Grrl Power #291 – And here’s the wind down
Whoops. Well, I’m a big dummy, set this to post at the wrong time. Oh well, enjoy the early comic!
A quasi montage page for you guys to wrap up a few items, including a little cheat by me to explain why the highway outside a restaurant at dinner time was curiously devoid of cars. (even though there should have been some on the first few pages of the fight. :P ) Oh, and in that panel, Sydney’s just doing one of her unnecessary truesight sweeps. That cop isn’t really an oni or anything. Also, I really like the idea that teleporters startling people. I don’t ever recall anyone jumping when Nightcrawler bamfed into a room. I imagine it’s happened a few times over the many years of comics, but not with enough consistency that I recall it being a thing.
Arguably this page would serve well as the final page in the book, but I have just a few more things to get to first. Nearly there though. It’s exciting! Of course, once book one is finished for realsies, I need to go back and make a bunch of corrections and set about getting the book put together for a kickstarter, which is utterly daunting since I already barely have any spare time. I think I may put out a call for a part time colorist, which I know was a milestone for the Patreon campaign, but it turns out finding someone good enough, fast enough, cheap enough and available enough is a tall order. I’ll make a separate post about that in the next few weeks I think.
I don’t have an update for the vote incentive quite yet cause I’m working on a Valentine’s Day Sex Drive piece concurrently. I’m trying something new with the coloring on it which may turn out nice but it’s taking longer than I’d like, but I’m hoping to have it done in time as well as the vote piece before the end of the month.
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
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.
Just so’s someone knows, the code on this page is glitching. Between the header/navigation and the comic page, I see the following:
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Hope this helps.
Just don’t say that out loud or you will summon the demon that Dabbler threw into the pit.
I’ve killed it and added some security to the site. Hopefully that will be the last of it.
We can hope!
I’m pretty sure it’s Vehemence’s fault. He probably created a new power just before his defeat to escape into the real internet. The only solution, I’m afraid, is to never draw that particular villain again. We’ll just have to live with your inevitable decision to do so.
Why is everyone so against V? He was a good villain, and I really enjoyed his fight… not to mention, this statement seems amazingly rude to me. You imply that it’s a bad idea to use his character again, then seem to say that the readers have to “live with” the decision to do so, which as everyone already knows is going to happen. What’s the point of this post exactly?
I don’t read western comics very often but I thought the idea of absorbing power from violence itself like a succubus does from lust was an original idea. Also I thought he was pretty well written along with his own querks. I would like the idea of Vehemence coming back in some future fight.
It’s always good to put some security on those pesky interdimensional portals. In the comics, they have a disturbing tendency to snap open at the worst possible times…
Me too. It comes and goes. Presently it has joined us for a cup of tea.
Is it just me or is our favorite genre savvy nerd really gorgeous in the reflected light of the orbs in that last panel?
It is the Lips. I too am a fan of a very pretty set of lips. …and the hair.
Could it be being a hero causes the comleness score to rise?
I think its partially just that its a side profile of her relaxing, something we havent seen before, combined with the tilt back pulling the hair back from her face. Its a good look for her. Kind of gives you an idea of what she could be if she ever left her adultescence (yes, thats a word…sort of). Of course then she wouldnt be the same character, but that side of her might show up under the right circumstances.
“unnecessary truesight sweeps” or what I like to call Search checks!
Whenever you set camp, make a preemptive search check. Stop at a light make a check. Wake up check. Bored roll the dice and call it a search check. Eventually the DM will give up trying to surprise you or the villains will have unusually high hiding skills which should reduce their survivability in a stand up fight. Unless you pissed off the DM in which case every villain will have a personal cloaking device that explodes when removed from the user.
Or the DM will have you arrive 30 minutes too late to save the day.
“Dude the king told you to hurry to the crypts to save those kidnapped nobles. You stopped at every streetlight to make another 5-minute sweep of the area!”
Wouldn’t ‘killing the user’ already count as removing the device from the user?
Presumably it relies on feedback from the living user to not explode, and thus it would explode if the user dies
Hmm, that’s either a cop or a non-cop in disguise. Also, nobody invisible is sneaking up on Maxima. Good ’nuff.
Sneaking up on Max strikes me as being a bad idea. We’ve already seen what can happen if she’s startled.
Yes, she gets fear vomit on her boots.
Actually, I was thinking Panel #2 of – https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/720
Random thought:
Does Harem ever try to scare people that don’t know about her powers by gathering a few bodies in a creepy place, and speaking in perfect unison?
Only every Halloween :D
How about each body speaking one word of a sentance…
C’mon Halo, level up dammit!!
Aw, c’mon,give the poor girl a break. She leveled up once today already, just a few hours earlier.
True, but she’s a nerd and nerds know how to grind why hasn’t she leveled up five times today?
You have to know what to grind
Yep. I doubt that Archon would let Sydney do her grinding like on the last panel at https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1608
Hello! Great ending to a great chapter. I’m compelled to point out a couple of typos, though: “choke him the lightwhip” should be “choke him with the lightwhip” and “super battles can out of hand” should be “super battles can get out of hand”. Thanks.
It’s not ended yet, DaveB just said that this would be a perfect spot to stop
(sigh) Excuse me. “A great page, one of the several that exist in the last 30% or so of the current chapter, assuming that this chapter will be ending within the next few pages, of what is considered by one or more persons to be a chapter of high quality, for which I chose to praise the author and artist.” I had mistakenly thought that “Great ending to a great chapter.” would mean roughly the same thing without using as many words.
Just a thought, but…her glasses are kinda reflecting yellow, as if off the truesight orb. But the orb is closer to us than the lenses…so…given the angle that they sit on her face in relation to both the viewer’s point of view and the orbs circling her head, shouldn’t her glasses be angle-reflecting the pink orb’s glow? If you line everything up according to the plane of the lens of her glasses, it’s pretty much a perfect shot for bouncing the light…though her nose might or might not get in the way a tiny bit…
Angle of incidence equals angle of refection. You win a cookie for spotting that. Unfortunately it is an internet cookie that will now track your browsing habits.
The orbs, quite literally, do not follow the laws of photodynamics. Anything near to them does glow an appropriate colour. How the do this would be the subject of considerable scientific and thaumatergic study.
Except that Sydney has a phobia of being poked and prodded in a laboratory. So it will only happen if she is comfortable with it. Possibly if Max or Dabbler ask nicely.
So ive been reading this comic for a while and realized that ive only read a few of the commentaries under the comic. Just finished a readthrough of all of them and i had a couple things to contribute based on things you put on deviant art. I was going to post this on the forum but after 2 weeks of waiting i guess no one’s validating new accounts anymore.
1) You posted an awesome diagram of Max’s gun and a lot of people came up with questions or sort-of ideas on why she carries it. I can tell you exactly why she carries it. Standard weapons capabilities aside since she’s using custom ammo anyway and the chamber is big enough for anything they could fit in a shotgun shell she can fire grenades from it. That gives her smoke, tear gas, and other things not replicable by her powers and the extra powder means she can fire them at ranges untouchable by a normal grenade launcher.
2) At one point you mentioned wanting something Latin for ARC. I think that was before you settled on Archon as the name for the organization, but i know Latin and think it could still make a cool motto so i came up with some suggestions.
Absens Repugnum Calamitas (my favorite)
Literal translation: Absent Opposition Calamity
Loose translation: If no one fights the bad guys win
Absens Ratio Caries
Literal translation: Absent Reckoning/Judgement Corruption
Loose translation: Without justice it all falls apart
Acer Repens Capium
Literal translation: Fierce Sudden Capture
Loose translation: The hard fast takedown
Interesting stuff.
Completely of topic. But it’s it me or is Goth Harem built like a brick shit house
Explained on the first page: she trains with Anvil, and is able to (almost) match her in strength when she combines all five bodies
she’s a match for an Uncharged Anvil, meaning just after Kenya rolls out of bed Harem MIGHT be able to take her. ;)
Well, Harem doesn’t look like she has the same color as a brick shithouse & I seriously doubt she smells like one either. I think that was very unflattering way to describe her.
O.o
Not unless you have a fetish for things that smell like it. :P
Brick shit house is a reference to Brick House, a song from the late eighties or early nineties and means she is seriously stacked (also a slang referencing the same song). Have you really never heard that phrase before?
The slang “built like a brick shithouse” is FAR older than that song.
A traditional outhouse (the original “shithouse” is of very light construction, first because it needs good ventilation, and second because it’s literally placed over a pit dug in the ground. Eventually the pit gets kind of full, so you dig a new pit and then just pick up the outhouse and move it (and finally, at least in theory, you fill in the top of the old pit with some of the dirt from the new one – although this step is often neglected).
An outhouse made of brick would be a FAR BETTER BUILT structure than an ordinary outhouse, great to look at but possibly failing in certain practical regards (who’s going to pick it up and move it?) and that’s the point of the analogy.
Would this be a good time to mention that my bookmark name for this site is ‘Nerd plus floaty things”
Really enjoying the comic! Especially like that there is a variety of body types and mental approaches and beefcake as well as cheesecake (in the grand tradition of comics everywhere). Interesting personalities and story – hope this comic lasts a good while (ie, hope you keep enjoying doing it!) <3 kerinbot
Welcome to the community, ‘Bright chameleon plus floaty hearts’.
Seeing your avatar makes me sad, nice though it is. It makes me miss my pet chameleons. They used to live in a couple of trees in my garden, as a kid. My party trick was to put them on kid’s clothes, and everybody would laugh or cheer, as they changed colour.
Always ending the display, with giving them a nice meaty treat, to reward them, before bringing out the piece de resistance. Namely a piece of tartan cloth. Which really freaked them out, as they never could quite manage it. Strobing each of the colours that made it up, or matching the pattern, but not the colours.
They were always glad to get off that, and back into their trees. It was sad when we had to move from there. Especially as it would not be fair to have taken them from their home. I hope they, or their descendants, are still entertaining kids there, today.
*sniff*
Did anyone remember to pull Achilles out of the rubble? Is he still there while people are talking and forgot about him?
Where’s Sydney’s level up? You’d think she’d have earned one after that battle. :)
She -just- got a level-up less than a few hours prior to this. It just feels longer since this fight has taken an entire year.
What is Sydney pointing to in panel three? She doesn’t have a ball in her hand and Gothamer isn’t interested
Achilles wandering by, having being pulled out of the rubble?
Huh.
Good first day.
Must admit… that last panel… crazy girl is cute in that ‘repose’.
Okay, about the question raised earlier, was Sydney lying about where she found the orbs. Looking at both scenes where she describes the area as near the keys, she is either fumbling madly or lying very badly. Previous commenters seemed to believe that Sydney was concealing her true location. Okay, she might just be trying to protect a person who took her someplace she wasn’t supposed to be. I can see that.
My suggestion is that her memories have been altered, and her inability to recall the details is what is making her get confused. If so, someone or something caused the memory blot. The obvious reason for the memory blot is to hide the location, and the obvious reason to hide the location is that there are more remains of alien technology (or magic) at that location. Or else, you know, an actual alien.
Things we know: She didn’t mention family on the trip so she would have had to go alone. Nerdy comic book store proprietors do not spend money on scuba trips to the Keys –they instead go to places with -CON in the name, often in highly expensive cosplay garb. Agreement with altered memory, less likely to be lying (she was being scanned by magic user and near an empathy). Solo, an abductee or she stumbled into them being sold at a CON vendor table as props…
I love wild speculation, but it is also worth considering the mundane explanations too. The key thing to remember, is that Sydney described the scene at a time when she was still afraid that the government were going to drag her off for vivisection. She liked Maxima, so was willing to go along with her… up to a point. She was still not trusting enough to share everything.
I think she was just covering up something minor. She had something that she did not feel comfortable revealing to the government. So it probably means she had done something wrong. Maybe as simple as breaking diving rules and regulations. Possibly something that was illegal. Treasure hunting, could well fit the bill, as others have proposed.
I suspect that Sydney was just stretching the truth. I do not think she would want to outright lie to Maxima, the shiny super-hero, who just saved her life, at the bank. Another commentator suggested she may have been diving in Cuban waters, which fits the bill nicely. It would have been risking provoking an international incident. Plus it would look very incriminating when speaking to a room full of ranking US military personnel.
So saying that it was ‘off the Florida Keys’ was a discreet, albeit clumsily implemented, evasion. It is off the Keys – way way off.
All that said though, what you suggested is entirely in keeping with the genre. And unlocking what caused the… vagueness in her memory, would be an interesting angle to take.
My reason for rejecting the lying angle is simply that the stumbled the second time. I can see her holding back, yes. But the second time around it would be fresh in her mind, so why stumble? Unless she was feeling conflicted about lying to Max, of course.
One other thing that has always stuck in the back of my mind is that she may just want to investigate the location more herself. And giving too precise information, on the location, would ensure government boots stomping all over Atlantis, ‘her’ crashed space ship or finding the buried treasure chest that has the instruction manual, for the orbs.
Solo? Really?
Sooooo an abductee
I’m still waiting for her to go back to the comic shop to find Joel buried under superhero nerds.
Uhm. Did anyone notice that in the third to last panel, she’s got an orb and doesn’t have a jacket, but in the other panels, her hands are free and she has a coat.
Yes. But those of us who noticed she had a teleporter friend, supplying her with stuff, were not bothered.
I was too busy trying to figure out why a cloud was following Sydney above her floating orbs for at least three panels to notice or care about the coat.
Any idea why there is a random cloud?
… I suppose it could just be a random cloud in the background and angles being what they are made it look like it was above her head rather than off in the distance… I wish I could edit or delete comments now #^_^#
We all wish for that, at times. But, yea, just a cloud. Although a sparkly rainbow dragon is hiding in one of the frames.
Even though the emotion and the power of the scene lies in the last two panels, and they are both superb, in their own right, I keep finding Sydney’s face in panel one to be amongst the nicest I have seen of her. Although the other two are pretty high up there as well.
Last panel: we finally see that Sydney’s bangs are not exempt from gravity.
Indeed. A subtle point mind, as gravity is her bitch.
Er, I know I saw this page a LONG time ago, but I just noticed the odd little cloud over Sydney’s head, around about the orbs. Anyone got an idea about what THAT’S all about?
Yup. Teeny ninjas in a flying saucer, with a magical cloud generator.
Probably.
Alternatively, it might just be the Evil Squirrel Overlord, in a tiny balloon, hidden by said magical cloud generator. Either way it has managed to sneak up really close to Halo, without being spotted. So has good stealth capability.
Reading back over this in Archive format, the whole fight bit definitely reads a lot smoother and faster than it did while you were updating it. Like, maybe 10-15 minutes of reading, 20 if you’re slow.
*VORP* “Here, have some coffee!”
“GAH! Oh, thanks, but the court said I wasn’t allowed to anymore… Oh, what the heck, I’m with the police now.”
“…
Give that back THIS INSTANT.”
Heh.
You know, now that I think about it, why is Harem handing HERSELF coffee? That must be like passing the cup from one hand to the other for her.
Well people do just that analogy, so it is not unusual. There are innumerable reasons why folks shift drinks from one hand to another. For Harem though it is clear why she did it this way. One of her bodies was holding a deep conversation with Halo. It would be highly disconcerting (and not to mention rude) for that body to suddenly teleport away, in order to get drinks!
Of course she could just say something, to politely excuse herself. But that would interrupt the flow of the conversation. Far better to make use of another body, that was not in the middle of something important. Which naturally enough would require handing the coffee from one to the other, on account that it is this body which felt thirsty. Plus it is more sociable to share a drink.
Equally the other body could have stayed around, but I am sure Daphne would want to keep Sydney’s attention focused on just the one conversational partner, in these circumstances.
Unlike at the restaurant, where she wanted to have all her bodies present, so that she could try as many dishes as possible. And not being a take-away, she had to have them all sitting at the table. But Harem did keep them all seated side by side, so that others present would not feel the need to keep turning around to speak to each, in turn.
Here it would be unnecessary. There is just the same coffee, and her other bodies are probably still busy tending to the wounded and guarding prisoners. With one body getting them any drinks or snax they desire.
“Unnecessary truesight sweeps”? I would say that from a logical perspective there’s no such thing, because you can only be 100% sure they won’t find anything after you’ve done them, and they are eminently necessary if they do.
Hey, isn’t that the mustachioed policeman from Maxima’s imagination, back in the meeting about Sydney’s self-defense record way earlier?