FAILED PROJECT FRIDAY: An art postscript (and pitch synopsis) for EMPOWERED AND THE MASK CITY MELTDOWN! (Patreon)

In a final "epilogue post" for the sadly defunct miniseries pitch Empowered and the Mask City Meltdown serialized here over many previous Failed-Project Friday posts, I'm showing you a few pieces of Emp artwork by the artist I originally wrote the project for, as well as Meltdown's original text proposal.

The artist whose work inspired me to write the urban-landscape-heavy two-parter was the excellent Arist Deyn, whose ability at rendering cities was almost as impressive as their gorgeous and expressive character work.  I contacted Arist initially, I think, to color the cover illo for Empowered vol. 11, but soon branched out into more ambitious proposals—in fact, vastly more ambitious proposals, as you'll see shortly.

Behold one of Arist's takes on Emp, in a casually tossed-off "down the street" shot that you will have rarely if ever seen in Empowered proper, as I absolutely hate drawing that particular shot:

And lo, an amusing take on the harshness of Empowered as a whole:

Dig those ridiculously beautiful backgrounds, folks, which display skills far, far beyond my own aptitudes and interests as an artist. In truth, I was so taken with Arist's impressive skill set that, even while Meltdown was being developed, I worked up a much more ambitious Empowered pitch that would've been a five-issue(!) Deyn follow-up to Mask City; I'll discuss that Failed Project at the end of this post.

Alas, we just couldn't work out the scheduling, and Empowered and the Mask City Meltdown came to naught. Later on, I'd repitch the clearly doomed concept to likewise excellent artist Rob "Robaato" Porter, but that attempt would also founder over scheduling issues; after that, I shelved the pitch for good, along with the entire concept of attempting any further Empowered Guest Artist projects. (I should clarify that the Guest Artist miniseries Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell was already in development by this point.)

Yeahp, by this time (2017-18) I'd proven myself quite thoroughly inept at wrangling freelancers and, besides, sales figures on anything Empowered-related had long ago fallen off to unsustainably low levels, so that was the end of the ill-fated Guest Artist effort. I decided that, if I were going to write scripts for other artists to draw, they would have to be based on entirely new projects—or on (very) rare freelance opportunities, such as 2019's Venom: The End one-shot that the great Chamba drew.

I was pleased to see that Arist has done some very nice DC and Marvel variant covers over the years since Meltdown's, uh, meltdown in 2017-18, as you can see here.

Next up, here's the original text synopsis for Meltdown, with one paragraph censored to avoid future SPOILER issues: 

EMPOWERED AND THE MASK CITY MELTDOWN

(2-issue miniseries synopsis)

ISSUE #1: This city-centered story features two very distinct and visually differentiated narrative threads. In the first one, which kicks off this issue, the reader is thrown into an action scene of Empowered and a half-dozen other frantic Superhomeys framed against an initially ambiguous backdrop of urban mayhem. As buildings crumble and shatter in the distance, the superheroes argue with each other as to what the hell's going on. Are aliens or supervillains—or alien supervillains—attacking? Are giant monsters kaijū-ing unstoppably across the city?

Cut to a big ol' double-page spread showing the even more bizarre truth: The city's buildings themselves are rampaging! Yeahp, a number of downtown skyscrapers and office buildings have mysteriously sprung to life and are thundering across the cityscape; some of the structures may have even joined together to form a single, enormous, humanoid kaijū made up of miscellaneous buildings.

After Emp and her fellow superheroes gasp "WTF?!" in the real-time action scene, we then start up the other running thread of the miniseries. This is a storybook-like narrative, told as much as possible with open, airy, illustrative vignettes instead of conventional panels, which features no dialogue as such but, instead, sparse narration from an initially unidentified storyteller. (Note that the separate narrative threads of "real-time action" and "storybook" never appear on the same comic page; each is contained in its own alternating 1-4pp scene.)

We see a fairy-tale summary of Emp’s experience with the mysterious, superhero-crowded, conspicuously unnamed city she now inhabits, starting with her arrival as an anxious but enthusiastic college grad and wannabe superheroine. Knowing that many Suprahuman Studies grads like herself are called here but few are chosen, she’s apprehensive about fitting in to the so-called “City of Masks”—but feels like she’s been chosen by fate (or the city itself) when she first acquires her enigmatic and unreliable “supersuit.” Alas, the galling humiliation and failure of her early “supercareer” as a frequent damsel in distress shake her confidence badly.

Ah, but in time Emp derives inspiration from her city, which is gradually revealed to be a very, very strange place indeed. Most notable about its oddities is that the cityscape spontaneously regenerates itself after every superhero-battle disaster or downtown-razing catastrophe, with its buildings apparently regrowing themselves—often in different forms—after being damaged or destroyed. Seeing this bizarre but amazing resilience echoed in her own supersuit, which always magically restores itself after being repeatedly shredded and torn, our plucky, storybook heroine vows to pick herself back up and muddle onward after every mortifying setback and embarrassing defeat. (Note, by the way, that the story hints that Emp considers her supersuit to have been an actual gift from the city.)

Back in the action scene—which intercuts with the storybook scenes every few pages—things are going very badly indeed for Emp and her teammates. As they desperately try to evacuate hapless civilians from under—if not inside!—the rampaging structures via Lotus Node portals, one by one the Superhomeys are felled by battlin’ buildings. Eventually, all the superheroes other than Emp wind up buried under thousands of tons of debris or otherwise incapacitated.

Meanwhile, across town, we see a high-elevation “overlook park” that provides a generous view of the downtown cityscape. Here is where the Lotus Node portals have been dumping the evacuated civilians Emp has been rescuing—and here, also, are a frustrated Thugboy and Ninjette. With their own skills useless in the face of such giant-scale mayhem, they can do little more than helplessly watch Emp from afar as she leaps and dodges the onslaught of hostile skyscrapers. Not helping matters much is the Caged Demonwolf, whose alien prison of power-draining bondage gear is draped over a park railing as he bellows a stentorian running commentary on the distant action.

Keying off the appearances by Thugboy and Ninjette, we jump back to quick storybook interludes depicting Emp’s first encounters with both of them, which she saw as the first signs that her fortunes were finally turning. As she felt accepted and, eventually, loved by them both, our long-suffering heroine began to believe that she had finally gained her mysterious city’s favor.

Snap back to reality! At the issue’s end, Emp belatedly notices that the civilians she’s so strenuously trying to rescue are, it seems, in no particular danger from the urban colossi; to her surprise, she sees that the fleeing “civvies” remain amazingly unscathed amidst the mayhem. Instead, she realizes that the run-amok buildings are specifically targeting superheroes—and only superheroes—in their megascale rampage.

Emp blurts,“So this city hates superheroes, now?” Cue the “TO BE CONTINUED!” caption!

ISSUE #2: The issue kicks off with a wild sequence—including an Akira-like double-page spread—of Emp alone against an entire downtown worth of rampaging, implacably hostile skyscrapers stomping after her. Meanwhile, Thugboy and Ninjette observe from the distant overlook park with horror, along with the amused Demonwolf and a crowd of ooh-ing and aah-ing civilians earlier evacuated by Emp. Side note: This group may include “adventure tourists” who have visited the (in)famous city solely because of its reputation as a superhero-crowded sandbox of spectacular but often strangely casualty-free urban destruction.

This issue's storybook interludes include brief vignettes with Emp’s supporting cast. First off, the narrator tells us that Thugboy certainly doesn’t see the city as a magical place, as Emp does. Instead, thanks to his history as a former capekilling resistance fighter, all he sees are potential sniping nests and ambush points and “cape killzones,” all swarming with masked targets aplenty. In fact, the narrator intones, he has no real idea why he drifted to the city in the first place—though he’s happy to have wound up with Emp, no matter how hellish the setting might otherwise be for him.

NInjette, herself a hick from the proverbial sticks—well, a hidden forest in rural New Jersey, anyway—doesn’t feel particularly at home in the city, either. Then again, given her horrific backstory, no place is home for her, except when she’s around Emp. The narrator chimes in that Ninjette, too, has no active recollection of why she drifted to the city after fleeing the East Coast.

The Caged Demonwolf’s storybook vignette begins with the Blazing-Eyed Devilgoat still in his towering, fiery, demonic “Uncaged” form, before Emp fells him with the power-draining alien bondage gear that still imprisons him today. He, too, has no idea as to why he wound up in the city, either—but being nigh-omniscient godling that he is, the Demonwolf has managed to perceive a few key points about the mysteriously regenerating city.

Back in the main plotline, a frantic Emp takes advantage of the Demonwolf’s nigh-omniscience by ringing him up using her suit’s goofily mundane telephonic powers, as conveyed by the familiar thumb-and-pinkie “phone gesture.” Out of desperation, she queries him (via a cellphone held up to the Devilgoat by a bemused Ninjette) to confirm her suspicions about the bizarre mayhem roiling the city.

We don’t have much pagecount to play around with, here, but the All-Knowing Autarch does sketch in a heretofore unrevealed fact or two about Emp’s beloved but thoroughly bizarre “City of Masks.” Among them is [CENSORED, as this is a key point about the Empverse not yet addressed in the series proper.]

The important thing, here, is that the reality-warped city is effectively a living organism of sorts, hence its amazing ability to magically heal its often-trashed skyline. The problem, however, is that some innate part of the city actually remembers every time its buildings have been destroyed during superhero battles and other cape-driven catastrophes—which has happened many, many times over the last few action-packed decades. Note that Emp guessed this by noticing earlier iterations of the city’s ever-changing architecture suddenly (re)appearing among the rampaging buildings; this might include, for example, wackily Gothic-looking buildings that hail back to a period when the city resembled the distinctive Anton Furst designs from the first Tim Burton Batman movie.

Guided by the Demonwolf from afar, Emp runs, leaps and spider-clings her way into the core of the city’s wounded memory, which is hidden inside the looming structure of the primary kaijū superstructure seen prominently throughout the issues, including both of the earlier opening spreads. (This is “the Big Boss building,” as labeled by Emp.) There, she uses the mysterious properties of her enigmatic supersuit to absorb the equally enigmatic city’s “locus of painful memory” into herself, inflicting all its internalized recollections of urban destruction on herself at once in a metaphorical if not surreal scene visualizing Emp as the agonized city.

Why does she do this, might you ask? Well, as a final storybook flourish conveys, Emp unspokenly feels like she owes the city everything. She perceives not only her maddening but amazing supersuit as a gift from the city, but her loving relationships with Thugboy and Ninjette as boons granted by the “masked metropolis” as well. Her own relentless resilience and never-say-die attitude are, she feels, just another gift from the city.

And lo, Emp’s act of attempted martyrdom quells the city’s pain, restoring the rampaging downtown to conventional, non-ambulatory status and freeing all her rubble-buried teammates. I say “attempted maryrdom” because she of course didn’t die, but does stagger out of the building physiologically and psychologically a bit worse for wear; nonetheless, she’s still wearily happy to have brought this latest urban disaster to a positive(-ish) conclusion.

We close out the issue with a final storybook “happy ending” scene reuniting Emp with Thugboy and Ninjette, a sequence which reveals that the narrator was, all along, the Caged Demonwolf using a voice very different from his usual bombastic tone. Gosh!

THE END! (Whew. Glad I’m not drawing this sucker, to say the least.)

Aaaaand that's it for Empowered and the Mask City Meltdown, folks. As I mentioned earlier, even as I was working up Meltdown's synopsis, I started planning another, much more ambitious Empowered Guest Artist pitch for Arist Deyn to draw; needless to say, this follow-up project was discarded once Meltdown foundered.

However, this proposed successor miniseries did indeed find a second life, as I wound up working its storyline into the upcoming Empowered vol. 12. Behold, that narrative's title page: 

Sometime next year, well after Empowered vol.12's release in March, I'll post the proposal document for the original Empowered and the Never-Ending Reboot miniseries, which features several key differences from the version that will appear in vol. 12. (For one thing, you'll see that the theoretical iteration that I wasn't going to draw myself would've imposed far greater demands on the potential artist, unsurprisingly enough.)

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Wellp, something should be going up in the next M/W/F slot, I can assure you. (Not yet sure what that content will be, though.)