interact for the most part. Some of it is taken from real life or real people I know. I shouldnt play that up too much because I dont want my friends asking, Is that supposed to be me? Theres a climactic argument between the heroine and her boyfriend at one point that uses an actual line that I heard from someone. Im not looking forward to seeing if those people notice.
DRE: What was the inspiration for the superpower suit itself?
Adam: I didnt put a lot of thought into it. I came up with the basic character design for the heroine based off another I character I did for a Marvel book called LiveWires. But the actual costume was randomly determined. Some people think it resembles Marvels Spider-Woman.
DRE: The one from the 70s?
Adam: Yes. Thats around the time I stopped reading comics as a kid but whatever. Shes been compared to that one and Stargirl from DC which Im not really familiar with.
DRE: I dont know that one.
Adam: Shes blonde and has a midriff exposing outfit. Actually, the lead character in Empowered only exposes her midriff when the suit gets torn which is most of the time actually.
DRE: The content of the story itself may be one that may be attractive to women but the idea of a character that gets her clothes ripped off every story may not.
Adam: That is a conflict. I have a secret mailing list that the files go around to and its about a third female. Ive actually had a lot of women react positively, not to the fetish aspects of it but how it depicts life in general has been relatively positive. I can see how the basis of the comic would be a problem. I could have a less offensive comic if I actually stripped out all the actual bondage stuff and make it more like the slice of life or whatever but it is what it is.
Some on the list are ok with cheesecake and some arent. Its not appropriate for the easily offended, lets put it that way. Someone online a little while ago wrote If you are a humorless puritanical scold of either the right or left leaning variety then this book isnt for you. But I was thinking, Wait a minute, I could lose sales on that one. No, its exactly for you, if youre easily offended, buy it and be offended. You can talk about it in detail in your blog later.
DRE: Your superheroine has body issues, is that something you took from someone you know?
Adam: Some of those aspects are from real life women who I hope wont see this interview. I thought it was an interesting angle to play.
DRE: Im not really familiar with your mainstream work. Are you making fun of the stuff that you used to do?
Adam: No, not really. Its not really a superhero parody. There are some aspects to that but Im not doing an elaborate parody of a particular superhero. Ive actually always liked to do stuff that is boldly contradictory. The idea that Dirty Pair were doing things that were simultaneously cheesecake while making fun of the impulse to do cheesecake at the same time amuses me.
DRE: How was it working with the great Chris Warner as an editor?
Adam: Oh, it was fine. He was my big supporter at Dark Horse which was the reason we went over there. By the time we actually had the contract going, I was already finished with the first volume so there wasnt much editing per se. We did change some stuff and in a desperate attempt to avoid the shrink-wrapping, we took out some of the more hyper suggestive things like suspicious spit strings. Which in the end, didnt help.
DRE: Even though you were doing this book mostly for fun but its always great to get new fans, are you hoping to move into stuff that might not be as mainstream?
Adam: Im actually not sure how this is going to appeal to mainstream superhero readers. I almost wish I hadnt gone the superhero route on this because Id like to have a broader audience for it than superhero fans but well see how that goes. I hope that doesnt put people off. Its not about the things that mainstream superhero comics are about like the maddening continuity detail and unapproachable stories that you have to have 30 years of knowledge of a comic publishers universe to understand.
DRE: I know you got the Iron Man comic out, so what are you interested in at this point?
Adam: I like working on different things because most of my work has a fairly heavy duty science fiction content to it and that is not the case with Empowered. Id like to do more science fiction writing, Id like to do more Dirty Pair at some point or hopefully get some other mainstream work.
DRE: Whos writing this Iron Man book?
Adam: I am. I write all my own stuff. I actually never work for other writers.
DRE: Is this Iron Man book in continuity?
Adam: It is not. Its a story that predates Civil War. Its entirely in its own universe using a new iteration of the Iron Man armor. It uses the old Iron Man trope of the Iron Man suit gone rogue which is giving away the first issue but what the hell. Its actually from the point of view of the rogue suit as opposed to the suit being a bad guy or Tony Stark having to shut it down or whatever. Its about the experiences of a supposedly rogue armor.
DRE: So its intelligent?
Adam: Yes. Due to an ambush by mysterious mecha, the armor has been forced to attempt to upload Tony Starks personality. It hasnt quite worked out entirely well because the suit has been on the run from the authorities and the enigmatic enemies aplenty.
DRE: You mentioned in an email to me that this Iron Man series has a bit of SuicideGirls flavor.
Adam: One of the subplots that wont become clear until issue number three is that the armor has also been infected by an ineffective computer virus. The viral avatar for the virus starts communicating with the uploaded Tony Stark personality armor has a rather strong SuicideGirls flavor to it. I didnt think to check her name on the site though. It is named Absynthe. Then I checked the site and saw that there is a SuicideGirl with that name. They dont actually resemble each other, thankfully, but that was startling.
DRE: Was the character in Empowered inspired by SuicideGirls?
Adam: Not the lead character so much but there are some other upcoming characters that have a bit more of an inspiration from that.
DRE: How interested are you in working on more Dirty Pair?
Adam: Its possible because the Empowered format is actually pretty easy for me to do so I probably could do an actual Dirty Pair project in a similar format. Ive done some trial versions of it but it really depends on if I have mainstream work or not because it pays a lot better. A straight to trade thing like Empowered or Dirty Pair does not have much advance money. Its down the road that you get to make pretty good money hopefully but in the short term its problematic. I really love Dirty Pair. Ive been working on it for close to 20 years which is terrifying.
DRE: Have you done any new Dirty Pair since Manga got such a foothold here in America?
Adam: Not really. Thats around the time I basically stopped doing that much artwork. I just dont have the patience anymore to cope with the grind of doing finished pencils and inks.
DRE: If were talking money wise, it would be almost crazy not to do more Dirty Pair at this point.
Adam: The certain amount of money for the advance is a fraction of what you would get for doing even a regular comic in pamphlet format. The money differential is what I have a problem with. Im unclear on how well Original English Language Manga is doing with the general Manga reading public but I dont know.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy Empowered
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Adam Warren: Right now Im finishing a cover for a role playing game by White Wolf.
DRE: What was the inspiration for Empowered?
Adam: I havent had a regular job in comics for a while. But I took on a lot of art commissions and a fair chunk of them were so-called damsels in distress commissions better known as bondage. I had a wad of them to do. Im not a big illustrator guy to begin with, so I got sick of just doing the pinups so I started doing very short run of one to three page stories about a distress prone superheroine. Somewhat to my shock, it evolved into a real comic after a while. I started thinking about random stuff like What if she met a boyfriend on the job? Just random small story ideas that built up and I kept rolling with it until I eventually had an actual comic albeit one with fairly strong fetish overtones.
DRE: I read that originally the short stories were just being emailed around.
Adam: Yeah, I emailed them around to a list of friends, pros and editors. Eventually a couple of the publishers expressed interest in it after there was about 100 or 200 pages of it. I didnt really think of it as a real comic so I ignored all the things I normally do for a real comic like a lot of storytelling devices and obsessing over story structure. I didnt really think about that.
DRE: Is that why it has that scratchier, less clean feeling?
Adam: I decided to reproduce it from pencils because I really hate inking. I hate it with a passion. Normally I do very tight layouts for my books and almost everyone who has seen my layouts, which Ive been doing since the Dirty Pair vastly prefers them to my finished work. That was actually aggravating for a while there. But I decided to make it work in a tighter form of the layouts. Go straight from the pencils and it is even lettered by hand as well. It works pretty well.
DRE: What kept bringing you back to doing these three page stories?
Adam: I really liked the characters and the format itself was the attraction. I could just think up a story in a day or two and do about two or three pages a day. From start to finish I could have a complete story done and not have to sweat over it. Normally when Im doing comics, I have to break stuff down into individual issues, then cover how many plot points I wanted deal with in each issue. I like to think of my comics work as energetic and freewheeling but the actual process is laborious. So the fact that this was so easy to come up with a story and put it on paper and be done in a day was the main attraction.
DRE: Why is the book being shrink-wrapped for the release in stores?
Adam: Theres no actual nudity in the book which I was very careful about. It comes down to that the heroine and her boyfriend are obviously having sex on many occasions in the comic. The Dark Horses lawyers basically said, This would be a problem. People assume that all superheroes are for kids which this is rather emphatically not. But Ive already gotten people already saying Why didnt you just do actual nudity and go straight for more of a porn thing, but I feel were very close to the edge on this. Its not that raunchier than what I was doing on Gen-13 back in the day.
DRE: It seems bizarre. I know that there are some librarians that wanted to ban Blankets [by Craig Thompson], is this being shrink-wrapped as a result of stuff like that?
Adam: Yes, I think it is that and also there have been a lot of issues with Manga. If you check your local Borders or Barnes & Noble or something, a seemingly random number of Mangas are shrink-wrapped to hopefully avoid problems. I think this is connected more with the Manga issues than anything else.
DRE: Do you even mind that its shrink wrapped or are you worried its going to get the raincoat crowd in there?
Adam: No, I dont mind if the raincoat crowd picks it up. Im more worried about the more casual reader not knowing what the interior looks like. So Im more worried about losing the more casual reader but ironically, its the most accessible work Ive ever done.
DRE: Yeah, its almost like real people with superpowers.
Adam: Pretty much. In a lot of ways, its not really a superhero book. Only the lead character is one and its more about mundane issues than actual superhero continuity of saving the world.
DRE: Is this the kind of stuff you have always wanted to do?
Adam: Yeah, pretty much. Ive actually thought that Id like to work an autobiographical element into my superhero or science fiction stuff. I wouldnt want to do straight autobio because Im just not that frigging interesting. I do like the idea of using real life elements in it and then building something fairly fantastic.
DRE: What are the autobiographical elements?
Adam: It is the different characters and how they interact for the most part. Some of it is taken from real life or real people I know. I shouldnt play that up too much because I dont want my friends asking, Is that supposed to be me? Theres a climactic argument between the heroine and her boyfriend at one point that uses an actual line that I heard from someone. Im not looking forward to seeing if those people notice.
DRE: What was the inspiration for the superpower suit itself?
Adam: I didnt put a lot of thought into it. I came up with the basic character design for the heroine based off another I character I did for a Marvel book called LiveWires. But the actual costume was randomly determined. Some people think it resembles Marvels Spider-Woman.
DRE: The one from the 70s?
Adam: Yes. Thats around the time I stopped reading comics as a kid but whatever. Shes been compared to that one and Stargirl from DC which Im not really familiar with.
DRE: I dont know that one.
Adam: Shes blonde and has a midriff exposing outfit. Actually, the lead character in Empowered only exposes her midriff when the suit gets torn which is most of the time actually.
DRE: The content of the story itself may be one that may be attractive to women but the idea of a character that gets her clothes ripped off every story may not.
Adam: That is a conflict. I have a secret mailing list that the files go around to and its about a third female. Ive actually had a lot of women react positively, not to the fetish aspects of it but how it depicts life in general has been relatively positive. I can see how the basis of the comic would be a problem. I could have a less offensive comic if I actually stripped out all the actual bondage stuff and make it more like the slice of life or whatever but it is what it is.
Some on the list are ok with cheesecake and some arent. Its not appropriate for the easily offended, lets put it that way. Someone online a little while ago wrote If you are a humorless puritanical scold of either the right or left leaning variety then this book isnt for you. But I was thinking, Wait a minute, I could lose sales on that one. No, its exactly for you, if youre easily offended, buy it and be offended. You can talk about it in detail in your blog later.
DRE: Your superheroine has body issues, is that something you took from someone you know?
Adam: Some of those aspects are from real life women who I hope wont see this interview. I thought it was an interesting angle to play.
DRE: Im not really familiar with your mainstream work. Are you making fun of the stuff that you used to do?
Adam: No, not really. Its not really a superhero parody. There are some aspects to that but Im not doing an elaborate parody of a particular superhero. Ive actually always liked to do stuff that is boldly contradictory. The idea that Dirty Pair were doing things that were simultaneously cheesecake while making fun of the impulse to do cheesecake at the same time amuses me.
DRE: How was it working with the great Chris Warner as an editor?
Adam: Oh, it was fine. He was my big supporter at Dark Horse which was the reason we went over there. By the time we actually had the contract going, I was already finished with the first volume so there wasnt much editing per se. We did change some stuff and in a desperate attempt to avoid the shrink-wrapping, we took out some of the more hyper suggestive things like suspicious spit strings. Which in the end, didnt help.
DRE: Even though you were doing this book mostly for fun but its always great to get new fans, are you hoping to move into stuff that might not be as mainstream?
Adam: Im actually not sure how this is going to appeal to mainstream superhero readers. I almost wish I hadnt gone the superhero route on this because Id like to have a broader audience for it than superhero fans but well see how that goes. I hope that doesnt put people off. Its not about the things that mainstream superhero comics are about like the maddening continuity detail and unapproachable stories that you have to have 30 years of knowledge of a comic publishers universe to understand.
DRE: I know you got the Iron Man comic out, so what are you interested in at this point?
Adam: I like working on different things because most of my work has a fairly heavy duty science fiction content to it and that is not the case with Empowered. Id like to do more science fiction writing, Id like to do more Dirty Pair at some point or hopefully get some other mainstream work.
DRE: Whos writing this Iron Man book?
Adam: I am. I write all my own stuff. I actually never work for other writers.
DRE: Is this Iron Man book in continuity?
Adam: It is not. Its a story that predates Civil War. Its entirely in its own universe using a new iteration of the Iron Man armor. It uses the old Iron Man trope of the Iron Man suit gone rogue which is giving away the first issue but what the hell. Its actually from the point of view of the rogue suit as opposed to the suit being a bad guy or Tony Stark having to shut it down or whatever. Its about the experiences of a supposedly rogue armor.
DRE: So its intelligent?
Adam: Yes. Due to an ambush by mysterious mecha, the armor has been forced to attempt to upload Tony Starks personality. It hasnt quite worked out entirely well because the suit has been on the run from the authorities and the enigmatic enemies aplenty.
DRE: You mentioned in an email to me that this Iron Man series has a bit of SuicideGirls flavor.
Adam: One of the subplots that wont become clear until issue number three is that the armor has also been infected by an ineffective computer virus. The viral avatar for the virus starts communicating with the uploaded Tony Stark personality armor has a rather strong SuicideGirls flavor to it. I didnt think to check her name on the site though. It is named Absynthe. Then I checked the site and saw that there is a SuicideGirl with that name. They dont actually resemble each other, thankfully, but that was startling.
DRE: Was the character in Empowered inspired by SuicideGirls?
Adam: Not the lead character so much but there are some other upcoming characters that have a bit more of an inspiration from that.
DRE: How interested are you in working on more Dirty Pair?
Adam: Its possible because the Empowered format is actually pretty easy for me to do so I probably could do an actual Dirty Pair project in a similar format. Ive done some trial versions of it but it really depends on if I have mainstream work or not because it pays a lot better. A straight to trade thing like Empowered or Dirty Pair does not have much advance money. Its down the road that you get to make pretty good money hopefully but in the short term its problematic. I really love Dirty Pair. Ive been working on it for close to 20 years which is terrifying.
DRE: Have you done any new Dirty Pair since Manga got such a foothold here in America?
Adam: Not really. Thats around the time I basically stopped doing that much artwork. I just dont have the patience anymore to cope with the grind of doing finished pencils and inks.
DRE: If were talking money wise, it would be almost crazy not to do more Dirty Pair at this point.
Adam: The certain amount of money for the advance is a fraction of what you would get for doing even a regular comic in pamphlet format. The money differential is what I have a problem with. Im unclear on how well Original English Language Manga is doing with the general Manga reading public but I dont know.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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-Thom