Grrl Power #1012 – Between 0 and 6 Harems walk into a bar…
This is a page that I really didn’t want to split into two, but I couldn’t fit everything on one page and I just couldn’t make it a double cause I’m still trying to get caught up after Xmas. (The vote incentive should hopefully update with Monday’s comic, BTW.) By itself, this page mostly just sets up the next one. It also doesn’t give you guys a ton to discuss, other than guessing what Harem’s foible was, that or just pitch your own super powered pranks. It’s kind of a limitless field, really, even without getting into weird mind control stuff. “I made him think mayonnaise was underwear,” etc.
I will mention that somehow, while Sydney was revealing where she found the orbs, Jiggawatt went and got her hair did. The reason she did that is because I always matched her lipstick to her hair color and yellow lipstick looks terrible. Unless you’re a dryad and have green skin. Gold lipstick can work, especially against darker skin, but the yellow wasn’t cutting it for me. In the early days of the comic, Jiggawatt had light blue hair, but I fairly quickly realized that if she’s doing lightning stuff and there are bright lights nearby, her hair washed out and looked a bit… Stormy. She looked like Storm. So I changed it to yellow. Now I’m changing it back to blue, but now it’s royal blue which won’t wash out to white even if it should because I’m the artist and I can just fudge it if I need to. Oh, and of course, since I tend to have most of the girls wear underwear that matches their hair color, I guess Jiggawatt also went shopping. Or maybe she had some bras around from her prior blue hair stint.
It’s not a fetish of mine or anything, I’m just kind of lazy when it comes to underwear color, and I refuse to have anyone wear beige bras. I understand why they exist: so white women don’t have to worry about their bra being visible through their shirt, but that doesn’t change the fact that beige bras are equivalent to tighty whities. No one is wearing them to be sexy, and guys, if you’re wearing tighty whities and taking your pants off in front of a woman (who wants you to be taking them off), you don’t get to be upset by the ripple of disgust that passes through her face when she sees your choice in underwear before she tamps it down and gives you a half-hearted thumbs up. I can confidently say there’s no such thing as sexy underwear for men, (at least from the perspective of a heterosexual male.) There are only less bad choices.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update: Getting Proofed!
Proofing’s kind of on hold until I get the vote incentive out.
December’s vote incentive guest stars Lana of Spying with Lana. January’s is a little delayed because of the holidays, but will likely be up with the Monday comic.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I’ll be honest, I never recognize Jiggawatt anyways cause I keep expecting her to have white-ish hair like in the icon on the right
Yeah pretty much. Tied-back white hair was her most recognizable trait.
That’s what I was also expecting Jiggwatt to look like, perhaps with white lipstick as well.
Also, that Harem in the last panel looks just like Heatwave usually does.
The blue hair and lipstick would, I believe, look awful on anyone, but somehow it looks worse than awful on a black woman. Dunno if it’s the contrast or what… it just looks worse than awful.
I dunno, looks good to me. :) I do like weird stuff tho. Now dreads on a blonde, that looks horrible.
Now THAT’S what I call S-U-L-T-R-Y… Oh Mama!
blue hair and blue lips looks great on silver skin.
Blue hair can be made to work but I’m not a fan of blue lips. It has some novelty value and in the comic it works for establishing a signature look but blue/green isn’t the color we are biologically wired to look for.
Very true. I certainly would not expect Jiggwatt to use that blue as her daily lippy, if only because the chapstick would soon wreck the paint-job. But used as a carefully calculated bait on the hook? She’ll get the man she wants.
I’ve never been a big fan of blue hair. It tends to scream ‘Look at me! I’m special!’ and give of a desperate vibe of needing attention, mainly because of how unusual blue is as a color in organisms in general. Usually the only time it’s used is specifically to get attention from a potential mate. The only time I think I’ve ever liked it on a person was Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim, but she IS an attention seeker, which is why she constantly changes her hair color, so it fits her character. It doesn’t really work well with a girl who can shoot lightning out of her hands and turn into living lightning, not to mention being blessed with a super-based perfect body. In other words, she already has quite a bit of ways to show that she’s quite special and get attention in the first place.
Blue hair would probably work okay with Harem, mainly because Harem goes out of her way to make each of her copies look as different as possible from each other, despite all being the same person with the same exact type of body, so I could understand that with her as well.
Yeah, I generally lump blue hair in with bright blue eye shadow. A few people can make it look good but it usually just says I don’t understand how to use colors yet. With Ramona Flowers it fits with the character and the overall look of the movie. Blue or green tips or highlights can look pretty good but it seems to be pretty high maintenance unless you already have very light colored hair.
I’m noticing Jiggawatt’s skin tone has changed multiple times, too. It’s like she gets darker toned each time we see her. My head cannon is that her body is continually upping its melinin production because the lightning is causing bright light inside of her skin when she discharges it, and her body is tricked into thinking it’s not blocking enough sunlight and so it ups the darkness factor (like getting a tan after you already got a tan).
My head-cannon is now that Jiggawatt has a side effect of her powers that cause her hair colour, skin colour and (maybe) eye colour to randomly change…….
Have fun with that Goverment ID, Jiggy!
Sorry but Jiggawatt’s new look is both visually terrible and renders the character unrecognisable
Personally, I mis-identified Harem on this page. I thought she was Heatwave
Same here it’s hard to keep up with harem though she’s always changing up her looks on various bodies.
Place your bets, place your bets. Mine goes to cheated on some finals exam, or trying to pretend with N-1 bodies that all N are present while the last set up a joke, and the whole affair failing hilariously.
What about telling Deus all the unit’s secrets? Or, since the 4th wall knows that already, would that be too passe
That’s not a “prank”, and if it’s not a coordinated with her superiors leak in order that they can feed him occasional misinformation, it’s likely a felony.
I also think she wouldn’t be allowed to tell most people that she’s a triple agent spying on Deus for a few reasons:
1) Same reason that Sydney can’t tell most people who are not cleared to know – it’s under their pay grade for intelligence.
2) What Harem is doing, being a triple agent for an American company, would have been highly illegal for the government to do without some sort of warrant to allow it (even a FISA warrant, which itself is a pretty sketchy thing in general since most of the time, the reasoning for granting the warrant is… very iffy… but still technically legal, and I’d assume Arianna would cover her – and Archon’s – butt with at LEAST that). Although if she started after Deus became a citizen of Galytin (and a de facto part of its government), they’d at least have a good argument for spying on someone in the United States, if they considered him a foreigner despite having American citizenship. Not the greatest defense since being an American citizen does carry certain constitutional rights (such as the government NOT being allowed to spy on you without a warrant for a legally sound reason, despite what happened with the stuff Edward Snowden leaked being an example of the government actively spying on US citizens), but it’s still a defense they COULD bring up.
Best way to avoid the potential problem though is to… y’know… just not let anyone know that that’s what she’s doing.
Always felt that was utter spy bullshit: the government isn’t allowed to keep an eye on it’s citizens to ensure the safety and protection of it’s citizens and peace for all, but the citizens are free to plot what ever anti-government shit they want?
Then again, it’s now illegal to stage a coup and secede from the country (you know, what they did in seventeen-seventy-whatever-the-fuck because they didn’t like paying tax for their shit)
“Always felt that was utter spy bullshit: the government isn’t allowed to keep an eye on it’s citizens to ensure the safety and protection of it’s citizens and peace for all,”
1) The government CAN spy on its citizens. But it needs a warrant and due cause because part of being an American citizen means you have constitutional rights. The government needs a warrant, and it needs to show cause to GET a warrant. If it doesn’t, then no, the government has crap all rights to spy on me or anyone else, regardless of what it thinks, unless it can make a judge sign off on it FIRST.
2) We are not subjects of the government. The US government are not our lords. Congress are not dukes and duchesses and Lords, and the President is not a King (or Queen). They are elected BY US, and subject TO US. Not the other way around.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution”
Not to mention in the Declaration of Independence, where the Founding Fathers wrote:
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ”
Notice it starts with We the People, being who are establishing the Constitution which grants the government what powers it is given (and the 9th and 10th amendment saying that any powers not given to the Federal government belong to the States or the people). It starts with ‘We the People’ because it’s not ‘The government gives itself these rights.’
So no, the government cannot legally spy on American citizens without a good d*mn reason that it needs to prove through due process of law FIRST. They don’t own you and you don’t owe them an open invite to your life.
“but the citizens are free to plot what ever anti-government shit they want?”
Yes. As long as they don’t do something illegal in the process. Any of us are allowed to be as anti-government as we want without resorting to criminal activities. When you protest, that’s anti-government. When you vote against the sitting politicians, that’s anti-government (anti current-government). When you write a scathing article in a paper about a politician, that’s anti-government. Heck when you lie about a politician because you don’t like them, that’s anti-government and usually legal because politicians and other public people (like politicians) have less protection from defamation than private individuals.
If the government thinks there’s an active CRIMINAL activity, then they need to get a warrant before spying on that American citizen or citizens. If they can’t get a warrant, then they can’t spy on Americans. But don’t worry – FISA courts give warrants out about 95% of the time, despite their arguably unconstitutional nature since they were DESIGNED for FOREIGN terrorism threats, not domestic ones. (FISA=Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
“Then again, it’s now illegal to stage a coup”
It’s always been illegal to stage a coup – that’s not a new thing.
Although even the Founding Fathers said:
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Basically, “If you’re going to start a coup, you better win. If you don’t win, you’re gonna die.”
Which was pretty much the mindset of what happened in the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t legal to start a coup back then either. That’s why there was a war. If Washington and the others had lost, they would have been hung as traitors and criminals. Legally.
“because they didn’t like paying tax for their shit”
The colonists (most of them) didn’t mind paying tax for their stuff. Or at least would have been okay with it if they were treated like other English citizenry. They minded having taxation without representation, despite them being English citizens who should have had the same rights as English citizens living in England. The Boston Tea Party was not just about the tea tax, because that only came up to a miniscule amount. It just happened to be the last straw after they warned about levying more taxes without giving the colonists representation and any possible redress to the King about concerns they had with how they were affected by royal edicts from a King 3000 miles away who had no idea what was going on in the colonies.
If/when possible could we get an updated Cast list to account for the plethora of new characters that have been introduced since it was last updated.
What is with this anti-briefs propaganda? I didn’t sign up for this!
…and, you’re still here!? :D
he needs to pontificate at length on this issue.
Precisely! :)
I will just go on record as saying beige…Blyeah. Black, red, blue or occasionally grey for me. And nude? Hah. No. Too close to beigeml. And I was referring to bras, ya pervs!
Pervs, which I say with much love and affection.
Agree, beige has always and will always be a horrible color in my mind (for anything). It’s just too bland. Like you were too afraid to go full white, but didn’t like the idea of grey so you settled on an ugly light brown. Even pea green is better.
” Even pea green is better.” It makes me want, to vomit!!!
“ya pervs!” You called!!!
while not related to today’s comic, but rather the orbs being brought up recently, and reading up on *plasma based life* and ascended beings. Did a little write up thinking about the civilization tier scale DaveB did and the one I have been trying to work on and realizing some life forms may have ended up with an “unfair” advantage and were able to skip tiers outright. Which you see from time to time in sci-fi *heck talking about this in real life with someone resulted in a conversation about Doctor Who episodes*
-the relevance here being the idea of aliens perceived of as third tier ascended beings or Nth or whatever that may not be as old, or gone through the “great filters” like all these other aliens had to, simply by being born as super aliens.
the Great Unfair Advantage, tier skippers.
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/The-Great-Unfair-Advantage-tier-skippers-903070309
In Champions, my character Jinx (a small super intelligent black cat with phasing and luck manipulation powers) would prank the other members of the team by “hiding” their underwear BETWEEN the panes of glass in the base’s double glazing. And would phase into the gap between walls and caterwaul.
A new member didn’t know about Jinx, and was manning the base “alone”. Not realising that Jinx was still there, until they heard her yowling and meowing behind one of the control room walls. Instead of contacting the team and asking, they freaked out and tore out half the wall trying to rescue the cat. Who had gotten bored, and phased through the other side to find something to eat.
So you play a “Cat Who Walks Through Walls”? I see what you did there. ;)
but do they stick to the shadows…or have a thing for hard Russians.
They also made a “black cat with luck manipulation powers that hangs around walls”…..might have a thing for spiders instead!
Sexy underwear for men depends on the kink of the lady and guy in the relationship. Fundies and edibles for example. The Koi brand for boxer shorts adds lift so those might be a more wearable example.
My wife has a thing for male thongs for me but I hated them not enough cloth to keep things in place and the perma-wedgie kinda ruined it for me LOL
Ah the things you do for love…..
I guess I’ve been leading a sheltered life, because I’ve never been able to picture a situation where a woman asks a man, “Will you… wear this tonight… for me?”
I think women have a fundamental advantage over (straight) men, because women’s underwear makes men go “Hamanahamanahamanahamana,” but women will use men’s underwear for cleaning rags.
Cleaning rags? I use a lot of old clothes out in the shop for paint/grease rags. T shirts and socks work well but but briefs, boxers or even the wife’s old panties just don’t work that well.
Gotta admit I thought Harem was heatwave until I checked the collar and the character/cast panel….
Whoops!
Seriously though – which Harem is this?
So… I thought they were both on this page, with Heatwave in panel 1, and Harem in panels 5 and 6. Though I feel she looks more like some other character than either of them in the first panel, but I just can’t think of who.
It’s Berry
There, is only one Harem! :)
So, on this page we have Sydney, Jabberwokky, Heatwave, and some woman we’ve never seen before.
*checks the Who’s Who*
…No, no I’m pretty confident about this.
Here I was all ready to correct you about Heatwave actually being Harem, when I realized you were joking. Well played.
I disagree about no sexy underwear for a heterosexual male… There are a lot of sexy underwears for heterosexual males, and a lot of them are the same ones that are sexy for homosexual males. If it looks sexy on and to a homosexual male, it’s usually the same on a heterosexual male and to a heterosexual female.
What it is… is that the sexuality of heterosexual males is often a bit too fragile for them to ever take the time to evaluate the sexiness of another man to make their own choices about how to look sexy. This is also why men who take care of their appearance often look gay, because it’s seen as gay to do that, so most heterosexual men don’t do it, or they try to look like they aren’t doing it.
There may be some truth to this, but everyone has their own reasons for their behavior. I’ve never put a lot of effort into my appearance because I hate shallowness, and the cost of making myself look like a model doesn’t seem worth it. Furthermore, if I’m attracting people based on how I look, then those usually aren’t people I’m going to want to be around. I’m not saying I want to repulse people, but I can usually make myself presentable daily with 20 minutes worth of showering, shaving, and putting on deodorant. I don’t need a haircut weekly, or an hour of mirror time each day to be reasonably presentable. Jeans, tee-shirt, and running shoes is just fine.
As for evaluating the sexiness of another man, that has gotten easier for me as I’ve gotten older. I think it is largely a learned behavior from media, but it’s obviously nicer to look at a toned male torso than a flabby one or a man wearing a nice fitting suit rather than a dirty bathrobe. But there is a difference between “not offensive” and “sexy.” Sexy is a lot harder to evaluate. I don’t know where I might rank on the Kinsey Scale, but I’ve never found myself aroused by a man unless he was engaged in a sexual act. Maybe arousal is the wrong metric, and I should just know the same way we know if something is beautiful? If so, then maybe I missed that gene because I’m pretty sure I would just be using my experiences with media to evaluate rather than any personal preference. With regard to underwear, it’s not hard to see that something form-fitting that accentuates curves is nicer looking than the loose wrinkled butt that you get in tighty-whities. Maybe any nice looking intimate-wear I should assume is sexy. Because if it makes you look nice when you are almost naked then someone naturally attracted to you is probably going to be aroused…
That was a lot of rambling. Hopefully it was coherent because I don’t want to read over it on my phone.
Deus, really knows what looks good on him!
i didnt feel like scanning all the old pages, but the few I did… are all bras drawn in the same style, just different by cup and color?
When they’ve got to support a superheroic physique, that imposes certain engineering requirements that limit the aesthetic options available.
Definitely not a fan of the anime eyes, can they get scaled back to a more realistic size its throwing off the immersion.
Nope. We see multiple kinds used here on the page. “throwing off immersion” is a you problem and we’d all be better off by not arbitrarily restricting the artist’s range cause of personal artistic biases.
The eyes in the last panel by design convey a certain set of emotions distinct from the others expressions.
Yeah, that. Personally I quite like the big-eyed look, insofar as I even notice it.
When people started going on about Alita’s eyes, I was like “Huh? Are they supposed to be unusual or something?”
Decades of reading manga has clearly desensitised me to subtle deformations like that. Still haven’t reached the level of Sydney blithely ignoring a muppet Max, though.
No, that wasn’t Sydney ‘blithely ignoring a muppet Max’, that was Sydney attempting to ignore an hallucination or side effect of the ADD-begone meds
same on being desensitized. I have noticed it was one of two eye things a lot of people aren’t as freaked out about as you would see in folktales and myths, the other being human eyes in animals.
So long as the anime eyes aren’t like bigger than their foreheads like some toons but fall somewhere between Tenchi Muyo and Sailor Moon chances are if I saw them in real life It wouldn’t register to me at first anything was off, which was me with the Alita trailer. Heck I used this as the basis for some (human descended alien species) either naturally or from generations of gene mods. Including one where aliens with big eyes and small noses and mouths were manipulating human media to alter the standards of beauty in the more powerful and technologically advanced societies so people wouldn’t be all uncanny valley freaked out at first contact.
the human eyes in animals thing I noticed when you see those face swap apps and how often people are like “I didn’t even notice the chicken had human eyes” type of responses, thanks in part to cartoons putting human eyes in animals and forward facing eyes in everything at that. So as a joke I did put a moment where someone went to Hell and saw squirrels with forward facing human eyes and thought they looked like funny cartoon characters as opposed to people from centuries+ ago who would have seen them as horrifying abominations.
I can just picture people from the past having freak outs in the modern world with modern media, one look at a spot mini and its *a headless dog made of swords with a giant eye in the neck stump!.
Anybody that’s had kids knows the big-eye pleading/I’m sorry look lol. actually those aren’t “anime” eyes anyway those are basically the letter D on it’s back it’s a fast and easy way to make eyes plus being able to clearly see the emotions in the eyes without a closeup.
I honestly agree. My favorite style for this comic was at about the 2/3’s point. Ever since then its been getting too complicated and kinda weird.
Yet Heatwave’s hair doesn’t appear to match her bra :p
Jiggawatt sadly looks terrible now :(
That aint Heatwave, and she put on the wrong clone’s bra
In what way does Jiggs look terrible?
70% chocolate… yummmm. YUM!
First thing I thought was chocolate covered blueberries LOL
I think Brand X might be using ‘terrible’ to mean ‘off-putting because I’m not used to the really drastic change in hair color from what he was used to’, after Jiggawatt changed her hair color from white to blonde, then from straight to frizzy.
Was just attempting to get them to identify the ‘problem’ so DaveB can work on it (if He feels it’s a real problem)
Just saying something is ‘terrible’ isn’t very helpful
They might really think blue frizzy hair looks terrible on a drawing of an otherwise hawt lady.
That seems the most obvious idea of what Brand X means. “Blue frizzy hair makes her look terrible” is sort of helpful, although more helpful would be telling if it’s the blue, the frizzy, or both that makes her look terrible.
I don’t like the blue at all, but it could be because it’s frizzy. I’d have to see the frizzy style in blonde and the old style in blue to know if it’s one or both.
I loved Jiggawatt’s white and blonde hair. Though, I was glad to see the change from white to blonde, because sexy black woman with white hair shooting lightning, seems a little to close to a specific X-Man.
Oops. Harem. Still, didn’t match her hair. :p
jigawatt is gorgeous wtf
It’s probably because the blue hair combined with that hairstyle is off-putting to some people. She’s obviously gorgeous because she ha a perfect body, face, and physique, but the hair does look weird. Especially after we just got used to the hairstyle change. :) And the last hair color change. :)
I must say though, Jiggawatt goes all out on the dye jobs. She even dyes her eyebrows every time. And now that I notice it, so do Jabberwokky and Harem.
What I get is a strong statement “I am empowered. You have every right to be jealous.”
If feels more to me like…. well… when I think blue or green or neon hot pink hair, I think of it as a cry of ‘notice me!’ – a trumpeting ‘LOOK AT ME I STAND OUT’ sort of thing. Which, as I said, doesn’t really seem like a requirement for someone who can turn into living lightning/shoot lighting out of their hands/etc in order to get attention, and having a naturally top-tier rockin’ bod ensures she can stand out from the crowd no matter what color her hair is.
And while Harem having different colored hair makes sense from her desire to have each clone of her stand out as different, not to mention Harem’s very showy attitude, it doesnt seem to make sense for Jiggawatt, who seemed perturbed at Sydney pointing out her perfect body, pointing at her butt, when she was sunbathing topless on by the pool. Harem is a lot more of a show-off so I wouldnt be surprised for her to dye her hair any color.
Also Krona, the other person who has blue hair, doesn’t really look out of place because she gives off a very anime girl vibe to begin with, and just like in Scott Pilgrim, blue and green hair is normal in anime. :) Plus Krona isnt visually as much of a ‘stand out’ because she has a more ‘average human’ physique instead of ‘peak human’ physique (plus she is short). Heck, Krona might just do it because it’s fun to code a changing hair color.
…is it just me or is Jiggawatt’s skin darker then it used to be ?
*check older appearance*
Yes, yes it is. At this point she may as well be an outright shapeshifter with how different she is from one appearance to the next. Hell, the actual shapeshifters on the team have more consistent appearances then she does at this point.
Didn’t Jabbawocky used to have more tattoos than…well…none?
Shit, yeah she did, didn’t she ? Some kind of bird on her chest I think ? Covered her entire cleavage.
We don’t see Jabberwokky’s cleavage from the front in this comic. So we wouldn’t see the tattoo.
However, DaveB did forget the tiger tattoo that’s on her back, which we SHOULD see on the first panel here.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-852-laundry-hold-em/
(panel 2 here shows Jabberwokky’s back, which sports a tiger tattoo, while her front has a phoenix tattoo (or maybe eagle, more likely phoenix)
Oh the tiger tattoo can also be seen on Jabberwokky’s back here
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-588-ablution-disillusion/
(panel 2)
The phoenix tattoo on this page is a bit bigger than the one on the strip poker page, but in either case it’s understandable to not see it on THIS page, since we don’t get a good look at Jabberwokky’s chest or low enough down on her arm/shoulder area to see where the wings would outstretch towards.
So yeah, DaveB definitely forgot her tiger tattoo on today’s page. Or the doctor ‘healed’ her tiger tattoo right off. :)
Personally, I like Jiggawatt a lot, but I do prefer her with her more straight hairstyle from before.
The afro just looks a little messy to me. Not saying that all afros do, but I just don’t think it really flatters Jigga’s face or physique.
Maybe I just don’t like afros that aren’t black hair?
Maybe its just me …… But Jinx’s hair changed directions from panel 1 to panel 4. In one it hanging to her left and in 4 it hangs to the right …
oops I meant JaberW
No, that’s okay, believe she has one of them mid-length mohawks with shaved on both sides, at least the piercing didn’t change
Holy snakeballs! Just saw a possible real-life Jiggs: same skin tone, same size bewbs, same hair style (not the same hair _colour_ though)
She even has a choker-collar (generic black collar though)
I like Jigg’s new hair, personally.
The style? Colour? Or both?