 Hi everyone, I just read Adam Warren's Empowered Volume 1. Here are my thoughts. Welcome back everybody to another exciting episode, another installment of A Week in Geek, them here on YouTube. And yeah, this is a review that I have been dreading slash anticipating for quite some time simply because of the subject matter. I am not like I really had to look carefully throughout the internet at every single image because I don't want to get flagged because it's a small channel, I get it. The probabilities of a copyright strike or a regular strike for indecent material or something, you never know. I am unlucky that that type of stuff could happen to me. I don't know, I don't want to risk it, but I did pull safer work images and I'm going to be very careful with what I show inside these pages. I had no idea what this book is about. For reals, I got this book a long time ago. You can look back at maybe a year and a half ago or something. It was more than a year. I'm going to say from a year and a half to two years ago, something like that. I got this book because it was like a superhero comedy or something and I didn't know too much about it. I didn't even know there was a parental advisory sticker. If you don't know what Empowered is, Adam Warren of course did the Dirty Pear comic books. He did Gen 13, Iron Man Hyper Velocity, and whatever, some other stuff. Adam made this book Manga-esque, but with superhero stuff. There's a cool joke that I like that it's a little bit too manga-ish for superhero fans and it's a little bit too superhero-ish for regular manga fans. The book is sort of right there in between. Empowered. Alyssa Megan Powers is her name. They call her EMP or EMP, or however you want to say it, EMP. Basically she gets her powers from her suit and it gives her informability. She's able to shoot lasers and I think flight and something else. But it's a comedy series and a very risque comedy series at that. It sort of ends up either the suit getting torn, as you can see at the back cover of this trade, or she's captured, bound, and gagged by the enemy. And I think a lot of people will misunderstand what I'm going to say here. Yeah, it's not something that should be glorified, but the book is a comedy series and it's sort of a satire on the ridiculousness of superheroes and tropes and all that stuff with the damsel in distress. But the character, what I do like about the series and what I don't like, is the nature of the character. She is wildfire. She is very comedic, she's smart, and she breaks the fourth wall constantly with every story chapter because she'll talk to the reader and will make some really, actually some really funny references. However, what I don't like about this book is that at least this first volume, I would say, man, I would say like 80, 70 to 80% of it is really repetitive. I struggled midway to actually finish this thing. It's not until past the halfway point where I genuinely started to care about what was happening because it started to narrate like full stories. At the beginning, you just get like three pages per story and then it jumps into something else and it's usually the same visual gag that might offend some people. That is completely understandable. I myself found some of the jokes in poor taste and questioned if this was really as popular as I was led to believe. I don't know who recommended the book to me, but I thought I was under the impression that it was going to be something else. You've already seen some images that I've been showing in this video, but yeah, the art is manga style, very reminiscent of a Japanese manga, but it is black and white. It's very sketchy, super. I was surprised at how detailed it is, but at the same time, certain angles just, I don't know, they looked a little off to me and I'm trying to, let's see. Oh, here we go. Certain panels that you see right here with empowered herself, I don't know, with the nose and the pouty lips, it just looked off, but then you would look at other panels. Here is, you see a little bit more definition with her character. The whole book is like that. There's a lot, a lot of, yeah, I can show you this. There is a lot of raunchy material. It's a crude lowbrow humor at some point, at some points, I should say, sorry, and a lot of sexual innuendo and suggested r-rated material, so it's got a little bit of everything. Do not recommend this to a young person that wants to read it because even myself, I was like, oh, okay, are we really showing this in a comic book? Well, yeah, some panels are a little bit explicit, but for the most part, I would say more than half of the book is pretty safe and tame. It's just a couple of stories where they deal with relationship issues and, you know, couplings and sexual stuff and whatnot, but for the most part, it deals with this character that is having trouble fitting in in this superhuman society because she's joined the Justice League of their universe, if you will, and she is the low tire, the sea-lister, and nobody really takes her serious. That's one of the core elements of the book, the fact that, one, her suit is always getting damaged, two, she is inferior to others and she's trying to acquire self-worth and she eventually does, and there is some character progression. At the beginning of the book, it's very face value and you don't get to sense that these characters are progressing or actually learning anything and it's just for gags. I know for certain that a lot of people that are not a little bit open-minded will be offended by some parts in the book, but it is what it is. It is a comedy series and it is a satire of superheroes. The art is a bit rough at the start, but it progresses smoothly throughout the book and by the end of it, I was hooked on the art. It was actually really good. Adam does a fantastic job of presenting you real detail on these characters. Everybody looks great, even from the super-deformed, alien-type creatures to the robots to the human characters themselves, they all look pretty damn great and even if it's in black and white and more sketchier than usual, there is detail in there and it's pretty to look at. Part of what I am conflicted by, which I mentioned at the beginning of this review, is if I really want to continue reading this story because I know where these stories are going to lead. I know that the visual gags will continue and sort of the motif will persist through later volumes. I have read online and I want you guys to answer me down below in the comment section. I have read online that there is a character progression. There is an arc for our main heroine and all the stuff she's doing. Is that the case? Should I continue? Because I don't know, I thought it was somewhat funny. The main purpose of the book is to make you laugh and I am a very tough customer because I am very cold when it comes to comedy. It's a very specific type of comedy that gets me, that gets to me I should say and this book I would say about 6040. 60 being it made me laugh. So take it with a grain of salt. I don't know, maybe you'll read it and you'll enjoy it but as for me, I thought it was pretty interesting. You do, one of my favorite parts actually, are these title pages right here where you see the character breaking the fourth wall and talking to you. It's a very raunchy comedic look at superheroes in a non-traditional way. I understand that people will be a little bit frustrated and outraged because of the concept and the idea that you're exposing this character for laughs and it's not as wholesome as it should be. And yeah, I myself was a little bit kind of worried or disturbed about it simply because I kept reading the first few pages and everything was the same. You would read a story, she would lose, get bound, gagged and she would lose part of her outfit. Oh and by the way, I didn't mention this at the beginning, she loses power when the suit is torn. But it happens constantly to an alarming rate and I think that's part of the visual gag and the joke and some people won't like it but I sort of looked past it and kept going to see where the story was leading and to see if the character actually progresses. Fortunately there is some sort of arc in there and you do, when you read the beginning and you read the end of the story of the first volume, there is a progression of sorts for our main hero. So yeah, all that said, I think it's not going to be for everyone but the book is pretty okay. I don't know, I don't really think I will continue anytime soon but what I read, you know, it's serviceable, it was funny to an extent and hopefully you get past the raunchiness and you're able to locate what makes this book worth it and it is the idea of self-worth and the idea that you do mean something, even if you're at the bottom, even if you're not as smart or as strong or as beautiful as certain other people, you're you, you are uniquely you and that should be celebrated. I think, I think, besides the satire and the playing with the tropes of superheroes and the ridiculousness of this pseudo fetish subculture that forms out of idolizing people in spandex outfits and all that stuff, I think that's what Adam Warren might be looking at. I don't know, I may be mistaken, what do you think? Do you like in power? Do you think, no, this is a horrendous book, it shouldn't be read or spread around? I don't know, I'm very interested in finding out. Hopefully you found this review entertaining enough. I am sorry that I didn't show enough pictures but hey, I don't want to risk it. It's 2018 and YouTube is all sorts of weird, you never know. Guys, as always, you can follow me on your favorite social media platform, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all that fun stuff. Let's get to 2,000 subscribers. Now, from now on, I am taking a little bit of a break between videos, they're not going to be as often as before, simply because I have a lot of catching up to do. Like recently, I finally finished Horizon Zero Dawn, a beautiful outstanding game. I loved it, I wasn't able to play it because of hurricanes and all that stuff from last year or whatever. So now I'm catching up with old video games, I'm catching up with manga, I am reading Berserk and I don't want to do videos on Berserk because the story is so huge. I need to get the full picture before I even attempt to do a video on Berserk. So yeah, that'll be for later. But yeah, I'm reading manga, I'm watching some animes and movies and all that stuff, I'm catching up. So please, bear with me, I am posting videos but at a slower rate. So yeah, thank you. Thank you everybody for liking and subscribing and commenting. You guys are the best. If we reach 2,000 subscribers on this channel, which I think we need like 900 more people, I will do a giveaway, I will do a very special giveaway. I didn't do it for the 1,000 mark, I said I was going to do it but I postponed it because it's only a thousand. Let's be ambitious, let's go for 2,000. How about that? So if we get to 2,000, I'll do an awesome giveaway for you guys. So yeah, thank you. And with that said, I will catch all of you on our next episode.