Grrl Power #176 – Intergalactic baggage
Dabbler’s crack about the urologist makes me giggle every time I read it. I mean… chuckle in a very manly way. I had to rewrite the demon’s line a little – originally it was “worlds will burn to herald my arrival” which is far more dramatic but doesn’t set up Dabbler’s line very well. It’s so nice when the bad guys are accommodating like that. So yeah, Dabbler’s long adventuring career makes her a valuable asset to the team, but it does come with some baggage.
The original version of this page had a bit more of a visual analog between Max and the demon guy, but his design evolved in the last few years (that is to say, as I was drawing him this time.) Speaking of which I have original rough pencils of Maxima’s portion of the demonstration that I drew about 4 years ago posted over at DeviantArt for those interested. The most significant difference is that originally, apparently Halo wasn’t in on Maxima’s little stunt. Obviously that part had to be rewritten, cause it was dumb. Also I had to cut up the pages differently because if I had left the big boom as the first panel of one page, the prior page had this cliffhanger that totally telegraphed what was going to happen IMO. I do like the side view of the explosion sweeping over Halo’s shield there on the 4th page. I probably could have kept that.
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Someone should warn Maxima that Milking the Giant Cow while boasting furiously about your power is a solid sign of incipit villainy.
Or that boasting your the most powerful is a guaranteed way for some one to show up more powerful..
On a side note, was given a grow your own ?Indonesian? Bhat chilli 1,000,000 Shu, I hope it doesn’t grow, if it grow I’ll have to eat it..
Wouldn’t it be neatasaurus if next page, we see Dabbles looking around and going “Wait a minute! This is the place he tried to breach the surface from!”
This.
I mean, we know it didn’t happen, but here’s WHY it didn’t.
This comic likes to make sense.
***this is not the demon lord you are looking for***
Someone is missing from the who’s who section. Can we have a name for this demon?
Team members who speak get put in the who’s who. Villains might require a formal introduction before getting their entry.
Thothogoth
I’ve got a question about Achilles. Obviously his power is to be indestructible, but assuming that he’s still human, then he’s still got nerves in his body and has a sense of touch. So what’s his ability to feel pain? I mean, when he got shot in the chest with Dabbler’s mini-railgun, surely he would have felt the impact of something that would have normally torn right through his chest. He got thrown back several feet by it. Even if it’s impossible to physically injure him, there are ways to inflict pain without doing physical damage. Electrocution for example.
Pressure points could work. Electrocution is up for debate. It would need to be like a taser to minimise chance to injure for the effect not to be negated. Pain is mostly done through damage or convincing the nerves there is damage. Electric could hi-jak the nervous system and send pain messages to the brain without damage being done.
We evolved the ability to feel pain to alert our conscious mind to physical damage. No damage = no damage alert.
actually it’s the other way around…you skin blisters not from heat, but as a response from a triggered nerve-ending trying to prevent more damage from that initial heat source. Same for bruising, the blood is sent there to do emergency repairs afterwards, it didn’t just appear there immediately. There are people with overactive nerve-endings that can get a bruise response from a light application of pressure. So I’m guessing his nerve endings are dulled or he simply lacks a pain response system thanks to the same thing that made him impervious to damage.
That’s partially true – the examples you gave are accurate (-ish… many bodily responses aren’t necessarily to prevent more damage but to try to start repairing the damage already done, for instance), but there are plenty of other cases where actual damage just plain hurts, no bodily response required.
Suffice to say that you both oversimplify quite a lot.
I have no doubt he’d lose from Sydney in eating spicey, as caspsin doesn’t actually do any damage. It just trics the nerves that they are on fire.
But that impact on his chest probably felt nothing more than a light tap. Maybe a football bouncing off
Actually, there’s a series of books dealing with “realistic” superpowers that tackled that problem in the second novel, What Fire Cannot Burn . The general verdict was that they could still feel pain as a relic of all the ordinary human DNA, and actually one of the only reliable ways to kill such a person was to set off their nerve endings so intensely that it would cause their CNS to go bonkers; in other words, a person with invulnerability wouldn’t experience any tissue damage from being hit by a nuclear bomb, but the pain they would experience from the heat and force of the blast could kill them anyway.
Of course, Achilles and his fellows would probably be… less than enthusiastic if ARCHON’s scientists suggested testing whether sufficient force could cause a pain-related reduction in combat effectiveness.
It may be similar to Sydney’s Mr Bubble. The ability that stops the damage makes the impact feel similar throughout the spectrum. There’s also good ol’ idiopathic neuropathy: he just doesn’t feel pain (go watch Haven).
I guess the small teddy at the end of her sword from the Dabbler vs. Zintiel pic is canon now…
I’m not sure about the page from a storytelling standpoint, it’s a bit difficult to figure out what’s going on. For one, the demon doesn’t really look defeated, so his disappearance into the hole feels somewhat unexplained. And I’m not sure what Dabbler’s “Nah” is directed at. The chance that the demon might appear? Or her attraction for Maxima?
From what I understand from it:
The demon thing is a flashback Dabbler has. She defeated that demon, and it predicted that it would return, heralded by a great burning. Currently Maxima is standing in the middle of a firestorm, which COULD be what he meant. That is what triggered the flashback.
If this firestorm is what the demon meant, he will probably emerge soon. Probably, since this is a comic. We call these things foreshadow here :P
I’m pritty sure Maxima is NOT the demon, she’s just the person who triggered the firestorm. There’s always some random person who happeneds to trigger the prophecy.
Now the demon itself: If you look, you can see each of his claws drawing gashes in the ground. What I took from it, is that he’s getting sucked into that hole. He’s digging his claws into the ground to slow himself down, but it’s not enough.
Dabbler probably fought him, found herself unable to damage/kill him, and found a way to kick him into the hole.
The ‘nah’ is probably meant as ‘nah, what are the odds of that guy returning now?’
The demon is sucked into temporal portal or subspace bubble or such which is at least partly of his doing or understanding if he knows a mighty burning is one of the requirements to escape.
Pretty sure he just means that he’s gonna start burning lots of stuff once he gets out
An odd thought, does Dabbler have a crush on Maxima?
Dabbler will go after anything sentient. I would say pulse…but she’d probably hit on the rock monster from that old star trek episode. She is a succubus after all.
Dabbler strikes me as a trisexual. She’ll try anything at least once; three times, just to be sure.
So im just going to throw this out there. I noticed the shattered pieces of crystal on the floor and the bit still left in his ( the demon/creature) chest. Now my initial question would be I dont think it is a power source so much as a means of being where he is, like a loophole device. As He does not look beaten up or hurt but rather being dragged into the hole I would think the crystal played a role in this. Like it was his means to be in this realm or out of hell or whatever back story place he was and is presumably being dragged back to. Is he going to be like a Zelda boss and have an obvious glowing weakness?
He wouldn’t be a boss if he didn’t have a weak point you could attack for massive damage.
And me without my boomerang.
man I simply adore her outfit here
No new page this week?
6:00 am on Mondays. (Central time in the US. Uh, GMT -6 I think)
So… Is THIS your timezone:
https://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Central/d/-6
Hey mate, love your comic – it’s awesome. Just one thing:
The whole shape-of-breasts-in-plate armour thing Dabbler has going on there would get her killed to death really, really quickly. It’s pretty much because the shape (which is unnecessary for defense, a lot of women wore men’s armour just fine) will redirect any force straight into the sternum, crushing it.
Or, y’know, maybe Dabbler’s armour is magic. Who am I to say?
Better explanation of the issue I’m raising here: https://martwhim.tumblr.com/post/40061546009/why-do-you-hate-the-shape-of-breasts-in-plate-armor-so
Thanks! Yeah it was very nearly much skimpier armor or at least something with a keyhole in it, but I made it a bit more practical as i drew it out. The boob shape… let’s just say it is magical because a succubus wouldn’t be caught dead in something that wasn’t form flattering. :)
When you’ve got full-on magic flying around, not to mention super-tech, “it’s magic armor” is sometimes the best explanation.
Well the last three pages have been pure delight, but this one definitely takes the cake for me; it’s my new official favorite page!
Does this remind anyone else of An American Tale?
Dancing buffalo bones…. Naaaahhhhh…..
Eight years later……
Rereading this, I wanna see what the context is for Xuriel having a breakup with her…life-donor.