FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: Kid superhero EMPOWERED GIRL & her upcoming appearance in EMPOWERED vol.12, pt.2! (Patreon)

[Here's a link to part 1 of this feature.]

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, if I can ever get around to writing up the g-d proposal properly.)

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 second half of said notes:

EMPOWERED GIRL (miniseries proposal), pt. 2:

(RE)ENTER THE NINJA: One character who will be ported over from “regular Empowered” would, of course, be Ninjette, who also appears here in a nine-year-old version. Her clan was, it seems, driven from its “Hidden Forest” home in New Jersey, so she’s spending the summer camped outside the Unnamed Superhero City where Emp lives. Plucky superheroine and devil-may-care kunoichi encounter each other late one night high above the streets of Unnamed City, and become Best Friends Foreva just as quickly as they did in their grown-up Empowered incarnations.

One element remains unchanged between Empverses: Ninjette is terrified of her father, who remains an unseen and indirect but clearly frightening presence in the series. When Emp suggests a sleepover at Ninjette’s, poor Kozue blanches in horror and stammers nervously, as inviting an outsider to her secret ninja encampment in a nearby state park is absolutely out of the question. She’s awed by Emp’s warm relationship with her dad, as the idea of a loving father figure is entirely alien to her own experience.

We’d play up Ninjette’s wacky arsenal of paranormal “jutsu” ninja skills, which would range from semi-plausible feats of derring-do to all-out, Naruto-worthy acts of mystical absurdity. Her hensojutsu disguise skills would get a heavy workout, for certain; I’m fond of the idea of Ninjette piggybacked on Emp’s shoulders while using hensojutsu to camouflage them as an adult supervillain for infiltration of a bad-guy gathering.

GARGOYLES AND LITTER: Emp and Ninjette arduously climb a local, cape-beloved landmark, a Gothic-architecture skyscraper sporting the city’s only collection of gargoyles for self-aggrandizing superheroes to pose dramatically atop. Emp, initially thrilled to reach the baroque heights where so many famous capes have stood, is dismayed to find that the place is a dump, littered with fast-food debris, candy wrappers, beer cans and countless cigarette butts left behind by brooding—and bored—superheroes. While Ninjette is amused, Emp is disillusioned and infuriated, complaining, “Grown-up capes are such slobs!” The girls, in fact, spend the next few hours laboriously cleaning off the gargoyles; an annoyed Emp is even forced to use her cape as an impromptu trash bag (“Eww...!”) to haul the garbage down to street level.

RESCUE RANGER-ETTE: Empowered Girl’s fondest wish as a superheroine isn’t just to beat up bad guys, but (as mentioned earlier) to “rescue the rescue-needy.” Alas, her small size and particular set of superpowers often make this a challenge. Cut to wee Emp struggling to carry a big, beefy, brawny, gear-laden firefighter to safety. Superstrong, she’s able to lift him in a so-called “bridal carry,” but is unable to see anything past his grown-up body mass while doing so; wackiness ensues as the firefighter desperately relays directions to a bulk-blinded Emp. “Left! Go left! No, your OTHER left!”

USELESS SUPERTEENS: One of Emp’s great frustrations is that grown-up capes overlook and dismiss so-called “kidcapes” like her, instead trying—and constantly failing—to recruit teenage suprahumans for cape-related pursuits.

As Emp sees it, superpowered teenagers are largely useless as functional heroes, because they’re far too driven by adolescent social pressures to bother with conventional superheroic activities. Obsessed with “fitting in” and intensely aware of shifting social status, superteens are solely concerned with the opinions of their peer group, caring little about what grown-up capes—or any grown-ups—might think. Thus, most superteens perceive the familiar tropes of superheroism as hopelessly lame and uncool, and openly sneer at older capes’ attempts to interest them in the “family business.”

Side note: An obvious corollary to this point is that, despite what we often see in comics, few superteens would ever consider dressing up like a “sidekick” version of some out-of-it, old-fogey superhero, let alone like their own goofy, cape-clad parents. Adolescent rebellion would obviously extend to superteen sartorial choices, which could make for some interesting costume designs...

From Emp’s POV, teen capes are “only interested in parties and hooking up and looking cool and doing dumbass stunts,” snarkily spurning superheroic activities that young “babycapes” like herself would dearly love to participate in.

SUPERFAILS, AHOY: Another side note, here: Many teenage boys are already prone to idiotic stunts, as a constant stream of new YouTube FAIL compilations can attest; make those young idiots superpowered and nigh-indestructible, though, and their harebrained JACKASSery knows no bounds. Emp winds up having to rescue the participants in a superstunt gone wildly wrong, only to find herself insulted and her efforts scornfully repudiated afterward. For a status-conscious superteen, being rescued by a “babycape” like Emp is a profound embarrassment that must be denied at all costs. “Teencapes suck,” Emp seethes, stomping away in a huff.

HELICOPTER SUPERPARENTS: As a “free-range” kidcape whose civilian parents are wholly unaware of her cape-clad activities, Emp enjoys a freedom that many other superpowered children do not. Most kidcapes chafe under the oppressive anxiety of apprehensive “helicopter superparents,” who fretfully hover—often literally!—over their precious offspring. At best, they’re shooed into what Emp would sneeringly dub “kidcape-safe pseudo-adventures”; one story might spotlight Emp’s chagrin about being shunted into one such preplanned, danger-free, “child-proofed escapade.” Some of the more nervous-nelly superparents might even be a wee bit scared of Emp, as they worry that her recklessly autonomous “capestyle” might be a negative influence on their own children. Side note: Just occurred to me that many—if not most—child superheroes would be heavily helmeted and padded to an almost absurd degree, which certainly could be visually amusing...

SUMMER VACATION AHOY: Since the trope of “elementary school for superheroes and/or villains” has been done to death over the last decade or so, we’d take a page from the timeframe of Disney’s Gravity Falls and set Empowered Girl’s stories during her summer vacation between grades. This could set up an interesting tension, as new-ish cape Emp might be mulling over whether to attend a “superacademy” in the upcoming school year.

IMPLICATIONS OF KIDCAPERY: In fiction—and within the context of the Empverse itself—child superheroes are usually addressed a tad dismissively and condescendingly, being viewed as non-threatening, “kiddie” versions of “real”—that is, adult—superheroes. The reality, though, might be very different. Superchildren don’t need grown-up bodies to be powerful or dangerous, since their powers may have nothing at all to do with their level of physical maturity. 

Moreover, kids who grow up with superpowers might soon become far more adept and innovative with their use than capes who gained their powers as adults. Contrast a young kid taking up skateboarding—or gymnastics, or any sport, really—versus, say, a thirtysomething trying the same for the first time. (Or consider how terrifyingly proficient children can quickly become with computers, videogames, cellphones and the electronic like, while grown-ups struggle, dinosaur-like, to adapt to changing technology.) Much like how only someone under age 4 can become perfectly fluent in any given language, capes empowered as adults might never become as fluent with their superpowers as a child who grew up using them. Grown-up capes, in fact, might never be able to catch up to their children’s relentlessly escalating “native proficiency” with superpowers...

This trend might wind up in a storyline pitting good-natured Emp against the excesses of some rather less altruistic superchildren. Wouldn’t wanna go so far as the high-concept logline of “Lord of the Flies with superpowered kids,” but a story hinting at the rather scary potential of kidcapes could potentially be interesting.

[Note: In fact, years before this pitch, I did actually hatch an idea for a Power Pack reboot(!) that arguably did skew in the direction of "Lord of the Flies with superpowered kids." Go figure, that proposal never went anywhere.]

Anyhoo, that's all for Empowered Girl, folks, though she does make that aforementioned appearance in Empowered vol. 12, as seen in another excerpted panel:

Alas, I had to crop out the rest of the page for SPOILER reasons. However, the dynamic of friction between Kid Spooky and Kid Ninjette will be pretty amusing, IMHO.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Well, something should be going up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?

UPDATE: Why, looking over in the Drafts folder, I am actually starting to build up a decent buffer of posts again! Our Monday post, however, will prrrrobably be a Designs Ahoy feature on the upcoming, old-yet-new fantasy comic dealie that will be replacing Rose & Lily: Flowers of Peril as my test-bed project for nailing down a digital workflow for future use on other fantasy comic dealie The Last Party.