Empowered and Sistah Spooky’s High School Hell

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?  Even when that thing is seeing privileged, arrogant, and condescending icy blonde white schoolgirls put in their place?  I realize that’s a rather specific categorization, but it’s wholly appropriate to this “Empowered” spinoff volume. As the title implies, it’s a team-up between Emp and her former frenemy Sistah Spooky which follows loosely on from the events of vol. 8.  In that volume, Emp and Spooky went to Hell to confront the latter’s Infernal Service Provider and get the soul of Spooky’s girlfriend out of its fiery pits.  Things didn’t go exactly as planned and now the ISP has come back to lock Emp and Spooky in a pocket high school hell dimension filled with the latter’s former classmates who are all looking to get a piece of her for getting a better infernal deal than they did.

This vengeance takes the form of traditional high school encounters exaggerated to horrific effect.  From biology dissection subjects which come to life, to singing competitions overseen by demons, to monsters made out of cafeteria food, there’s no part of high school life that isn’t mined for its awful subtext.  That’s the biggest problem with this miniseries as there’s so many of these encounters and they all basically play out the same way: Emp and Spooky are rushed to the latest encounter, they’re terrorized by the white girl(s) du jour, then Emp and/or Spooky find a way to turn the tables and it’s off to the next nightmare.  It’s debatable whether this would’ve sustained four issues, but at six it just feels like overkill.

I’ll admit that this is in spite of writer/creator Adam Warren and artist Carla Speed McNeil doing everything they can to energize the proceedings.  Warren’s dialogue has bite and he’s more than willing to dive into all of the issues of class, race, and privilege which the subject matter brings up.  McNeil thrives on all of the craziness she’s been given to draw, making things like demonic texting and emojis come off imaginatively on the page. The problem is that their talents are spent propping up a repetitive idea of a story.  If they had deviated from the established setup to tell a different story, rather than the same one over and over again, then this would’ve been a far more worthy and engaging spinoff.