“Empowered” has an excess of bondage

Empowered is a graphic novel only release by the series writer and artist Adam Warren. Warren has several major cover arts under his belt, and has been a constant gem in the comic industry and “Empowered” is his main comic project at the moment.

Manga as an art form has had many obstacles to overcome, especially in its transition to American culture, and into the eventual spawning of the American manga subgenre. The biggest obstacle that it has needed to traverse, besides the language barrier, is the extent to which it is taken seriously by Americans. More people associate the idea of manga with anime, than with distinguishing it as a comic style or to give credit to the storytelling and sometimes superior artistic quality of Japanese manga. American culture has accepted manga to an extent and has integrated some of the appealing facets of the style into our mainstream works and into dawning new genres. These integrations take the more blaring features of both manga and anime to new extremes;: absurd facial expressions with no realism, and the flagrant exposure of the female body for humor and sexual appeal. We have had this latter theme consistently in our original comic repertoire, and yes, at times it gets taken to extremes, manga pushes that limit, and for the artistic vision that’s very appealing. Creating this new American manga-style has taken sophomoric ideals as flaunting breasts and something as inappropriate as bondage and degradation and using it as a selling point. It’s on this train of thought that “Empowered,” as a series, comes into play.

For this American manga, he has created a character and a storyline that follows the idea of Japanese manga artistically, but breaks the mimicry with more American dialogue, by being crass and obscene. The stories within this particular volume revolve around one seemingly constant theme in this series: Empowered gets into a set of scenarios where she is bound and flaunted, to the point of being the entire plot of a chapter. It deviates occasionally from this to dive deeper into the individual characters and Warren shows his skills as a witty writer but overall, boobs and bondage are the motif.

Considering there is little to no linear story line, there is no real way to summarize the volume. Several stories, however, are especially interesting for their deviation from the main plot to give some background on Empowered’s love interest, Thug Boy, and his previous anti-superhero lifestyle. Warren also develops Empowered’s best friend, Ninjette, a drunkard ninja warrior, by showing the exciting fight scenes normally associated with manga, almost mirroring scenes in “Naruto.”

For a critique of the volume and of the series, it’s unfortunate that the writing and plot was as poorly developed as it was. I had a very low expectation going into the book, and while that expectation was overcome, it still stands as being an unoriginal and sophomoric attempt at developing an emerging breed of graphic novels and comics in general. It’s entertaining and a quick read, yes, but there are many blaring problems overall that make the series suffer.