empowered volume 5

When I got back on Friday I was greeted by a pleasant sight - the latest volume of Empowered had turned up.

Empowered is by Adam Warren, who I'm something of a fan of. His drawing style is what's called (or now called - there's something of a plethora of different terms for it) Original English-Language Manga, or OEL.

In other words, he draws in a manga style. It's not an entirely traditional manga style - over the years Warren's style has grown and developed as you'd expect of any artist - but manga-influenced, nonetheless.

Empowered is his latest project - it's been going for a few years now, and this is the fifth volume. Give-or-take, each volume of Emp is better than the last, although my personal opinion was that it dipped a little in volume 4.

Perhaps that's something of a reflection of how much I enjoyed vol3, but I think it was more to do with the extended fight at the end of the volume. It wasn't bad or anything, it just felt a bit 'been there, done that' for some reason - superheroes fighting for huge page counts is in every other book too.

Anyway, the point is that volume 5 is an absolute cracker. It too has a long chapter at the end, which also involves a big old superhero fight, but here Warren does what he's best at in Emp and kinda subverts that. Basically, it all goes tits up and they get wiped out in five minutes and then the rest of the story is about Emp simply trying to survive. Also, we get some true heroism in the form of people sacrificing themselves to save others.

See, there's nothing wrong with Emp using powers to do the superhero thing like in Vol 4, it's just that the book works better when it's subverting (that's really the wrong word, but I can't think of a better one) that idea and showing the other side. The Emp et al being human side.

I mean, in a sense, that's the core theme of the book - if Emp's very fragile suit gets torn up, she looses her powers, yet she still leaps into danger. And also, even when it does get torn up and she looses her powers she still manages to save the day. It's all about the true heroism.

Anyway, enough of the deeper analysis stuff.

What's also great about this volume is that it contains a good balance of "other stuff" too. As the volumes have progressed, the number of characters has greatly increased, as you'd imagine, and quite a few of them are more than just background characters. They're not quite stars of the book, but they're a bit more than supporting characters.

One of my favourites is the caged Demonwolf, a mega-powerful evil entity in the Lovecraftian vein who Emp trapped inside a sort of bondage belt thing. He now basically lives on Emp's coffee table and is essentially just a voice.

But what a voice - he has quite the way of words and is often used by Warren to narrate stories. These take the form of more fanciful/possibly-fictitious accounts through to more realistic narration.

What particularly amused me this volume is that the Demonwolf relates a story and quotes some of the character, but what they say gets processed through Demonwolf speak and becomes very humorous.

There's also a good chunk of Ninjette in the book and a character called Ocelotina recurs too.

This is actually an advantage of the way the book is structured. The book is written as a proper graphic novel, rather than being a collection of individual comic books. This means that chapter length varies, which means a shorter (or longer) chapter featuring a secondary character can be included without needing to batter it into the required page count.

So yeah, check it out.

The last few pages put a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye - if there's any higher recommendation than that, I don't know what it is.