I’m going to own up to it. I cannot draw butts. That literally may be only the 11th butt I’ve ever drawn. I need to work on that. Maybe the next vote incentive will just be an assload of butts. It probably won’t be. I just felt like typing “assload of butts.”

Dabbler is stronger than a human woman of the same weight. She’s actually about twice as strong as a human male of twice her weight. A proper succubus would usually downplay that most of the time – you know, guys and their egos – but Dabbler’s just as much adventurer and scrapper as she is seductress. This page is Dabbler’s first public reveal of her “Battle Form.” Whether or not people buy that explanation, Arianna will have her work cut out for her. If there was a superheroine with just little satyr horns on her forehead and no other demony characteristics, you know there would be someone freaking out about demons or gargoyles. In the first few drafts of the story, Dabbler never disguised herself, but after giving it more than a few seconds of though, I realized that the general public would have to casually accept the existence of demons and/or aliens, and that would make the Grrl Power world too different from ours. It’s supposed to be almost identical to ours, only certain historical events and people can be attributed to supers. Tech level’s the same, politics are the same. If there are super powered assassins, that means there are also super powered bodyguards. It’s mostly zero-sum. Now that all this super stuff has gone public, the world will probably begin to diverge from ours in more significant ways.

Dabbler’s sword has show up briefly in the comic before, but obviously will be more heavily featured this time around. Notice she’s not teleporting it to her hand like she did the railgun. It’s all part of her vast bag of tricks. I thought of the name Soul Reaver independently, then thought it sounded too cool not to have been used before, so I googled it and found there was a video game franchise of the same name. A third person hack and slash about, if google image search is any judge, a blue vampire with no lower jaw. I guess you could still bite people like that, though the actual sucking action would be considerably more challenging. Perhaps there was some sort of lapping motion involved. I’d like to think he hung out in the video game character’s after hours bar with Darth Malak and commiserated about beards. Anyway, I point that out because now in this scene, Dabbler is using Soul Reaver against Heavenly Sword, which was also a third person hack and slash. I’m just commenting on it so Sydney doesn’t have to.

Update: So apparently there were 2 games in a series of 5 with the name Soul Reaver in them, and across the 5 games there were two protagonists, and the one guy with no lower jaw sucked souls, not blood, which presumably did not involve biting anything. I obviously never played them, but it turns out Soul Reaver is actually a reference to a sword in the game called “The Soul Reaver” and now I’m considering renaming Dabbler’s sword. Although it’s not like Dabbler would have known about those video games and it could definitely lead to some funny discussions with Sydney who is supposed to be a nerd omnipedia, who would definitely know about those games.

Sydney and Dabbler are capable of this level of distraction in the middle of a grand scuffle, just imagine the first time they’re left alone together.

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As always I will be at A-kon this year (June 6-8 in Dallas) and, I’ll be doing a panel on Friday. Humor-Based Webcomics 1: Humor in Story. Be sure to stop by!

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In case you missed it, my fourth Gynostar Guest strip is up. The current arc starts here.

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 <– Patreon, if you’re unfamiliar, is like Kickstarter for microtransactions. Instead of funding one off projects, it creates a steady source of revenue to help support artist you like so they can concentrate on making more of what you love.