Grrl Power #1059 – Coarse language and/or sand
Instead of sticking her head in the sand, Maxima is sticking herself in, uh… his head, which is made of sand. So… aphorisms.
Does this count as a gritty reboot, because she’s fought this guy before and, you know… sand? Which is gritty…
Anyhoo. Ah, action pages. I wanted to show some scale here, but of course that means I can’t do my typical 9 panel page. Every once in a while it’s a bit of a relief to be able to draw a page slightly faster, but of course I made up for that by making the next vote incentive more involved than usual so I didn’t actually give myself any extra free time this week.
I looked up some common curses in Arabic. This is not one of them, but I can only assume that some dog a long time in the past really offended someone in the Middle-East of yore, because a lot of curses involve calling people a dog, son of a dog, etc. I mean, if I was a canine family pet in that region, I’d be like, “Aw.”
Maxima speaks enough arabic to order food, complain about hotel accommodations, direct troops, get directions to insurgent camps, etc. She’s actually very nearly fluent, at least until a conversation veers into trade lingo. She knows the words for jeep, truck, technical, wheel, axle, etc, but if you start talking about rebuilding an engine or human anatomy beyond major organs that are likely to get hit with a bullet, or decorating a cake, her vocab becomes a stumbling block.
Oh, and insults. She knows how to insult people. But like I said, it seems any and all canine adjacent insults are a slam dunk. “Your high school guidance counselor was a dog!” are probably fighting words.
Oh, and about the stinger, yes he can control sand, and Maxima will definitely wind up with sand everywhere, but presumably he can’t control sand if it’s inside her personal near skin tight forcefield that kinda sorta protects her clothes. She’s wearing the gas mask so he can’t use inertia to get sand into her mouth or down her throat. Really, if someone could control sand when it was inside someone else’s body? They’d be able to kill anyone. A single grain of sand spinning around ripping up their arteries or lungs or optic nerves or causing 20 aneurysms a minute? Maybe Wolverine could survive that. Definitely Colossus or your basic Superman type, but just about anyone else would be fucked.
The June Vote Incentive is up! What’s that dripping down Sydney’s face? Uh… well, actually, clicking on the link won’t actually give it away necessarily, cause the thumbnail is from one of the, er, advanced pictures in the series, if you take my meaning. Yes, I mean there is a nude version of Sydney (and guest) over at the Patreon version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
If he can control sand, you have to wonder if he’s really there, or chilling at a nearby cafe…
True, a macrosilicakinetic like Darude could be miles away if his control range is large enough. Imhotep wasn’t in that sandstorm he created after all.
I’ll take terms I never knew existed for 400, Ken.
silica is the material that makes up most of sand, kinetic means ‘moving, or to move’, and macro is a modifier that essentially means ‘massive amounts of (whatever)’. So a macrosilicakinetic is a person who can move/control massive amounts of sand.
The way it works is: you take any quantity of Latin roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. and slam them together so that they form a word that means the sentence you wanted to say. Just like German.
except, in German, you have to sound angry while saying it
…or have a terrible chest cold pumping out buckets of phlegm
Thought that that was Flemish…
Krankenwagon! (Ambulance, or more literally “sick wagon” or “Sick car” don’t @ me, I’m not a linguist it’s just a funny word I know.)
Not a car designed for a massive sea monster. It only sounds that way.
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung
motor vehicle indemnity insurance
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
The is one of the all time favorite german words for being oddly specific.
Which translates to:
Beef Labeling Supervision Duties Transfer Act
Pro gloria imperii
Omnia Finem Habent
O quam cito transit gloria mundi
Hearing a name and then reading it threw me for a loop. Imhotep, character realization after rereading twice. Imhotep, acronym (in my honest opinion the evil person) first thought… It still fits.
Hmm, that vortex seems to lead down to the ground not that far from Maxi in panel 2. If that is where Darude is then he is well within BoomUltraMegaSplatter range, not the best place to be.
Could we be in for some Maxima fan service? I doubt her clothing would survive a serious sand blasting.
Agreed, at the very minimum we need a shower scene to get rid of the excess sand and to point out it really gets everywhere.
How do you fight sand? With water?
Getting sand wet/sticky enough that it can’t be manipulated as a particulate fluid is the traditional tactic. The other usual options are dispersing it beyond the ability to retain control (Max’s concussive blasts) or heat fusing it into glass (collateral damage though)
I think the odds of a shower scene is high. Dave seems to like drawing those.
With heat turn it to glass and it’s immobile which I believe that’s what Max is doing I’m starting to think this guy is another Sandman type.
Heat. I doubt he can control glass.
No… No… I beg. no more glass kinetics. the last one who manipulated two supersonic IR missiles coming from behind was bad enough. (fun fact- there’s no glass in an IR missile.) please… something else… almost anything else…
I’m not remembering this in the comic. Do you have a link so I can refresh my memory?
to be fair, different comic. caused a raging debate in the comments for it..
I don’t know the comic, but given the powerset I am guessing the reasoning was they were some precision and distance capable Silicakinetic able to control the silicon based guidance system (although such a power would be more ripping apart such mechanisms and actual control would require something like electrokinesis, magnekinesis, electromagnekinesis, tech-pathy, *possibly just ferrikinesis if the missiles have ferris metal casings*, or just the good old fashioned telekinesis and just grab the whole thing.
Colonel Glass’s power was specifically over “glass”, and nothing else. Couldn’t do anything with plastics, but *maybe* he could have manipulated the non-silica based lens materials used for IR.
https://spinnerette.fandom.com/wiki/Colonel_Glass
I know the character now, not the even though. It was shortly after his introduction I stopped following this comic.
-this was so many years ago now and at the time I was going through some personal issues and was looking for more comical comics and this one had gone from comical to serious and bloody so I moved away from it. Never did go back, by the time I would try, too much time had passed and I didn’t want to try and play catch up.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It’s rare that you get an opportunity use a word that essentially means “Turn your lungs into marinara by filling them with pulverized glass” but that is one of the few ways to kill someone like Max, since they still need to breathe.
Sydney will be throwing out the Anakin “I hate sand” memes though.
Ah yes good old “Pompeiitis” because nobody in the er has time to say…not worth the bother. Trust me, unless it’s an academic discussion. Short versions or common names get used. Influenza for example.
Or, good ole ‘flu’
That is probably why she requested and is wearing a protective respirator mask.
Even with all her powers, Maxima would be way less dangerous if not for her logistical and tactical military training.
Unless she’s a prequel hater lol.
Quite right, knowing the insults, and curses I might add, are always useful when speaking a foreign language.
Or your native one, of course.
First thing we learned as military brats was the curses of the local language, so we would know when people were swearing at us and we should leave.
One would get the opinion that Maxima and the Sandblaster do not like each other. Just saying……
they have an abrasive history
He hurt her before. She is showing true grit in facing him again.
Yeah, she just couldn’t bury her head in the sand.
They don’t really seem able to hurt each other. Maybe one of them thinks it’s foreplay.
They have a rocky relationship.
Unsurprising. Darude is a complete son of a beach.
I’m surprised Pander hasn’t ground her teeth at us.
How is this guy a threat to Maxima? Is it more because he can’t be damaged really while he can be a vast threat to any of Max’s comrades?
He is one of two on record of stalemating Maxi (and she thought he was dead)
Because Max job its to protect and this guy can’t be taken down. He can kept putting people in danger. Thats way the story its that they fought to an stand still.
Well apparently Max learned that she needed a face mask after their last encounter where he tried to choke her out by filling her nose and mouth and maybe lungs with sand.
Starting this encounter equipped with the foil to her only (apparent) weakness to his power set should give her a huge advantage. And a huge advantage would seem to seal the deal since she thought she’d killed him during their last encounter where we can assume that she didn’t start with any kind of breathing apparatus.
Expect him to either get rid of her mask somehow or for this to be a quick fight.
I wonder what would happen if someone took a really big force-field bubble, and flew it through all that at Mach 16.
I am guessing the ground level shock wave would be more damaging than he is.
My thought, exactly !
Probably not a lot
Or, alternatively, opens up a portal into interstellar space and starts dumping the sand there.
Does this guy remotely manipulate the sand, or become the sand? The glowing eyes suggest the latter, in which case dumping enough of it into space would remove him from the battlefield.
Are we ready to see Sydles become a killer?
I’d wager that even if Darude is also component to the storm, he probably isn’t equipped to remain in vacuum indefinitely.
she is an American law enforcement officer. she has to start sometime, to be fair she did get vehemence back before he expired.
You’ve just summarized everything wrong with the American attitude towards law enforcement, far more eloquently than I ever could.
While in sand form, does he need to breathe? Or eat and drink?
That might only give him a long walk home.
Opening a portal into space has another interesting option. If dumping him in sand form through the portal is capable of moving him to another location, then a gravity well would suck him into a star. Or black hole. Recall, Sydney’s guidance system seems to have a built-in safety to keep her from diving into a black hole. If she can figure out how to dump Darude into the vicinity of a black hole without actually going there herself, I don’t really care how supernatural this guy is. He’s going to have a very long fall before becoming part of the black hole. If he can somehow survive that and pop up in another universe, that could be billions of years from now. And somebody else’s problem.
people keep saying this with the flight and shield over the last few pages.
if she is going to go through that trouble she could just use the PPO and cause possibly several explosions at once through his body.
It’ll be interesting to see how much they’ve learned about the other’s tactics. Unfortunately, I suspect Darude might have the upper hand there.
kind of like magneto and a 5 gallon bucket of brake wheel shavings (when! brake shop re-surface the drum/discs)
“beyond major organs that are likely to […] decorating a cake, her vocab becomes a stumbling block.”
Okay, I have questions. About those major organs decorating cakes???
You haven’t been to certain werecritter birthday parties or celebrations…
… Don’t ask a Red Talon to decorate for Christmas incidentally.
Fluency nearly always starts with being able to curse.
I know enough of about 7 languages to get myself into a fight.
I think the most unique one I know how to curse in is sign language.
I’m not sure computer languages count either, but then I could probably start a flame war about Forth being better than everything else. :-)
If you use Forth to actually say something, do you end up thounding like Yoda with a lithp?
I don’t think so. LISP is a completely different language.
I guess that depends of how you learn it. Teachers almost never mention that kind of things.
Yeah, but just having a teacher won’t get you to fluency in *any* language, to achieve genuine fluency you *need* to be able to practice carrying conversations with fluent speakers, ideally native ones, and the amount of practice and the breadth of material to be practiced required effectively necessitates immersion in the culture. Being able to keep up when someone is insulting you, being able to insult someone when the situation demands, knowing the combinations of words to avoid if you *don’t* want to insult someone, etc. are all fairly important aspects of dealing with the common folk of a society.
If someone claims fluency in a language but has only spoken it in a classroom they are either lying or have absolutely no idea what they are talking about because the claim is almost certainly false. I’ve heard of people achieving total literacy in a language from a classroom but never genuine fluency.
I don’t know that I’ve ever needed to insult someone, in any language or situation.
It’s hard to consider the possibility that there are situations in which insulting people would produce better outcomes, and that I don’t insult people enough.
Spend some time in Tucson.
one son was enough thank you.
Will admit, curious as to how effective cutting the whirlwind off at the base with one of her plasma blasts would be.
Isn’t Maxima intended as a sort of basic Superman type? Flight, super durability, super strength, super speed, energy blasts?
I believe that would be an Atlas Type (see Wearing the Cape crossover files). :)
Atlas Types have only part of the Superman package: flight, durability, strength, enhanced senses. Maxima seems to lack enhanced senses, but has all the rest.
Well, she technically has all of those, but not all of them at the same time. She has to shift around energy allocation between those.
Dogs are ritually impure animals in Islam. Probably most important reason why they’re looked down on in middle east.
Insults involving dogs seem to be fairly universal actually. As far as I can tell, sunova bitch seems to show up in every European language, and using “dog” and various variations as insults show up in languages everywhere across Europe and Asia. Admittedly I’m less certain about Africa, but arabic is big in northern Africa, and I wouldn’t be surprised in similar insults showed up further south too.
This, but also that dogs are considered “impure” in orthodox interpretations of Islam, as another commenter pointed out.
The only problem with whipping a grain off sand around someone’s body is that it would take a massive amount of power and control to do that.
There’s fluids, both viscous and non-viscous, cell walls, bones etc.
Anyone trying this would likely suffer a similar fate to that of of Discworld Wizards trying telekinesis (ie: their brains would end up running out their ears because they used them as the fulcrum).
So… today we learn that Max has learned Arabic. I kinda wonder what her full linguistic scope is.
Well, she does know hat “what the he…” means in Farsi. Probably in other languages, too. *grins*
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-38-about-time-they-noticed-her/
“Definitely Colossus or your basic Superman type, but just about anyone else would be fucked.”
Nah, loads of supers have impossibly durable body tissues inside and out. If it was just bulletproof skin or dermal armor/force fields or something they’d still be dying from hydrostatic shock induced by supersonic punches, heat transfer from energy blasts, trauma from sudden acceleration resulting from getting tossed a couple of city blocks, etc. Hell, they’d kill themselves just trying to use their super-strength if their whole physiology wasn’t adapted to enormous stresses. Your infiltrating sand grain would need a hell of a lot of energy behind it to accomplish anything drastic against any reasonably tough brick, and that assumes they don’t have really exotic metabolisms like being filled with molten metal or plasma or (much like lions) undifferentiated mucus or something.
Guess you could postulate a sand controller whose maximum force output could all be concentrated on a singe grain, but at that point the question becomes why you’re making giant sandstorms or mucking about with internal physiological sabotage rather than chucking individual projectiles at relativistic speeds. Seems like most supers would have trouble applying their full force to small volumes of material – difficult to get a mental grip on a lone grain, maybe.
You might have super durable bone and muscle and whatnot, but if your lungs are full of water, sand, ash, bugs or even something innocuous like pure nitrogen gas, you’ll still drown/suffocate barring having “Batman can breathe in Space” life support powers.
Even wolverine drowned briefly until his body was recovered in one of the films.
Same reason I think has a long wait ahead of him till his last death gets recovered from. Just wait till what killed him is eventually removed.
In most comics, Kryptonians like Superman and Supergirl literally do not need to breathe while they’re under a yellow sun. In New 52, Kara was a little shocked when she was dragged underwater and tried to hold her breath long enough to survive, then stopped while being attacked…. and found she wasn’t drowning because ‘apparently I don’t need to breathe anymore either.’ The Superman TAS cartoon still required Kryptonians to breathe oxygen though. There was also a multi-part series where Green Lantern made a mask for Kara while they were in space, but it turned out it wasnt for breathing – it was for communicating with Green Lantern while in space (he called it Greentooth).
Kryptonians also barely need any sleep or food. Mostly they eat and sleep on any semi-regular basis because 1) They DO still need to be able to dream (random eye movements for their psychological health)… but largely out of habit since, for Kara, she spent most of her life as a normal person and enjoys eating and sleeping, and with Clark, he tries really hard to act normal. Plus food tastes better than sunlight, especially when you grew up on Ma Kent’s home cooking.
Pretty sure they have a hard time converting sunlight into body mass, too, or replacing hair or shed skin cells with it. Mind, just being able to recycle materials that don’t outright leave the body would probably mean that, once you were done growing you could get by with a bit of jerky every few months, and an occasional sip of water.
…kinda hope we get some info on why he’s here or even who he is. I mean, we’ve yet to really establish him as even a bad guy yet, since he IS leading troops into what is very much an Occupied country. Our knowledge of him being a bad guy seems to be mostly just ‘Maxima and him fought’ and ‘He’s kind of generically Arabic’.
Which isn’t really…great arguments for his evilness when a LOT of groups have fought America over the years. Like, not to say he can’t be but ‘Leading troops against a military based in an occupied country, then being attacked by Maxima’ is not really immediately establishing his evil credentials.
While I doubt it’s how it will go, I would like to see how Maxima would handle ‘I was called in by citizens of this country to attempt to liberate them from the invaders’.
… No one said he was Evil (or even plain lower-cap evil), just that he was an enemy super Maxi fought
Well, Deus claims to have been called in by citizens of several countries to liberate them, so I’d say we’ve already seen how Maxima would handle that scenario. The question is when you have several people claiming to represent the people, but with contradictory goals.
Which is pretty much normal politics around the world.
Serving in the military you do tend to pick up various phrases in multiple languages. Mostly insults and curses, but also how to ask where good food is.
And where the nearest brothel is
About that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordel_militaire_de_campagne
somehow, I don’t think anyone would willingly teach Max how to say ‘where is the nearest Brothel?’ or ‘where are the camp girls?’ or anything like that. that would be a career limiting action.
Not in the American Military, recently LGBT+ people are allowed into the Military!
There’s an Spider-Man comic where Sandman kills Spider-Man of Earth-91126 (Alternate universe, so nothing that needs to be undone) by going into his body and essentially exploding him from the inside by sheer volume.
Good times.
Malice (evil Invisible Woman) has done that a few times by placing her force field inside people
So… Shaker and he has a huge volume of effect, or Breaker and that really IS his body?
Place your bets!
I don’t like sand…
it gets everywhere…..
and it’s a beach about it.
So… maxima can’t really SEE… and it would really suck if she were to say… let loose one of those big blasts only to see she fired it right at the building with all the mass fabbers. I’m just saying it’s hard to ‘imagine hitting what’s behind the bad guy’ if you can see what’s behind the bad guy till its too late.
Presumably she’s using the Plasma Boom Grenade (I don’t know if it has an official name already). https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-172-one-and-done/
Who says she can’t really see?
What happens when sand melts? Glass. What does glass do? Break.
stabs, scratches and lacerates? and before it hardens? Liquid glass is probably the most dangerous substance that humans have had for more than a century
so, uh, everyone nip over there under Halo’s shield, because the air is about to be filled with streamers and splashes of liquid and semi-liquid glass. burns and stabbies all around.
a gritty reboot is when you gotta put your boots back on without knocking all the sand out of them first.
lets not be to rough here.
“My name is Maximillia Leander. You got sand in my panties. Prepare to die.”
Well, to be fair, since the guy is literally made of sand it goes from a prank to harassment (at least).
Grit 2: Electroresistant Boogaloo
For some reason, whenever I try to post, I get an Internal Service Error unless I use a VPN.
Anyone else having that problem?
Also:
Qu’vatlh ghuy’cha’ baQa’!
(In case you know what that means, I apologize and don’t actually mean it.)
Only when I make a long post, or try to reply to more than two people in one visit using a table top PC
not yet- is your post is sponsored by nordVPN?
So is this guy a full silicakinetic or specifically a sandkinetic because Maxima is making it rain glass right now with that heat and force…also even if he can’t control it…she is still making it rain glass…everyone right under there is a little worse off than they were a few seconds prior. More so if he’s a full silicakinetic
Just like with the bridge, she’s gonna make things MUCH worse (and blame the other guy) before things get better (or, more likely, not get better)
I think that is by design. She is the old school power set and military frontman type. Her powers come down to (make things explode, defend self, and hit things really hard). Not the most precision of powers.
Halo conversely has a power set that is mostly utility so she has to be creative, and her one offense option currently only has two settings and they are both *kill everything in front of us right now*. So she can’t rely on that for fights where she isn’t fighting some inhuman space squid-bots.
Just a quick note, a gasmask has a 5-point harness rig holding it securely in place, Maxima’s hair would be partially bound down by it, and only flowing from her neck onward.
Not exactly what I was thinking of, but close enough: https://www.varusteleka.com/pictures/thumbs500a/472445e8f007db4152.jpg
Also just found some with 6 straps. Didn’t know that was a style.
Don’t think it’s a gas mask, looks like that giant face-mask (with a filter) we saw a couple pages back amongst SmugD’s bondage gear
Given her opening line, I’m thinking Max has been hanging out with Sydney for too long. :)
Note that when *that* word was coined, there already existed the perfectly serviceable word “silicosis” for the same meaning. But it was too serviceable, and Mr Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers’ League, wanted something with more pizazz.
After this battle,how will Maxima get the sand off of herself?!?
HOpefully with next month’s vote incentive.
Does Maxima need to breathe? If no, a solid plastic wrap around her head would work. If yes, Darude can try near solid sand all around he and exclude the aid.
exclude the air.
Yes, Maxi still needs to breathe, we saw that when she was testing Sydney’s flight limits
yes she breathes,
that said, a sand coffin type move rarely works on someone with her power set and class unless he manages to bury her under a mountain and add many tons of force. He seems to also be an S-class so he might be able to, but doubtful she’d give him the chance.