Silly standalone adventures collected in one great package.
Creative Staff:
Story: Adam Warren
Art: Adam Warren, Emily Warren, Ryan Kinnaird, John Staton, Takeshi Miyazawa, Brandon Graham
What They Say:
With every Empowered Special collected under one vast roof, Empowered Unchained sprays a shrapnel salvo of sizzling superhero satire, written by the almighty Adam Warren and illustrated by Warren and comicdom’s most feared makers of pictures heroic! Featuring grave-robbing supervillains! Broom-swinging vigilantes! Slutty cyberangels! Animal crimebots! Boozy ninja! Angry spaceships! And more!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Though I’ve fallen out of the regular continuity for Empowered, largely owing to being very far behind on the volumes, the arrival of a new collection of short stories is quite appealing as a way to reconnect a bit with the property from Adam Warren. Following Warren on Twitter, it’s easy to get a good sense of what he’s up to and he’s definitely a writer/artist that shares his struggles, which makes enjoying the final work all the more pleasing because you know the effort and time that went into it. With this collection of shorts, he gets to work with a few more people, and to have a lot of the stories done up in color, which makes for a welcome change of pace. The characters are all on target and the artwork is great, but it just feels different with it being in color.
The variety of the stories here are fun and hey do mix in both black and white and color, which in some cases is a little jarring at first in seeing what each represents. The book also plays to being a bit more accessible in some ways as the stories delve into the who of the characters, which can be a little exhausting for long time fans if they know these details all too well. The opening tale is one that certainly plays to that in a fun way as we get a look at the million different ways that Emp sighs. Through this, we get a look at her life in general and all the things she faces from heroes, villains and people in general, and the way that her sighs mean so many different things. It’s cute, if familiar, as we see the way her life goes as a superhero and a young woman as well and to get the breakdown of the sighs as done through the eyes of Ninjette and Thugboy among others. A sign is like a painting in that it can contain so much and throughout the story we get so many variations on it in a very fun and very adorable way.
The second installment focuses on a two prong approach where the main story shows Emp facing off against a variety of villains over different encounters where she tricks them amid the battle by saying things to get them to believe Maidman has shown up, which gives her the opportunity to thrash them from behind. Maidman is definitely a boogeyman to your rank and file villains so it works out well for her for the most part, though we also see it going awry. While that’s all done in black and white, we get color pages mixed in where Maidman is doing an interview, which provides a look at the character and what he’s all about – all while wearing his maid outfit – and to get some great background commentary from Emp, Ninjette and Thugboy that covers a lot of their interactions and interests and some very amusing sexual aspects from Emp that really reinforces that Thugboy does have certain prudish tendencies that bother his young, modern woman who wants to experience all things.
Other stories are done more in color, such as the one with the animal gang that Emp has to fight off as they try to steal a ton of custom villain and hero vehicles, but the overuse of color really made the whole thing far more chaotic in a way that kept me from really engaging with it. The story is straightforward and there’s some great black and white commentary from the suprahuman studies college aged Emp, but the action itself just felt like too much. Similarly, the other story that has Emp being assigned to monitor duty in the Cryptovault felt the same as it just becomes a lot of color and detail with the way Warren’s artwork is, making it so that there’s just a heavier and more intense feeling about it as it plays out. Storywise, it’s fun as Emp has to deal with being the only one immune to a nanomachine attack while realizing the crux of what’s going on is a whole lot of male gaze material gone awry with alien technology. It’s all solid character stuff, though at times it just feels heavy handed and ripped too much from the pages of the internet with what’s going on there in terms of objectification. I’m not disagreeing with any of it, and Empowered is a wholly proper place to deal with it as it has for quite some time, but it just felt even more blunt than usual.
With the final story, after we get the obligatory cute recap page at the start, we essentially learn that a large portion of the planet is in danger as Emp and Ninajette are being called in to help with some emergency xenosurgery. With a massive alien behemoth ship in orbit that will destroy a good chunk of the world should its baby die, there’s plenty of incentive to get it done right. Why Emp and Ninjette? Well, why not? The quirky fun comes when the pair make their way to the hospital where there are a hundred and fifty floors, but anything above forty is in extradimensional space that can’t be seen, and most of them are not fit for human existence. Naturally, Emp has to get off on the wrong floor at least once, otherwise weird otherworldly comedy would not ensue.
The surgery aspect is a fun thing since the babyship is essentially a Tardis in a way in that it has endless space inside it, but is just a bit bigger than two people side by side. As the babyship gets older, it kind of reverses its spatial aspect as the inside gets smaller and the outside bigger until it can threaten whole worlds like its parent is doing. With it having an infection and parasites inside, the girls get lowered into its interior and have to face the weird and creepy things that exist there, which does include the body mirroring parasites. It has some good off kilter humor to it as we see the girls interact with them and come up with a way to make everyone happy, and the physical comedy naturally hits some good points as well, including the obvious and expect costume shredding that happens.
The final story has a lot of appeal in that we once again the kind of quirky and fast paced script that Warren does so well. But the interesting part is seeing how Brandon Graham does in presenting his interpretation of the characters, which is mostly limited to Emp and Ninjette. I’m admittedly a huge fan of Warren’s style, but comics and characters offer endless adaptations and interpretations. Graham does decent here with it, but since Warren is so distinctive, he has to go in a different direction altogether. The color aspect alone is kind of jarring in some ways, but it gives it a very “comic-strip” kind of feeling that works for the story at hand. It also goes for a lot more long shots and establishing pieces that doesn’t give the movement and action the kind of energy that Warren’s work usually does. In a way, it simply doesn’t feel as frenetic, and that’s a difficult loss for the characters because for me, that’s a big part of the charm in that it has so much energy.
In Summary:
Much as I find with other Empowered works, the more breaks you take between stories, the better off you are. I really enjoy Warren’s works with the character, much as I have his other works over the years, but the style and constantness of it, and the length of some of the stories, really makes it so that you have to take a break between chapters. This collection brings together a range of fun standalone tales that adds to the overall universe and it has the added appeal of a lot of color material. Each story has its own identity and there’s a lot of fun in seeing the various approaches to superheroes and supervillains in this world, and some of the more honest ways that they deal with each other – and the totally wrongheaded aspects of it as well since it just goes completely creepy in a way that a lot of villains really would. And some heroes as well. It’s definitely a fun collection and a great companion to the ongoing series itself.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: March 25th, 2015
MSRP: $19.99
