Heya everyone. I just wanted to share a couple of comics I've picked up recently and very much enjoyed.
Comic the first:
Empowered, published by Dark Horse. This is a collection of shorts (usually 4-8 or so pages) compiled into a trade paperback; a second volume is in the works, the first has been on sale for a couple of months, but I just picked it up today. The star is Empowered ('Emp' for short), an awkward but big-hearted superheroine who gains her superpowers from an ultra-tight bodysuit, which is prone to getting torn and shutting down at the worst possible moments. She is thus probably the most vulnerable superhero in the world, and enemies and allies alike make fun of her habit of winding up tied up and held hostage by nearly every villain she confronts, but in spite of it all she keeps on trying. Emp lives with her boyfriend Thugboy (a former minion of various supervillains, whose lack of attention to detail he exploited by stealing everything in their lairs and selling it on eBay), Ninjette (a hard-drinking extrovert ninja), and self-proclaimed Demonwolf, a satanic monstrosity Emp captured in an alien containment gizmo (one of her few true victories), which now sits on her coffee table dispensing unuseful advice and demanding DVDs to stave off boredom. Empowered is part superhero satire, part romance comedy, and there's an interesting evolution from its beginning as a tongue-in-cheek damsel-in-distress joke, through Emp and her friends developing true personalities and quirks all their own, the whole story developing a bona fide world as it goes along. It's funny, touching, sexy (if you don't mind the manga-esque art style - it's neither here nor there to me), even dark and tumultuous at times. There's an interview with writer/artist Adam Warren
here on ComicBookResources, including preview pages, if you're interested in seeing more.
Comic the second is
Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, a supernatural adventure series from BroadSword Comics that has been coming out regular as clockwork, bi-monthly for seven years, but which I just found out about a few weeks ago. Tarot (born Rowan) is a witch whose dreams contain prophecies couched in the imagery of the tarot, from which she took her adult name. She is chosen by the Goddess to be the Swordmaiden, gifted with unique powers and tasked with maintaining the balance between the mundane human world and the supernatural world of witches, fairies, dragons and all manner of other beings that exist on the edge of the world we know. Tarot (the book) features mystical adventures built around messages of tolerance - her adversaries, who come from both the mortal and supernatural realms, are driven by intolerance and prejudice, but where it would be easy for such stories to come across as preachy, Tarot has a sense of unashamed sincerity that saves it from such a fate. The art is notably explicit, with characters frequently appearing naked (and even by comic book standards they're almost preposterously idealised), and the stories often touch on sexuality (though neither art nor story go so far as to be pornographic), but again, there's a sincerity, and what I can only (oddly) describe as innocence to it - the sense is that the story admires and treasures beauty and sensuality, rather than exploiting it. It seems like it would be tacky, but it isn't. If you've ever wondered "Why is it violence is okay, but nudity is forbidden?", this is a book where the tables are thoroughly turned - nudity and sexuality is presented and regarded as natural and healthy, whereas violence (especially against humans or other human-like beings, rather than 'monsters') is invariably a last resort. It's kind of charming, really. There's a strong Wiccan influence on Tarot, but in keeping with the overall philosophy of the book, it's presented in an inclusive manner, not as the only 'right' way to behave. There's a
Newsarama interview here with Jim Balent (writer/artist) and Holly Golightly (collaborator/colourist/letterer) about BroadSword and Tarot, if you're curious to learn more. Issue #44 is out this week, beginning a new arc called 'The Witch Key'; there are four trade paperbacks available so far containing early issues, with a fifth coming soon.