Behold, the cover art for EMPOWERED: "The Wench With A Million Sighs", the upcoming, one-shot installment in my ongoing "sexy superhero comedy" series from Dark Horse Comics.
Line art by me, exceedingly sweet colors by ... Yeahp, I wanted to get away from the "blank background" format of the last five EMPOWERED collections' covers, and Emily did an awesome job with breaking said format, as you can see.

Back to the floggery: "The Wench With A Million Sighs" is EMPOWERED's first appearance in conventional-comics format, as a 32-page "floppy" one-shot comic. The issue features a 30-page story, still in pencil-based B&W (as with the previous EMPOWERED trade paperbacks) but on glossy, shiny paper stock (unlike the Emp trades), which should lend itself to improved repro; brief EMPOWERED excerpts in Dark Horse's co-published STYLE SCHOOL books have looked verra nice indeed on such paper.

The one-shot hits the comics-retailer shelves on December 2, 2009; you can look for it in the October PREVIEWS catalog (for comics on sale in December), which should be in comics shops next Wednesday, September 30th. Or, it can be preordered here: [link]

I should note that, if you want to "wait for the trade" on this one, you'll be waiting for quite a while. The one-shot's story will NOT be reprinted in the next volume of EMPOWERED (vol. 6)*, but will have to wait until vol. 7 (or even later), which won't be out until well into 2011. This one-shot is rather important for future EMPOWERED material, as its sales figures will serve as a baseline for further EMP projects that might be released in a conventional-comics format. So, if this one-shot actually sells fairly well, you might see considerably more EMPOWERED material down the road, and (gasp!) on a far more frequent basis... Ooh, ah.

Here's the solicitation copy for the issue:

Even as costumed crimefighter “Empowered” fights a desperate battle against a functionally invulnerable, grave-robbing supervillain inside a secret underground mausoleum for fallen superheroes, back at her apartment, the alien demonlord imprisoned upon her coffee table spins a tempestuous tell-all tale of the often-struggling heroine’s deepest secrets... The scruple-free storyteller soon reveals how all of Empowered’s many frustrations at work, at home, and even in the bedroom can be conveyed strictly through the vocabulary of her extraordinarily expressive exhalations, thus making her... “The Wench With A Million Sighs!”

Anyhoo, the five previous collections of EMPOWERED can be found at Dark Horse's retail website: [link] or on Amazon.com: [link] Or you can ask your local bookstore or comics retailer to order 'em for you; believe me, I have to do that at my local bookstore all the time, due to their rather, ah, capricious approach to ordering manga and American comics.


*So that readers wouldn't get annoyed at having the buy the same damn story again when vol. 6 comes out, which is slated to happen at some point in the second half of 2010. Sadly, this means that my work on the one-shot over the last month or so** hasn't contributed in the slightest towards vol. 6's pagecount... Oh, well. Back to the drawing board, needless to say.

**And, yeahp, I finished and sent off all the story pages to Dark Horse last week, so the one-shot will steer well clear of the lateness issues that have plagued some of the previous volumes; I'll post some sample pages during the next few weeks.