The second volume of Empowered, my "sexy superhero comedy" published by Dark Horse comics, is slated to finally hit the shelves on Oct. 3, 2007, after suffering through a bizarre series of printing problems. (As did volume 1, for some reason.) To quote the solicitation copy:

Empowered returns for further misadventures as the peril-prone girl wonder struggles with life on the superheroic C-list! Clad-- or unclad, as fate would too often have it-- in her embarrassingly revealing and maddeningly unreliable "super-suit," she fights a never-ending battle against overly sensitive supervillains, irrationally envious superheroines, and her own body-image issues! Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Thugboy, plays with fire when he foolhardily attempts to compliment his deeply insecure girlfriend on the beauty of her... well... booty. And her often-inebriated galpal, Ninjette, pursues a drunken anmd ultimately disastrous mission to acquire Empowered some respect-- by force, if necessary! All this, plus crossword-obsessed goons, speech-impaired super-beasts, and even a few self-help hints from nigh-omnipotent cosmic overlords!

And let us not forget Emp undercover as Sexy Librarian (as seen in My Pics), Thugboy dealing with literally nightmarish nudity plus arguably magical sock monkeys, and the exotic, erotic arts of the ninja! Etcetera, etcetera.

You can pick up Empowered vol. 2 from your local comics retailer or bookstore Oct. 3rd (heck, even my local Barnes & Noble briefly stocked EMPOWERED vol. 1, albeit in the jumbled hellscape of the regular comics section, as opposed to the orderly paradise of the manga section)... or you can order it from DH online at:

http://www.tfaw.com/Graphic-Novels/Profile/Empowered-Volume-2___269371

or look it up on Amazon (where you can also read some/most of Empowered vol. 1, using the Search Inside! dealie, I'm told):

http://www.amazon.com/Empowered-2-Adam-Warren/dp/1593078161/ref=sr_1_2/102-6745819-7796934?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190475127&sr=8-2
 

I should also note that also shipping in October (on the 10th, I believe) is the trade paperback collection of the miniseries I wrote and laid out for Marvel, Iron Man: Hypervelocity. To quote that sucker's solicitation copy:

A single, grueling night of high-speed, mechanized mayhem finds Tony Stark and a new, uniquely improved version of the Iron Man armor caught in the crossfire between the bleeding-edge technology of an insurgent mecha subculture and the massed hardware of an elite "cape-killing" paramilitary force. Besieged by ballistic missiles, supersonic jihadi LMDs, seductive viral avatars and cyberdrug-addled roboravers, Iron Man must push himself far beyond his technological and biological limits to survive the onslaught of ultra-tech war machinery...

Needless to say, it's quite an unusual experienmce for yours truly to have two books out in the same month... Not likely to ever happen again, I'm afraid. Side note: the collected Hypervelocity will include a number of my design sheets for the unique set of Iron Man armor featured in the story, along with a selection of my original layout pages from the miniseries. Ooh, ah.
 

And in other Empowered news... To bridge the gap between the imminent vol. 2 in October and the release of vol. 3 in March 2008, Dark Horse has been kind enough to give me a slot in their online comics anthology, "Dark Horse Presents on MySpace"! Wheeee!

http://myspace.com/darkhorsepresents

Yep, I'll be writing and drawing an 8-page EMPOWERED story that will run online in the December "issue" of DHP on MySpace. The story, which is a fast-paced and (I hope) funny overview of/ introduction to the Empverse, currently features the working title of "Who Da Ubermensch?" (Pardon the missing umlaut, but it doesn't seem available in this format.)

Points of interest include: Hummer fu; 10-year-old Emp confronts the grim spectre of her grown-up self's behind; the fearsome fury of the Crimera! unleashed; and Emp's bachelor's degree in suprahuman studies finally pays off! All this and more in glorious FULL COLOR, brought to you by the brave Photoshop phreaks of color studio Guru eFX!


Anyhoo, you can always see a goodly amount of Empowered artwork (and even the Iron Man design sheets and layouts mentioned earlier) at my frequently updated DeviantART page's gallery:

http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/

Well, it's back to the drawing board for me... Time to draw Capitan Rivet busting you off some vintage, Purple Rain-era Prince dance moves! Have a good one, everybody.

                                                                   -AW

A word of explanation: A year or two ago, for no apparent reason, I sent around an email to various friends, blithering on about whether or not perceptions of beauty, particularly of the facial sort, were based on perceived symmetry. (This is explained in more detail shortly.) Goofy and pointless blather, yes, but I received some interesting replies. So, just for the hell of it, here's Part One of the Facial Symmetry rant:  

     The other day, I was reading Scott Westerfeld's UGLIES, an young-adult SF novel set in a future milieu where everyone gets turned into insanely attractive "pretties" at age 16. A very good book, yes, but it frequently mentions the oft-repeated theory that our perception of attractiveness is all about the extreme degree of facial symmetry possessed by beautiful people, and how this ties in to a subconscious connotation of good health and high reproductive quality. I believe this theory gained popularity after a study that showed its subjects pictures of young people with both "normal" faces and faces photographically altered for greater facial-feature balance and evenness, and found that the latter group was widely perceived as being more attractive.   

      The only thing is, I'm starting to have my doubts about the whole "beauty = facial symmetry" concept. While, admittedly, someone with a wildly off-balance face prolly ain't gonna be perceived as a "hottie," I'm not convinced that beautiful faces are necessarily beautiful because of their facial-structure equilibrium.

     Take this excerpt from a LA Times article about Bettie Page:

 
     (snip)

      Perhaps that explains fans like Minnesota artist Rick Volkmar, who has spent years painstakingly touching up old black-and-white Bettie Page photos, erasing rips and tears and thousands of tiny white specks with a fine brush to rebuild the mesh of her stockings, the sheen of her hair, the shadows on her face.

     In the process, Volkmar developed carpal tunnel syndrome and learned a lot about her anatomy.

  "Her right eyebrow slants up and is shorter than the left one; her right nostril is higher than her left nostril," he noted. "The indent beneath her nose and above her upper lip is unusually wide. Her four front incisors are larger than normal.

   "Her right eye is lower than the left one and slants down…. Her right knee has a dimple in it, and there is a famous notch on the back of her right thigh, four inches above the knee. Her thumb and hands are muscular, almost mannish. Same with her feet.

  "Her rear end is noticeably squarish, and there are two creases under the left buttocks and one under her right buttocks….

 "It all adds up to this," he said. "She looks like fun."

 That alchemy of asymmetry and temperament inadvertently unleashed a cultural movement.

 (snip)

  Ain't many women hotter than Bettie Page from back in the day, but listen to that list of asmmetrical flaws! Lordy loo! She must, therefore, have been a hideous, facially distorted beast, according to the "beauty = facial symmetry" theory! Obviously, though, that just waran't the case.

     Moreover, I doubt that anyone promulgating this theory was ever an artist... and lemme tell you, speaking as an artist, there is nothing, NOTHING harder to draw than the perfect symmetry of a straight-on, eye-level, close-up shot of a beautiful person's face. It's phenomenally diffcult to get (in particular) the eyes and the sides of the face to mirror each other perfectly. I once spent most of a day redrawing a straight-on close-up of Shasti from the Dirty Pair, erasing and flipping the image on a lightboard and redrawing it upwards of sixty or seventy times (no, really)... and the shot still wound up flawed, once I checked it reversed in a mirror. Now, this sounds like an argument FOR the "beauty = symmetry" thing, but the bizarre fact is that you can, in fact, produce straight-on shots that SEEM to be attractive, but turn out to be wildly distorted and biased when you look at the images flopped. The truth is, nowadays I no longer check the faces I draw reversed in a mirror or a lightbox, even though extreme degrees of right-hand bias are guaranteed to be seen when the images are viewed that way. As long as the shot still looks attractive "forwards," I just blunder on regardless.

     Anyway, most of the time, you're better off drawing a face from a very slight angle rather than a straight-on shot (if not an outright 3/4 angle), which makes the facial shot inherently asymmetrical and much, MUCH (make that MUUUUUCH) less problematic to draw. But think about it: ALL possible camera views of a pretty face that aren't taken from a direct, straight-on angle are therefore asymmetrical, with one side of the face larger than the other, one eye smaller than the other, the lines of the face dwindling off in perspective, and so on. Even worse is a side-angled profile shot of a face, which doesn't even show the twinned sets of eyes, cheekbones, nostrils and the like that are necessary to express facial symmetry in the first place. Yet we still find 3/4 and profile images of a beautiful person to be attractive, even though no symmetry cues can actually be perceived from these angles... and considering that we would almost never see perfectly straight-on views of pretty faces in the media or in real life, that might suggest that symmetry perception can't possibly be the sole reason why we find particular faces attractive.

     Maybe, maybe not. Then again, s'not like I have another theory in mind to explain why certain faces are beautiful or not.  Oh, well.    

Now, here's part two, after I received a bunch o' replies via email:

     After some interesting email responses to my earlier rant about pure symmetry not necessarily being the dominant determinant of facial attractiveness, thought I'd pass some of those comments along to the rest of the mailing list.

 Jason M. dug up the following study...

 http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/symmetrie/symmetrie.htm

 ...which more or less supports what I was saying. A quote:

 "The results from our experiment regarding 'symmetry' show that facial symmetry affects the perceived attractiveness. However, the effect is rather small and by far not as influential as it has been reported in the media. To sum up our findings: Very asymmetric faces are judged rather unattractive, but very unattractive faces are not necessarily asymmetric. And vice versa : very symmetrical faces need not necessarily be judged attractive and very attractive faces often show deviations from perfect symmetry (see report!). Based on our results, symmetry only seems to be a rather weak indicator for attractiveness. Often it is even difficult to distinguish between the original and the perfectly symmetrical version, because irregularities in shape are rather insignificant. Therefore, the strong influence of symmetry that has been reported in the scientific literature over and over again is questionable." 

     Check out some of the side links of that website, many of which are quite interesting, if not disturbing. To quote from the "social perception" page:

    "Taking everything together it can be said that the most attractive face does not exist in reality - they are computed according to certain principles by machines.

    "Having these results in mind it is also not surprising that a model agency from Munich chose 88% artificial faces (14 out of 16 selected faces) for potentially being interesting as a model for the category 'beauty'. Only two natural male faces could keep up with the computer generated ones, within the group of female faces no natural faces have been selected!"

     Note that the specific website page to which I linked features a number of images of the "mirrored/ split face" concept you've prolly heard of (and to which several e-mailers referred), in which, after someone's face is photographed from straight on, "one half of the facial image is duplicated, mirrored along a vertical axis and finally added to the remaining half of the original face." This process generally results in two very different-looking faces, depending on which side of the face was used; most famously, Edgar Allen Poe's portrait was mirrored/ split like this to show how different each half of his face was. As Lea H. notes, you can try this on your own image over at:

http://www.symface.com/.

Note, however, that to get a truly accurate view of your face's symmetry or lack thereof, you would need an image in which your face was PERFECTLY aligned straight-on to the camera... Otherwise, even the slightest deviation to an oblique angle will produce quite distorted results, which explains why the "split face" effect is often exaggerated.   

    Nick J. writes:

    "I tend to believe that symmetry works to a point, essentially meaning 'OK, this one won't spit out mutant children' at a genetic level, but then, for beauty (as opposed to prettyness) there have to be some unique features: a lop-sided smile, an off-kilter nose....something. Look at all the great beauties: Dietrich, Bergman,  Kelly, Monroe, and they were all 'off' a bit."

    Carla puts it rather more bluntly:

"Symmetry-as-beauty is bullshit. All the arts hinge on playing with symmetry and asymmetry; look at ballet, which contains symmetrical poses, but focuses upon exaggeratedly asymmetrical ones."    

 
    Regarding the Scott Westerfeld SF novel, UGLIES, that started this train of thought chugging in the first place... For those who've not read it, I should clarify that the book's milieu, in which everyone is transformed into hyperattractive "Pretties" at age 16, does so in order to balance out and democratize the effects and advantages of individual beauty. This seems a utopic impulse at first, but we soon find out that less savory motives underlie that culture's creation of "universal beauty"... (Anyhoo, the story continues with the sequel, PRETTIES, and concludes with the novel SPECIALS, by the way.)

     Well, thought I'd mention a different SF story that approaches the same ends by almost exactly the opposite means. In Ted Chiang's short story* "Liking What You See", controversy roils a college campus as the school mulls over whether or not to mandate that its students be induced into a temporary neurological condition called "calliagnosis." In this state, the students would still be able to recognize a pretty face, but would experience no actual aesthetic response to it. Thus, Chiang's milieu seeks to nullify the unfair advantages of individual beauty by negating the perception of individual beauty in the first place (instead of the UGLIES concept of universalizing beauty). Sounds tiresomely PC, I know (the perils of "lookism," ahoy!), but Chiang's story is actually quite balanced and thought-provoking. 

*From his fine collection "Stories of Your Life and Others," which I strongly recommend.

Well, there you go... Was that not a completely random and inexplicable blog post? Yay! Maybe next time in Inexplicable Blog Posts, I'll put up my extremely elaborate justification for why the Dirty Pair dress the way they do! (Or maybe not.)

Hello dere!

I've been away from this MySpace account since late March, alas; in the meantime, terrifying amounts of mail and Friend Requests have been piling up, which I'm trying to hack through over the next few days/ weeks. MySpace's incompatibility with my grindingly slow dial-up connection(!), however, makes this process rather lengthy and time-consuming.

By the way, MySpace purged almost all of the Friend Requests that were sent to me prior to the beginning of June (while I was away)... and, it seems, listed every one of said purged requests as "rejected," thus making me look like quite the dillweed. Ouch. Anyhoo, if your request got bounced during the late March through early June period, try again, and I'll likely approve it. (Though this takes rather a while, as I like to look at each person's page before I do so... and, again, MySpace isn't especially friendly to broadband-challenged slobs such as myself.)

In the last few months, I've mainly been posting artwork to my DeviantART account. My gallery over there now exceeds 200 pieces selected from my vast and semi-varied ouevre, if you care to take a look:

http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/

Currently dominating my DA gallery are a whole bunch of chapter-break illos from the upcoming second volume of EMPOWERED, my "sexy superhero comedy" book published through Dark Horse Comics. You can take a look at the first volume of EMPOWERED at:

http://www.darkhorse.com/profile/profile.php?sku=14-043

...and you can order it (AND vol. 2) at Dark Horse's online shop at :

http://www.tfaw.com/Profile/___14-043?dhrf=JnNrdT0xNC0wNDM=

...or from Amazon (where it's currently ranked a sizzlin' hot #22,244) at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159307672X/ref=cm_rdp_product/103-0451823-1613460

...or you can order it from your local comics store or bookstore, for that matter.

EMPOWERED vol. 2 is due out in September '07, the same month as the trade-paperback collection for IRON MAN: HYPERVELOCITY, the recent miniseries I wrote and laid out for Marvel Comics. Note the incredible coincidence, here; I'm highly unlikely to ever have two, count 'em TWO books out in the same month, needless to say.

Side note: The TPB for  HYPERVELOCITY will feature some of my detailed armor design sheets and layout pages as bonus materials, incidentally. The miniseries' sales tanked in a most grievous fashion, but perhaps the compilation might do a little bit better...? No? Guess we'll find out in September.

Meanwhile, things are looking considerably more positive for EMPOWERED, as vol. 1 just went back to press for a second printing, which is none too shabby for a $15 shrink-wrapped book. Even more positive, Dark Horse just greenlighted EMPOWERED vol. 3 for a March 2008 release... Wheeeee!

A less-positive side note: Due to my somewhat tenuous hotel arrangements falling through, I won't be attending San Diego Comic-Con this year... Awww. Maybe next year? In fact, I might be widening my congoing horizons a tad, and thus might wind up attending some other conventions in lieu of San Diego, for whatever that's worth.

Well, that's all for now, gots to get back to the drawing board. All y'all have a good one, and I'll blither at you later.

                                                                                      -AW

 Woo hoo! The first volume of EMPOWERED, the "sexy superhero comedy" comic that I both write and draw, hit the shelves today! It's a 248-page, $14.95 trade paperback from Dark Horse Comics, roughly 6.5" X 9", with B&W artwork reproduced directly from my pencils. A 14-page excerpt from the beginning of the volume can be seen at:

[link]

...and plenty of illustrations, from both the book's front and back covers as well as interior-page images, are a-lurking within my deviantART gallery at:

http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/

And now, a few words cribbed from some upcoming interviews:

The first volume of EMPOWERED is a collection of short stories depicting the less-than-glamorous life of a C-list superheroine... Not only does her embarrassingly provocative "supersuit" often malfunction and leave her in dire peril, but long-suffering heroine "Empowered" also can't quite seem to fit in with the "Mean (Super) Girls" and testosterone-drunk "fratboys in capes" who are her nominal teammates. So, through a series of humorous anecdotes, we follow our positive-thinking but put-upon protagonist as she valiantly muddles through the goofily demented world of modern superheroism with a little help from her real friends... who, we find out, are all "bad guys" of one sort or another!

Or, to put it more briefly, EMPOWERED is an episodic "sexy superhero comedy," mixing a twisted take on costumed crime-fighting, romance, and absurdist workplace humor with a strong dose of that "manga flava"... and just a dash of the kinky.

That last element's not entirely surprising, given EMPOWERED has an exceedingly unsavory origin... A few years ago, in the throes of yet another bout of underemployment, I was plowing through a bunch of commissioned sketches for various folks, and hit a stretch of requests for, shall we say, "damsels in distress." Growing tired of cranking out such repetitive pin-up illos, I started drawing a series of 1- or 2-page comics "stories" about an oft-distressed superheroine instead. Long story truncated, these throwaway joke pages eventually morphed and mutated into an ongoing series that veered off into broader takes on both romantic and workplace comedy, not to mention detailing the pitfalls of a low-level career in the "mask and tights" business.

Thus, in time EMPOWERED evolved beyond its initial "bondage-prone superheroine" premise into a comic designed for anybody who can appreciate a good laugh, sexualized romantic comedy, unconventional fun with superheroes, sparkling dialogue, and manga-influenced artwork. The reader does, however, need to be able to tolerate a heavy dose of cheesecake... and some degree of beefcake as well, the latter of which will only increase in future volumes. (Or "tofu-cake," really, as an upcoming story features an excerpt of "yaoi" slash-fanfiction manga about male superheroes; as you may know, yaoi artists rarely draw their "beautiful boys" looking all that beefy.) Alas, due to the stories' high degree of sexual farcicality (without actual nudity, for the most part!), the book had to ship shrink-wrapped and warning-labeled as a title meant for readers age 16 and older.

EMPOWERED is probably one of the most accessible and easy-to-read projects I've ever done, from its formatting as "bite-sized" short stories to its freedom from the tangles of mainstream-comic continuity to its complete break from the "techy" science-fiction orientation that characterizes much of my other work... (Sorry, technofetish fans, but I'll have plenty of other work with a far heavier SF orientation out soon enough, I hope.) If anything, it's closest in tone and feel to some of my work on Wildstorm's teen-superhero title GEN13 where, you'll remember, I was getting away with a LOT in regards to sexualized shenanigans.

Anyhoo, if you buy EMPOWERED and find that you like it, please feel free to sing out about it, baby. Tell your friends, mention the book on forums, spread the word, etcetera. Another volume of EMPOWERED is due out in September 2007, but the possibility of any further volumes coming out after that will depend on what kind of sales figures the first two trades pull (especially in long-term reorders, which will either save or kill the project). Furthermore, if EMP does well, there's a pretty good chance that I might start squeezing in a new collection or two of DIRTY PAIR material (in the EMP format) between volumes of my "sexy superhero comedy"...

Well, have a good one. In the meantime, I'm headed back to the drawing board, to crank out a rough for the cover to EMP vol. 2... Yay!

-AW

I just found out a few days ago that EMPOWERED vol. 1 has run into problems at the printer, and thus its ship date will be delayed at least a week, to March 14th... (and possibly even longer, though I'm told that's quite unlikely).

I'm choosing to perceive this as A Good Thing, Sorta, in the hopes that the delay will ensure top-quality printing on the book... and top-quality printing is absolutely essential for EMPOWERED, given that its interior pages are greyscale-repro'd from pencil-based originals. As noted before, Dark Horse has a 14-page preview of the book online, over at:

http://www.darkhorse.com/profile/preview.php?theid=14-043

...and a further preview of another EMPOWERED short story is lurking over in "My Pics," if you wanna take a look; also, more EMPOWERED artwork can be found on my deviantArt page:

http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/

Anyhoo, sorry for the delay, folks. I'll keep you apprised on further developments... and regardless, I'll be posting longer excerpts of EMPOWERED stories both here and in deviantArt as we approach the book's release date.

On the other hand, as far as I know, the third issue of my Marvel miniseries, IRON MAN: HYPERVELOCITY, will still be shipping on time on Wednesday, March 7th. Yippee! I'd hoped to experience the first "Comics Convergence" of my career by having two, count 'em TWO of my books drop on the same day... but sadly, events have conspired against me. (Stupid events, why do you conspire against me? What did I ever do to you, events?) Oh, well.

                                              Have a good-ish one,
                                                                     AW

                                                                

Just thought I'd mention that a 14-page preview of my new comic, EMPOWERED, has been posted over at Dark Horse's website:

 http://www.darkhorse.com/profile/preview.php?theid=14-043

A further 5-page preview of another EMPOWERED short story is lurking over in "My Pics," if you wanna take a look.

EMPOWERED is a "sexy superhero comedy" I've been working on in my spare time; the project started as a joke (or, more accurately, from a bunch of "damsel in distress" art commissions I was trying to get through), but unexpectedly evolved into a "real comic," more or less. The first collection of EMPOWERED "drops" on March 7th from Dark Horse Comics, as a 6" X 9", 248-page, B&W trade paperback. Alas, due to pervasive sexual content (but no actual nudity! Really!), EMPOWERED will be shipped shrink-wrapped and parental-warning-labeled, lest mommies and daddies everywhere be outraged.

Anyhoo, here's the solicitation copy:

Not only is costumed crimefighter "Empowered" saddled with a less-than-ideal superhero name, but she wears a skintight and cruelly revealing "supersuit" that only magnifies her body-image insecurities. Worse yet, the suit's unreliable powers are prone to failure, repeatedly leaving her in appallingly distressing situations . . . and giving her a shameful reputation as the lamest "cape" in the masks-and-tights business. Nonetheless, she pluckily braves the ordeals of her bottom-rung superheroic life with the help of her "thugalicious" boyfriend (and former Witless Minion) and her hard-drinking ninja girlfriend, not to mention the supervillainous advice from the caged alien demonlord watching DVDs from atop her coffee table . . .

Also, more artwork from EMPOWERED (and a boatload of other artwork by yers truly) can be seen over at my new-ish DeviantArt page:

http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/

And now, back to the drawing board. Have a good one, everybody.

                                                                 -AW

The second issue of the miniseries I wrote for Marvel Comics, IRON MAN: HYPERVELOCITY, is out this week, or so I'm told. Brian Denham's artwork and Guru eFX's colors looked pretty damn sweet in the approvals stage, so I'm looking forward to seeing the result in print. I'll try posting the cover (and my rough for it) in "My Pics", at some point.

Meanwhile, I went ahead and set up an account at DeviantArt, as I'm essentially too lazy and out-of-it after a day at the drawing board/keyboard/PS2 controller to set up my own art-related site. I'm posting about three or four pieces of artwork a day, if you wanna take a look. Even the folks on my Secret Art E-Mailing List might want to drop by, as I've dropped a fair number of heretofore unseen roughs and sketches and the like in the "scraps" section...

http://adamwarren.deviantart.com/