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Grrl Power #1414 – Smaug, minus “a”
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Grrl Power #1414 – Smaug, minus “a”

by on December 4, 2025 at 5:00 am
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I may have mentioned this before, but for some reason, jokes about things being load-bearing always land with me. Probably because the only ones I’ve heard are absurdist. I think Brooklyn 99 did one about a balloon arch being load-bearing. Knees are, evolutionarily speaking, load-bearing. All bones are, really. Maybe not the skull, or the lower mandible. I suppose that depends on how you define “load.” But knees are inarguably load-bearing, so my little joke meets my own standard for being absurdist, therefore, I made myself laugh with this one.

Also, not to keep patting myself on the back, but “the most structurally reinforced of women’s knees” (which is an awkward sentence, but I think it’s grammatically correct?) also makes me laugh, because, yes, of course, there are such things as knee braces and in the advanced galaxy, powered armor, but the first thing my mind conjures is something like a woman wearing 6 pairs of pantyhose, or some kind of stocking and garter and flying buttress affair.

In some settings, dragon fire would be just some napalm-ish goo stored in a gland and it’s lit by the dragon clicking their teeth together when they have some flint stuck between their molars. That sort of biological dragon can account for the acid and chlorine breathers, but doesn’t allow for the kind that breath lightning or “cold.” In magical dragon settings, there’s probably more to the breath weapons than some goo in a gland. So dragons would probably have a name for it that sounds cool. Soulfire was the best I could come up with. Which probably happened at a Dragon council meeting, and the Red and Gold and Magma dragons were like “I guess “SoulFire” is the best we can come up with.” And all the other dragons who breathe cold or tornadoes or avalanches or starlight or whatever were all “No! It must be inclusive! EnergyForge!” “What are we? Dwarves?” “How about DragonCore!” “Ug, that sounds like an exercise trend for douchey nobles and High Elves.” “Okay, fine, SoulFire it is, but must we do intercaps?” “The Time Dragon says it will be easier to Duck Duck Go, whatever that means.”

Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!

So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.

 

 

 

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

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Tamer: Enhancer 2

by on January 27, 2022 at 4:58 am
Posted In: Blog

I wrote another book!

Have a sequel! Wow, almost two years to the day since the first book. Well, still faster than some of the pros, eh? This book is a bit longer, at 210K words. The first book was right around 120K for comparison.

I wanted to do more with the cover, but I’m not going to hold the book hostage because I didn’t get a chance to hide Yxlyn on the cover yet. (Yeah, like 3 people noticed her on the other cover.)

Please let me know what you think! I’m amenable to all constructive feedback and abject praise. Feel free to leave comments here, but please be mindful of spoilers if you do. You can also email me at grrlpowercomic@gmail, which is also probably the best way to let me know about typos. I’ll eventually release updated versions once typo feedback slows and I’m sure most everything’s been found.

Download your format of choice here:

Here’s a quick link to Book 1 since I’m sure some people will ask.

Tamer: King of Dinosaurs is by Michael-Scott Earle. I’ve linked it several times in the past. The first book is free if you’ve never checked it out, but you don’t need to be familiar with Tamer to read my story. But it’s still free and it’s good… so… get it.

Obviously, “Tamer: King of Dinosaurs” is Michael-Scott Earle’s IP and my fan work is by a fan for fans, and certainly not intended to infringe in any way.

For those of you unsure of how to get a .mobi file onto your Kindle or Kindle app on your phone/ipad, the easiest way is to download it, then email it to your kindle email. You can find this on Amazon, under “Your Contents and Devices” you’ll see a list of books you’ve bought through Amazon. Click on “Devices” up at the top and you’ll see a list of kindles and phones etc that have the kindle app installed. Click on the box with the “…” next to each device and you’ll see an email address for it. Just email that address with the .mobi attachment.

Alternatively, I’m sure you could transfer it with dropbox or google drive or whatever poison you use.

158 Comments

December Vote Incentive Posted

by on December 6, 2021 at 3:52 pm
Posted In: Blog

This month’s vote incentive guest stars Lana of Spying with Lana. One of my own secret agents, Pixel, is trying to assist, with various levels of success and… nudity. Well, in the Patreon versions. The Vote Incentive will give you a pretty good idea of what might go down.

Check out Spying with Lana. Their current vote incentive features a certain gold-plated glamazon. Also it’s a funny comic with tons of skin.

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November Vote Incentive Posted

by on November 5, 2021 at 9:10 am
Posted In: Blog

I thought I would make a separate post for this.

The vote incentive is updated! I started drawing this and honestly had the thought that I might shelve it so I could use this for a plotline setup in the comic itself. The Vallejo Glamor, not the Nude version, obviously. And while I reserve the right to do it at some point in the future, the one thing I learned from drawing this is that those tiny bikinis take a lot more effort than you might think. Sure, in the comic, the art wouldn’t be nearly so fiddly and intricate, but Sydney’s “Coin Mail” is right out, and I can also foresee Maxima’s “Drizzled Metal” bikini just wildly morphing from page to page, not because it’s supposed to me like a clingy T-1000, but because I just think I remember how it looks and don’t bother checking and 5 pages later it looks suspiciously like Princess Leia’s slave bikini. 

Though I will say the TOS Star Trek cloudy pastel backgrounds are a little easier to draw than perspective correct interiors. 

Nude and textless versions over at Patreon.

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Some more book recommendations

by on May 16, 2021 at 10:27 am
Posted In: Blog

An Orc at College

I’ve recommended this Liam Lawson series before. I love me some good xenoanthropology, and my favorite thing about this series is the “fish out of water”/”Tarzan in New York” bits where the Orc main character has to figure out all the weird cultural stuff humans (and other races) do.

Well, Book 8 is out, Trorm’s family is coming to visit, and the xenoanthropology spills out onto the front lawn in the form of fistfights and flaming maces, much to the horror of the hand-wringing and probably slightly racist HOA. Mmm mmm! Good stuff!

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Entangled Fates

A near future, proto-cyberpunk novel. As in, the main character is, through circumstances beyond his control, the first guy with a quantum linked AI in his brain. It’s kind of like he’s got “The Machine” from Person of Interest riding shotgun, only instead of being an enigmatic and vaguely creepy superintelligence, his machine decides it likes the human experience and adopts very anthropomorphic (feminine) qualities right off the bat. Corporations, governments, and organized crime antagonize, and eventually a bunch of ex-military female bodyguards are hired because they blend in better than burly dudes in suits and sunglasses. Yes, it’s a (slow burn) harem, obviously.

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Savage Ascension

There’s a lot of stories like this one, i.e., displaced hero makes good and grows his household and gets his revenge, partially by living well, but mostly with head chopping. I’m recommending this one because from among the similar books I’ve read recently, I thought this one stood out. I immediately bought the second book when I finished the first, which is a pretty good gauge of a series I think. I have a lot of orphaned Book #1’s in my library. This one is like, Isekai-lite. Instead of being from another world, the MC is a “Savage” from the north, forcibly taken to the “civilized” city where he proves that being a skilled hunter is advantageous in slave arena battles. So, it’s kind of a bummer at first, but then he finds out that if he wins, he gets to pick a wife from an assembly of female combatants, and the ruling class here has a way to combat a blight of infertility sweeping the land, so the MC is like, “I guess I’ll pick up a wife or two before I get my revenge on everyone.” So, yeah. As books of this nature go, I thought it was one of the better ones.

The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by [Jack Campbell]

The Lost Fleet

This series is a little different from most of my recommendations. It’s more akin to the early Honor Harrington books, which I quite liked, for their technical fleet battles. (I’m as surprised as anyone I enjoy that stuff.)

The hook of this series is; Guy wakes up from 100 years in cryosleep to discover 1) The war he was fighting is still going on, 2) Everyone thinks he’s some mythical super-tactician cause he fought in a famous, desperate battle before jumping in his pod. 3) He kind of is, because now, after 100 years of constant war, so many people have died that advanced fleet tactics have been lost as the war chewed up all the old captains and admirals, and most warfare has devolved into “charge forward and hit them harder than they hit you.”

Something I like about this series is that it recognizes that space is stupidly huge, and when a ship that is 10 light minutes away from you does something, it takes ten minutes for you to know about it. Fleet battles held at .1 lightspeed still take hours and hours when fleets start off in distances measured in AU’s.

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Some Book Recommendations

by on May 24, 2020 at 11:45 pm
Posted In: Blog

So I found some books that I really enjoyed, and I thought I’d make a separate post about them. It’s actually two series, both by the same author, Daniel Schinhofen.

The first thing I will tell you is, don’t worry about the covers. He’s kind of famous for having bad covers. The cover from Apocalypse Gates looks like a flat lit Doom 1 level.

Anyway.

The series I really liked is Binding Words, the first book of which is Morrigan’s Bidding. One of the things I liked about it was the book is very good at laying out the rules of the world the MC finds himself in. This might seem like a minor point, but the rules of this world are quite important, and some books don’t do a great job with set up. I will admit, I also like the fact that the MC is kind of OP, even though (and I don’t want to spoil anything) there’s not a lot of action in the first book. I’m sure some of you are like “How is he OP if he’s not kicking ass?” Ah, see? You gotta read it to find out.

One caveat – you guys know that I like the slice of life stuff, right? I mean, if you’ve been reading Grrl Power, you’ve probably figured that out. That said, by the time I got to the third book in Binding Words though, even I was like “I don’t really need to know what they eat for every single meal. It’s okay to skip ahead a few days.” But don’t let that dissuade you from checking out this series. I’m definitely snapping up the next book when it comes out.

After finishing all the released Binding Words books, I jumped straight over to a new series he’s working on called Aether’s Blessing. Or… the series is Aether’s Revival. Book 1 is Aether’s Blessing. It’s fairly different from Binding Words (though there is at least one common theme)

Some of you may be familiar with his other series, Apocalypse Gates and Alpha World. I have tried to read Alpha World on numerous occasions, and I can’t get into it. It’s not because the writing is bad, but I just cannot get into books that are set in video games. I just can’t bring myself to care about what happens, because no matter how it’s set up, whether it’s VR, or the character’s brain is trapped in the game or whatever, there just aren’t any stakes for me. If a horde of demi-liches are about to sweep the last bastion of humanity, I can’t help thinking, “Yeah, but what happens if some developer patches the game and now all the liches are covered in Mt. Dew branding like a NASCAR driver, or are accidentally flagged as neutral?” or “What if a janitor trips over the power cord to the server?” And also, what if the main character does defeat the horde of demi-liches? Do they just respawn the moment he turns his back so other players can take them on, thereby lowering the stakes even further? It’s a bad set up for a book. If an author wants to put game like stats in his novel, then just have the character wear some sort of contact lense that scans everyone’s strength levels, or make it a spell, or have aliens rip out everyone’s eyeballs and replace them with cyber eyes that give them special skills and make them duke it out on a planet full of dinosaurs. It’s just lazy writing IMO to make it a video game.

I’ll probably try again to read further into Alpha World, and maybe I’ll get to a point where I can ignore all the game stuff, because I really liked the two series I recommended above, but man, it’s tough. “Oh, he finally met a girl that’s probably going to be a love interest… but has he? Or has he met a lookup table with some clever dialog trees?”

Anyway. I liked his other books and maybe you will too.

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