EMPOWERED story notes, pt. 2 (Patreon)

And now, the next set of Empowered story notes, from very early on in the series. (Well before publication, certainly.) Here's a guide for the annotations that follow:

1) Er, I think I meant "Mrs. Butterworth," not "Butterwolf." (Maybe.)

2) The half-baked idea, here, was that Emp's mom—and Dad!—would've been models for lurid, sweaty, damsel-in-distress-oriented 1960s men's magazine covers, such as the work of illustrator Norm Eastman. The timeframe was, of course, wildly unworkable, though it just now occurs to me that Emp's grandmother could've possibly been such a model. (Hope you'll forgive the misspelling of "Khrushchev.")

3) This is quite clearly the origin of EMP1's story "Love Changes Everything." These notes, I think, predate the compiling of the stories that wound up in EMP1, as I churned out roughly 300-odd pages of Empowered stories before we decided which ones would be included in the first volume.

4) We visit said "Kubert-like" art school in the opener of EMP8, of course.  (As in, the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Arts, which I attended.) The cryptic "A Better Tomorrow" line is a hyper-obscure reference to a failed 1993-ish pitch for Marvel's X-Force, which I will someday post on this here Patreon.

5) This bloomed into the "like unto Michael Dudikoff?" line that the Demonwolf says to Ninjette as she discusses her New Jersey ninja status near the end of EMP3.

6) I have wanted to use this particular joke for so g-d long, yet somehow have never quite gotten around to using it.

7) The supersuit, you'll recall, does get used as a condom in an EMP2 flashback.

8) The B) idea, here, is something I worked up when I was writing Wildstorm/ DC's Gen13, but never had a chance to use.

9) Ninjette's peculiar side jobs did eventually appear in an EMP6 story, years after I wrote these notes.

The rest of the concepts on the page never did appear in an actual story. Still, pretty solid "hit rate" on material from this set of notes, gotta say.