Empowered by Adam Warren

Empowered by Adam Warren

I read the first few issues of Empowered over a decade ago, and soon gave up. There was little to no story, and the sex in superheroes angle was either too prominent or not enough, but it just didn't work for me. Then a few weeks back a good friend noted that the series was finished and how much he'd enjoyed it, so I decided to revisit it and went and read the whole 12 TPBs. My opinion of Empowered is a lot more positive than it was 12 years ago. It's one of those serials that starts as a lot of silly with no real story arc and gradually shifts. In this way (and not many others) it's comparable to Order of the Stick or (for my French readers) Kaamelott. I think the pacing is still a bit off and the actual story takes too long to emerge, but when it does, it is powerful. At the heart of it is Emp, short for Empowered, a superheroine whose feats of arms seem to be getting hogtied by every supervillain out there, filmed and publicly humiliated (which is not a euphemism for rape, the justification of which is that villains (with one exception) know that if they cross that line, the whole superhero community will fall on their backs). But Emp, predictably but convincingly, endures and actually gets the job done while the high falutin' supers around her turn out to mostly be jackasses, if not downright problematic. At a meta level, Empowered plays wonderfully with tropes and cliches of the superhero genre, including the inherent sexism of the genre. I don't think I'll read it again, but I do think it's worth reading.