EMPOWERED story notes, pt.6 (Patreon)

Oooh, weekend service here on the ol' Patreon! (In the interests of long-term sustainability, I'm mainly sticking to weekdaily-oriented posting, but what the heck.) 

More Empowered story notes from very early on in the series; been a while since the last one of these, alas.  And now, some quick annotations. 

Left-hand column:

*While a fair bit of Empowered really is personal in derivation, I'm careful to disperse such material across the entire cast, as I'm almost phobic about avoiding anything resembling an "authorial self-insertion" character. This wasn't an intentional aspect of the older "supervill mentor" fella (no, really!), but I nonetheless never featured him in the story because of said intense aversion. 

*Never did roll with the overt clinical depression bit for Ninjette, but I clearly was considering it early on in the series.

*We do, however, see the first mention of the American ninja riffs for her that blossom in vol.3.  (No sign of New Jersey yet, though.)

*The comparisons between manga and ninjutsu as performed by Westerners never went anywhere because, TBH, by this point I didn't really care about such criticism in my own work, whether or not overenthusiastic young "weebs" were doing the boundary-patrolling or not, (To be clear, that last paragraph was referring to tensions among younger manga-influenced creators over the whole "Original English Language (OEL) manga" thing; I rarely faced much friction along those lines.)

Right-hand column: 

*Behold, the "sigh" story notes that directly inspired the first "floppy" one-shot, Empowered: The Wench with a Million Sighs.

*Next, a scene that appears during a vol. 3 Thugboy flashback to his Witless Minions days. 

*For the uninitiated, Michael Dudikoff was the star of the 1985 Cannon Films flick American Ninja, which I saw in the theater(!) during my teenage phase of "see a movie every g-d weekend, whether or not anything's actually worth seeing."

*And we close out with a Thugboy anecdote setting up vol.2's butt-centric story "Schrodinger's Catgirl."