FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: Kid superhero EMPOWERED GIRL & her upcoming appearance in EMPOWERED vol.12, pt.1! (Patreon)

So!

About 10 years or so ago, I had the bright idea for an Empowered spinoff of a sort, working the tangential angle of, "What if Emp had found the supersuit as a confident youth?" The concept, believe it or not, was to do an essentially "all-ages" version of Empowered.

This would've been another Guest Artist project, dubbed Empowered Girl, which I planned to pitch to the great artist Jeffrey "Chamba" Cruz—who later wound up doing a fantastic job on the art for that Venom: The End one-shot I wrote in 2019. (And, in fact, I'm pitching a entirely new project to Chamba shortly, I hope.)

Alas, this whimsical proposal fizzled out at Dark Horse Comics for, I think, understandable reasons that I shall detail in a follow-up post. Ah, but the "kid Emp" character briefly springs back to life as one of many, many wacky reboots in the upcoming Empowered vol. 12, as seen in this initial preview page:

Anyhoo, a decade ago I wrote up a bunch of story notes for an informal Empowered Girl pitch before everything fell apart. Here's the initial set of notes, to be concluded in another Failed-Project Friday post next year:

EMPOWERED GIRL (miniseries proposal)

THE OVERVIEW: When 9-year-old Elissa Megan Powers dons her mysterious alien “supersuit,” she becomes the petite but plucky superheroine Empowered Girl. Armed with impressive but unreliable superpowers and a relentlessly positive attitude, Emp bravely charges off into the cape-crowded Unnamed City to fight injustice—or unfairness, at least—and rescue the rescue-needy! (Yes, it’s essentially Empowered retold as an all-ages superhero romp with all the frolic-y fun and humor intact, but none of the sex and damsel-in-distress ickiness.)

WHO GETS PORTED OVER? While some characters from the regular series will indeed appear—like Emp herself—as younger versions of themselves, I don’t want to make Empowered Girl just a direct “kid-friendly translation” of grown-up Empowered. While Emp’s budding friendship with a young Ninjette and friction with a 10-year-old version of Sistah Spooky remain centerpieces of the series, the rest of the book’s cast will be a mix of both reimagined Empowered superheroes and all-new characters unique to the title.

For readers of “grown-up Empowered,” this series will actually address some points not clarified in the volumes—who the heck is the Purple Paladin, anyway?—and address bigger questions about the Empverse as a whole—such where the heck all these “capes” came from, for one thing. The idea, here, is to interest existing Empowered readers while, I hope, making a title that’s accessible to a wider readership.

EMPOWERED GIRL’S SUPERSUIT: One glaring divergence between Empowered Girl and “regular Empowered” is that Emp’s mysterious supersuit behaves—and, importantly, appears—very, very differently in this version. The idea is that the behavior and powers of Emp’s “hypermembrane” vary with her level of self-confidence. Worn by a grown-up Emp bedeviled by rampant anxiety and insecurities, body-image issues and crippling self-doubt, the supersuit is cruelly revealing and ridiculously fragile—just like poor Emp’s emotional state. HOWEVA: When worn by 9-year-old Elissa, an outgoing mash-up of “girly-girl” and tomboy at the very peak of self-confidence she will ever experience in her life, the supersuit looks and acts quite differently.

Most notably, the hypermembrane morphs itself into whatever form young Emp desires. Its default configuration for much of the story is a stylish but practical one—a “pop punky” look, if you will—that grown-up Emp would kill for: Rugged, perhaps oversized boots and gloves, and—taa daah!—a swirling cape of varying lengths. She might vary the suit’s appearance at will, depending on the situation she faces. If trying to intimidate an adult supervillain, petite Emp boosts her “threat aspect” by bulking the suit up into a comically outsized leather jacket form. A “hoodie” form arises when she’s feeling steathy, if not an outright “ninja suit” configuration when sneaking around with Ninjette. If is faced with a sudden need for “prettiness,” an absurdity of ruffles and bows and over-the-top formalware might be spawned. Why, the suit might even shift into a full-on “mermaid” format if Emp engages in extended adventure underwater! Just as Batman and Iron Man have a vast arsenal of mission-specific suits and armors, so too does Emp sport supersuit variations appropriate for any occasion.

Unlike grown-up Emp’s largely featureless (and, to be honest, kinda boring) costume, Empowered Girl’s ever-morphing outfit could also feature a changing array of design elements, depending on her mood and the task at hand. I like the idea that, when replying to a request that irks her, Emp can make her cape display a gigantic “NO” in billboard-sized type, if not repeating “NO” all over the rest of her costume. Or, when aggression is required, lightning bolts and tiger stripes and other bold, threatening motifs might suddenly appear all over her hypermembrane.

One interesting possibility would be that civilian-identity Elissa actually has relatively short hair, if not an outright “pixie cut”; when she dons the supersuit, its hypermembrane effectively grants her “extensions,” using part of its mass to further disguise her identity with a (much) longer mane of blonde hair. We could work in some amusing meta-commentary here, as the long, flowing locks that most superheroines are depicted with—including, alas, grown-up Empowered—are quite obviously ridiculous and impractical for action-prone women. Ah, but a fake head of hypermembranous hair could remain frictionless and tangle-free, unable to be grabbed by bad guys or snagged by any environmental hazards. The “frictionless” bit, in particular, could be funny: Cut to supersuited Emp before a mirror, awed at her own silken, graceful hair-tossing and to-and-fro whipping. “Wow, I totally look like I’m in a shampoo commercial or something...!”

EMP’S SUPERPOWERS: Empowered Girl’s suit boasts all of the powers used by grown-up Emp, such as superstrength, inhuman durability, energy-projecting “VORPP” zapping, and Spider-Man-style “gecko clinging.” Since young Emp’s strength-to-weight ratio and tomboy-ish confidence are so much higher than grown-up Emp’s, she’s much more of an enthusiastic—if not always competent—acrobat and daredevil, hopping and leaping vast distances across the city. She’s normally able to “stick the landing” quite easily on her superjumps, thanks to her “gecko-cling” powers, but not always; when she screws up, though, her youthful enthusiasm allows her to bounce back—often literally!—from disaster rather more speedily than her deeply insecure older self. Young Emp is especially girly-girl thrilled by how her supersuit sparkles brightly whenever the membrane exerts itself; even when it’s not evoking any powers, she often exhorts the costume to “Glitter, supersuit, glitter!” (Emp would definitely be more enthused about sparkle-intensive, Sailor-Moon-style posing and declarative, rather flouncy posturing than conventional American superheroines would be.)

The membrane can still be damaged to the point of power failure, but we’d obviously wanna steer well of showing much exposed skin on a nine-year-old; her cape and costume just become a bit ragged and discolored—and, most frightening of all, non-sparkly—after exceeding its limits. (Cue a scene of a distraught Emp babying and pampering her poor, damaged suit as it slowly recovers, perhaps giving it a bath or asking if it would like some hot chocolate with plenty of little marshmallows.)

One potentially amusing supersuit power: When Emp falls from a great height, her suit’s hypermembrane inflates hundreds of cells all over itself, bubbling and ballooning until she’s completely enshrouded by a mass of improvised airbags. Cut to a delightedly shrieking “Empball” bouncing high and merrily across the city streets (not unlike the airbag-based landing scheme used by space probes such as Mars Pathfinder).

I’d prefer to skew the action more towards goofily daring stunts, amazing rescues and clever outwitting than the violent bad-guy beatdowns that (ahem) “grown-up” superhero titles focus on. Kind-hearted as she is, Emp is reluctant to just haul off and beat the crap out of her opponents. Being a caring soul, she might go so far as to airbag-inflate her suit’s gloves before punching a less-superhuman opponent. (I like the idea of a sternly safety-conscious, frown-y Emp lecturing bad guys about the importance of wearing adequate protective gear, or critiquing the blatantly unsafe design of their lairs.) Along those lines, a dramatic showdown between Emp and a brawny supervillain might end up as a high-stakes pillowfight, albeit one depicted with all the dead-serious drama and high-energy spectacle of a regular capefight.

NEXT TIME ON FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: In another week or two, you will soon learn "the rest of the story," per Paul Harvey (well, the rest of the story notes, at least), along with the arguably reasonable Dark Horse rationale for rejecting the pitch.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: I hoping to put up a Saturday or Sunday post discussing what's coming up in January on this here Patreon, and possibly an overview of what I'd like the Patreon to accomplish in 2023 as a whole, before regular M/W/F posting resumes next week.