Ember Rewarded (Kickstart the Week 1A)

I've made dozens of posts about various Kickstarters over the year. But I feel it's time to look at some of the wild and weird projects I recommended over the years. That's what the Rewarded posts will be all about. (They will always be marked with an A after the original post number. )So let's head way back to the first title I featured on this iteration of Super Powered Fiction over three and a half years ago!

The Ember 0 Art Nouveau cover is the best to show off her *ahem* costume.
Character published by Boundless Comics. 

I expected adult themes and luscious art when I first introduced Ember on this site many moons ago. I never expected Boundless Comics to take things in a much more adult direction with their titles though. Don't get me wrong, as I expected some nudity. Christian Zanier has made a career on naked bodies ever since his runs on Buffy and Rising Stars ended many moons ago. So his creation of a new superhero seemed ripe for his kind of good girl art. And come on, that costume was a dead giveaway.

So Ember turned out to be a whole lot of crazy. And that crazy was just intensified by the "Beautified" edition released two years after the original Ember 0. This was meant to lead in to the characters return, as she teamed up with the Lookers, a pair of ultra-hot bounty hunters. The new edition took the adult content from the original edition and ramped it up to be closer to the standard fare of the Boundless line.

The book opens with a bit of back story, as our heroine wants to become a model. Her plane is destroyed mid-flight but she survives thanks to the emergence of her flame powers. We flash forward to a battle between the costumed hero, now an idol of millions, and a gigantic woman bent on killing her. Both have taken beatings from the other which means a broken costume on Ember's part and a burnt to nothing costume on the giantess part. This book is nothing if not gratuitous.

The book continues its time jumps by going back to earlier in the same day as the attack and getting even more gratuitous, with a two page spread of  Ember showing herself some love. She sets off the sprinklers when she gets a little too hot. We learn that this is part of her new found fame, that she's become a modern celebutante with millions of followers and a need to show some skin. She's filming herself in the build to her plans for a sex tape, but the conversation quickly turns to worries about normal life. She costumes up and her friend Beth and her head to a premiere.

Unfortunately, they're immediately attacked on arrival by a more clothed version of the giant from our opening. The villainess reveals she was on the same destroyed flight that gave Ember her powers, only she sees hers as a curse and not a gift. Ember tries to talk her into rehabilitation, but the villain continues the fight, only to be crushed under the weight of a building destroyed in their battle.

These first two panels of their fight are literally the only ones I can feature that don't go into R rated or higher territory.

Only she's too powerful for that. She breaks free and attacks the shocked Ember. The two beat on each other, with Ember turning the ground molten and the giantess attacking with all her strength. All hope seems lost for our hero when an attack helicopter appears to gun down her foe and save the day.

In the end, the girl is forced to stand down, but is still not beaten. As both women are flown away from the destruction, the attacker breaks down and admits she shouldn't have let her rage consume her.

The 0 issue ends with a promise to continue in Lookers: Ember, a follow up crossover limited series.

It's a pretty simple introductory piece, mostly designed to let you know what you've got to look forward to in later adventures. Unfortunately, I've yet to read the follow up series, so for now it's just a simple one and done with lots of good girl and bad girl art taking to an extreme. But if nothing else Ember stands as a fun character to show off the problems of fire powers with real world clothes. And for that, I can at least rank it as a lot of fun.

The book is now available from Boundless / Avatar in print or digital at Comic Cavalcade.