Grrl Power #1046 – Four on the force field
In panel three, Dabbler really means that altering someone’s mind without their consent is illegal. Super powers are new enough to the public that things like psychiatrists with mental powers aren’t really a thing yet. There’s definitely been uses for mental powers in the past, whether it’s a super, or a vampire from the Twilight Council helping out a soldier with PTSD and the like. (There’s also less sanctioned but still official uses for it like flipping a spy’s allegiance or Secret Service super bodyguards keeping all manner of foreign mental influence away from key personnel in the chain of command.)
That said, most supers (and supernaturals) with mental powers working for the government are part of Arc-DARK or various other intelligence agencies. The consensus is that the American public will be okay if big strong hero smash car on bad guy, but would lose their collective shit if one of Arc-SWAT’s field agents named “Z. V. BIHMP” (Zero Violence Because I Have Mental Powers)” walked up to a rampaging criminal and said “You should surrender yourself and cooperate with the authorities.” and the bad guy said “Okay.”
I know the question you’re asking. Can Sydney’s shield cut stuff when it pops into existence, and did she almost do something really horrendous to Dabbler and Parfait? Well, it can cut through water, certainly. Solids? Honestly I haven’t decided. Maybe it’s one of her power ups. If she can’t, that would mean that someone could zip tie her ankle to a chain link fence and she wouldn’t be able to raise her shields. It would be a temporary state of affairs as she could laser or lighthook the fence in short order, but it opens up a number of tactics that could be used against her.
So, I don’t normally talk about my birthday because I like keeping focused on the comic, but I thought this one time I’d indulge. First off, my birthday is May 4th, which means I was born under the sign of auspicious nerd cred. My birth year… was 1972. Which means I just turned 50. Yeah… I’m at least as shocked as you are. That sounds fucking old to me, too. I mean, apologies to anyone older than me, but 50 is one of those milestones that I think everyone agrees officially makes someone “an old.”
I don’t know what 50 is supposed to feel like, but I definitely don’t feel it. If you’re suddenly picturing some white-bearded grandpa in a straw fedora and a Hawaiian shirt gingerly bent over a drafting table, you can just knock that off right now. Still have a full head of (brown) hair, and no conspicuous wrinkles. The only thing that’s starting to hint at my age is a little more gray in my goatee. I’m not going to pass for 30, but 40? Eh, maybe.
The thing that makes me feel a little better about suddenly being 50 is remembering that Tom Cruise is 60. He was 52 in Edge of Tomorrow, 53 in M:I; Rogue Nation. Or maybe a year younger in each depending on when they were filmed. My point is, the dude doesn’t look fucking 60. Sure, actors have professional fitness coaches/consultants, and some of them get a little nip and tuck here and there. Still, it makes me think that 50 maybe isn’t so old. Also, Keanu Reeves was 50 when he made John Wick. Kate Blanchett was 48 as Hela in Thor: Ragnarok, and she was hella fine in that. Anyway, if I sound defensive, it’s because 50 still sounds old to me.
But let me tell you why being 50 is actually pretty cool. Being born in 1972 means I was 5 when the Atari 2600 came out. When you’re 5-10 years old and neither you nor anyone else has ever played a video game before, they were amazing. Well, some of the games were. The lack of a “seal of quality” on the 2600 library did doom the console because there was some shit game for it. But some of them were definitely fun. Nowadays? Have you ever played a collection of those retro games? Even with the spark of nostalgia on my side, they held my interest for about 5 minutes apiece. The point is, I got to grow up with the video game industry, alongside the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Apple IIgs, the X86 PC Clones. Ah, good times. Especially when Sound Blaster came along and made it so PC’s could do more than beep. Star Wars: Dark Forces on a Sound Blaster 64AWE was the business.
Speaking of Star Wars, that also came out when I was 5. I don’t recall seeing it in the theater, but I do remember seeing Empire. That’s less important than the overall influence that Star Wars had on science fiction in general. Before Star Wars, sci-fi was… well, kind of boring. Yes, Star Trek first aired in 1966, and definitely had a major impact, but other that there was Doctor Who and… a bunch of stuff like Flash Gordon. Not the one with the Queen soundtrack either. It was mostly a bunch of black and white stuff that made space look like basically any other job, only it involved a lot of foil and clothes dryer tubes. But man, after Star Wars came out? If you make a habit of watching bad movies, (or MST3K/Rifftrax) you know that you can gauge a movie’s real success based on the number of terrible rip offs that get made after its release. Jaws? Yeah, there’s a lot of bad shark movies out there. Alien rip-offs are practically a sub-genre of their own. But you know who the absolute king is? Yeah, mother fucking Star Wars. You think Battlestar Galactica would have gotten made without Star Wars? Or Starchaser: The Legend of Orin? (So many of you are like, “the fuck is that?”) or Prisoners of the Lost Universe, or Starcrash or you get the idea. The point is that it changed how people thought about sci-fi, and it changed everything that came after it.
So yeah, my formative years were filled with Piers Anthony and Dragonlance novels, Chris Claremont X-Men, Atari, Commodore 64’s, and Nintendo, Stars both Trek and Wars, the tail end of the Cold War, post Moon-landing America (when it was still majorly on people’s mind and not “something my parents generation did with fucking slide rules”), Robotech (yes, the Harmony Gold version, but it was fucking amazing), and slasher films where actors were covered in real fake viscera and not fake digital gore. I’ve lived through porn being a thing you sneak a look at if you have a friend who knows where his dad kept his Playboys and/or Hustlers to the BBS era of watching a single picture of a naked lady load literally one line of pixels at a time to unlimited HD porn all the time everywhere, and lived through 5.25″ floppy disks and Bill Gates saying that 640K of RAM is more than anyone needed, to “Ug, this Ipad only comes with 64 gigabytes of storage and doesn’t even have an SD Card Slot.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer to be 20 because it’d be a lot more likely I’d still be around to check out the PlayStation 21, but it is what it is. I don’t ever pine for “the good old days” like a lot of proper old people, but being alive when computers basically weren’t a thing to where we are today? From there literally being maybe 13 TV channels to “all media ever on instant demand?” From print porn to omniporn? It’s been an awesome ride so far, and here’s to another 50 years (when I’m sure I’ll insist I don’t look a day over 90.)
Almost done with the May incentive. Probably be up with the next monday comic.
April Vote Incentive is up! Looks like someone had better make sure their life insurance includes acts of Snu Snu.
Alternate versions over at Patreon include less cloth-y versions as usual, but also some of those color changing chokers.
Her shirt, since no one has figured out the kanji yet, says “I ahegao you. (As long as you ahegao me.)”
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Happy birthday, young man.
double succubus for double fun, can’t stop laughing since parfait showed up.
Dave,
What do you mean you haven’t decided on the shield power up cutting through solid objects?
Way back when you posted up the picture of the Orbs upgrade view, you commented that you had worked out all of the upgrade paths and abilities… no retconning! Who do you think you are, Marvel or DC?? “Crisis on Infinite Harems”? “Global Conflict Maxima”?
I’m just giving you a hard time. It’s your work, you are obviously allowed to make changes to fit your narrative :)
not surprised, when designing a character and what they can do, sometimes something that should have been obvious just slips through the cracks. Maybe you were thinking about them fighting in a big open field against an army of enemies, or designing with space battles in mind, or rule of cool or rule of funny; but then down the line you write a scene and its like…hold up…*checks notes*, what exactly would their powers and abilities do in this situation? Its like the clear shield vs light discussions from the first pages that came up again later when other clear shields came into play, and the discussions in the comments as well regarding the different ways to “explain” it away (a super soft retcon if you were, not really changing events, but making it so something always was that you hadn’t really thought of till now so its written in stone going forward).
The battle vs kaiju squids. When she was hiding in ruins. Shield meshed with ground and walls. Also might have happened during he prekidnapped scene.
yes, it clearly forms to flatten across the ground and other surfaces, although this does wander if it can detect a difference between continuous surfaces *floors, walls, ceilings, ground etc…) and obstruction surfaces like debris, chairs, and other shorter objects not part of the continuous surface), or if control over the differentiation for the shield between them is an upgrade option.
I’m 55. I know exactly what you are talking about – all the wonderful things that have occurred in our lifetimes. And the 80’s – let’s not forget how amazing it was to be a young adult in the 80’s! I sometimes look back and wonder how we accomplished the things we did before computers and the internet – I mean, c’mon – going to the library and looking through a giant box full of cards to find which shelf in which section and where on that shelf a book is supposed to be that was full of 10 year old information in order to write that report?
My mother was a librarian from 1972 til she retired in ’98 ah yes the dewy decimal system…. (retches) it was close to the grade school so my kid sister and I would go there until my father got off work so yeah I was a book nerd until high school LOL.
The 80’s was definitely a good time to be a kid/young adult. Some of the fashion from that era does make me cringe honestly though.
thinking back to when Sydney “embiggend” the field at the press conference, I feel like there might be a “slide” to adjust the size of the field and perhaps the size is adjustable on the fly.
I’m pretty sure that’s what she did there, start the shield just big enough to enclose her then rapidly expanded it to push them away. That’s why they went flying backwards like they were hit by something.
I’m about to hit 44 (God, how did that happen?), so I definitely feel you on pretty much everything you said. My formative years were filled with Nintendo and the Super Nintendo, and they were the shit! My friend and I reminisce occasionally about the hour long grudge matches in the original Super Mario Kart battle mode. We even developed our own signature moves on it. Good times. :)
Born in ’70, and you just hit everything I’m feeling. I do not feel like I’m 52, although my body decides to warn me now and again I ain’t young. I did see Star Wars (before it was “a new hope”) in the theaters, and I thank my parents soundly for allowing me to go see it, and then putting up with my life-long obsession with SW.
So Happy Birthday! Enjoy yourself, and thank you for creating GrrlPower. May you still enjoy drawing and entertaining over the next 50years!
You just made me feel young again…and I always thought you were younger then me ot begin with! Hah! You are a young soul. Always making me smile. Don’t ever change, you nut.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!
I’m 62 born 1960 and I remember TV rabbit ears with tin foil on them, telephones heavy enough to kill, tubes that glowed in the back of radios and TV’s, black and white TV shows, Flower power and hippies, what to do when a nuke was dropped, and so on…
You’d be surprised how many people out there that don’t know that cell phones and social media are less than 25 years old! Fox started out as a small TV station out of Chicago, Ill. channel 32 (UHF). ALL TV & radio stations shut off at midnight. Self serve gas stations didn’t start until the 80’s my first real job was pumping gas. In ’88 my wife was pregnant with our first woke up craving clark bars at 3am I had to drive 3 towns over to find a store open by time I got home she was sound asleep and didn’t want them “they made her sick” lol. Ah memories…
happy birthday youngster… i’m a year older:)
we need a name for ourselves, like “the video game generation”
Happy just-after birthday dude! May 4th is a great natal day – and you do great work for a kid! I’m 64 – born the month Sputnik launched – and yeah, it doesn’t seem like age is the same as it used to be. Maybe it’s the preservatives in the food** – which would be kinda cool – or general longevity due to vaccines, better health care & sanitation. That said, I’d rather be my age now than a newer-model 20 – but I would like the option to upgrade to a meat-bag 2.0 that could live 200+ years, TBH.
**Preservatives DO slow the rate at which dead bodies decay now, as compared to bodies of those who eat a diet without preservatives that are not just salt, dried or smoked foods.
Happy birthday, fellow ’72 model! Our warranties expired years ago and everything’s started creaking and making disturbing noises when one gets out of bed in the morning. The times I feel old is when I catch myself realizing things I think of as “not that long ago” happened before many of my co-workers were even _born_!
One option is to have the shield differentiate between organic and inorganic matter. I’m not sure there’s any physics or chemistry based justification that would make sense for that, but a lot of powers in comics use it for exactly the same reason as would be useful to you, if you don’t want her capable of intentionally or accidentally bisecting people.
Nth tech, probably some multidimensional imprint signature that differentiates between the complex energy interactions of life forms with the interconnecting buffer *or Higgs Boson field I guess its called now…* and the other sub-fields with interdimensional reactions *like pinging the psionic field and so on which could be used to determine the presence of sapient thought patters*. Honestly this tech could be well below 4th tier and something you could see in the 1.5 and 2 tier ranges as “Life sign detectors”. or “Captain this life form is emitting sapient thought patterns according to the sensers*.
You share your birthday with cartoonist Shaenon Garrity (of “Narbonic” and “Skin Horse”). So happy day to both of you!
Shouldn’t it be “fortitudinous” with a “t”?
“From print porn to omniporn” that will be my quote of the week to represent time.
Happy Birthday from someone who’s had the past year to ponder the 50yo label and still feel like I’m 40ish (1971).
On the age thing, I’m only five years younger than you, DB, and don’t feel a bit past 35. At most. I get regularly pegged at 25 and don’t have arthritis or any of that creaky stuff slowing me down yet. Heck, I’m in my senior year at college! (Had to drop out the first round due to lack of funding.)
As for whether shields can cut, it varies depending on the person and the power. The Invisible Woman can depending on the writer, Green Lanterns usually can, but Zhantee of ElfQuest can shield and nothing else. (And even aside from part-owning a comic store that clearly sells used comics, I would be really surprised if Sydney didn’t know about that series.)
Parfait is so adorable, and apparently into anime… She is like a mix between Dabbler and Sydney, with a heap of innocent charm added in… I can’t wait to see more of her
Hehe boob squish
You’re 6 years older than my youngest, who was born when I was 19. Happy B-Day!
Congratulations on your first half century!
I too have the privilege of not having my mistakes of my twenties recorded for all time because cell phone cameras were not invented yet!
We alone are free to create our own mythos! To craft our origin story to our liking! I mean sure, there is the occasional, faded daguerreotype of us wearing rayon bell-bottoms, easily dismissed as being the fashion at the time, but our past is ours to control!
I do have to chime in about the force field and cutting through solids.
It has already been shown that her force field can have holes in it. It has also already been shown that she can form it while standing on solid ground, and still move without taking the ground with her. That means, as far as I can tell, that the shield will still raise, it will just form around solids and not cut them. So if she were chained to something, she could shield herself, but would still be chained.
My theory with the shield which would prolly resolve the question. If there is an obstruction, the shield tries to appear closer to Sydney until there is no obstruction. Then it expands to the desired size, hence the ability to actually shove Dabbler and Parfait away with the shield.
This would however cause some hilarious antics with the ankle zip-tied to the fence. Imagine the shield having to form closer and closer until it finds itself skin tight just to get under the obstruction, and then it forms and expands leaving poor Sydney no longer wearing her zip-tie, or anything else more loose fitting than skin-tight. It also means the shield wouldn’t be sheering through things, unless she picked up the “sheer through things” shield upgrade. It’s probably next to the “Electroshock things that touch the shield” upgrade.
Parfait seems kind of…innocent?…Wholesome?…Cinnamon Roll?…for a succubus.
honestly I would suspect many classic mimicking were like that to throw off the misogynistic men treating women like children and property. He thinks she’s just some naive sex toy he can convince to do whatever he wants, not realizing it all an act, a lure, mimicking what their prey would be drawn to before snapping them up *like an angler fish, or those predatory fire flies that emit the mating light signals of a smaller species*.
I may have mimics on the brain right now. But the principle is the same, give the target what they want, make the target comfortable, think they are in control of the situation, that THEY are the predator; only to turn around and prove them wrong as they are the meal here.
52 here. Ah, the old Atari games. Surprised you never brought up the classic Arcade games that seem so old-fashioned today, too, many of which can be downloaded
Yeah, Star Wars did for Sci-fi what The Hobbit did for fantasy. Just a huge leap forwards in how seriously it was treated.
You mentioned the moon landing. I always remember the birthday of a girl I went to school with because her Birthday was July 20, 1970, 4 days before mine… and one year after they landed on the moon.
Oh My ME do I wish for the talent to make a drawing of Sydney with triple G rack!!!
Depends on you, I think. I don’t do anything constructive at all, I’m sitting on my ass right now, and at 40 I’m pretty sure I’m an old. So I think it’s more about how much life you have in you, whether you become old, not the numbers.
Three observations:
1: Sidney may be getting some adrenaline booster and serious anger issues over being rendered helpless and at someone else’s mercy. Dabbler may want to consider that going forward.
2: Looks like we may be getting a “I’ve fought bigger” superhero moment.
3: Really thinking about it, what does Tom and these demons actually bring to the table in terms of Earth defenses? I mean if the cintinent sized ship with its robeast biomechs (or fel gods or whatever those were), shows up to Earth what can the Infernals do in defense of Earth? Tank demons throwing large chunks of metal isn’t going to cut it. The demons have strength and magic but where do they really stand on the civilization scale? Interplanetary committee standings, and over all military might to protect worlds they claim? Saying “we can just call upon the Overlord to handle that space ship while we hide under rocks” won’t cut it in a full on military conflict the encapsulates an entire planet. and while the demons can demoralize humans thanks to superstition, any aliens without them as bed time boogymen, or are equal or greater in power won’t be demoralized by their looks and titles.
I turned 45 in March, but my experience echoes yours quite a bit. Different country, and I saw episodes 4-6 on VHS rather than in theaters before I had turned 7. Atari 2600 was my first own console (pass-down from my uncle) and so on. I still can’t truly reconcile with the fact that I’m less than 5 years out from the 50 mark, but I certainly don’t feel particularly old yet, neither mentally nor physically. I both envy and pity my kids in terms of how accessible technology and information is these days; they get all the toys but much less of the understanding of the underlying systems since they don’t have to build them from scratch by themselves.
So, my assumption on how Sydney’s shield works is that it expands from her body in a semi permeable state, allowing it to collect air, pass through friendlies, not rip off her clothes, etc; but doesn’t get to do so in a selective state, so she has to mentally set a ‘radius’ where it switches from permeable to not. Also, a sphere centered on her at that radius would likely be small enough to cut off bits of [i]her[/i] not just bits of Dabbles and Parfait.
Also, hypothetical mind powers guy could alter targets memories and pretend to be a high tier organic telekinetic and pull the same stunt Maxima did a bit ago and threatened to do violent things to the villains junk. While, again, not nearly as well received as throwing a car at someone, I think most people would assume that violence towards one junk would be a pretty good argument to stand down.
One thing I always liked about your comic was that you knew the separation between the power fantasy element and the vigilantism elements of super heroes, and you’ve shown it again, as mind powers are one of the very few abilities that likely aren’t covered by the legal system in some way beyond something like fraud.
Happy Birthday! I just had my 55th last month. I really like Parfait, hope she shows up from time to time. :)
A: “You’re old…”
B: “I’m not old, I’m just older than you.”
You aren’t old until you think you’re old. Since my warrantee ran out when I was 16, I’ve become a well used and abused body greatly in need of a complete tune up, but I’m not old. I’m planning on a midlife crisis somewhere around 32nd or 33rd century ;P
I’ve been feeling bone-tired of life (rather than bone-tired due to vigorous physical activity or bone-tired from deep focus or, as now, bone tired due to 12+ hours of continuous attention draining by habitual nuisance upstairs neighbours) since I was eight or so.
I’m really quite done with this game of soldiers. Not “so deep in a dark hole there is no other way out imaginable”, but, you know, bored and tired of all the senseless drama of playing the life game. Instead of “not king yet”, “not dead yet”.
Happy Birthday!
I just had my 55th last month.
I really like Parfait, hope she shows up again!
Happy friggin birthday from a slightly less “not old” person (April 1971). So. Lacking the nerd cred date, but everything else (dial phones to iPhones, Atari/Odyssey2/Intellivision/Amiga, Soundblaster, all that stuff! I got the gray goatee in my 40s sufficiently that the wife asked me to shave it off, but look at people like Keanu, J-Lo, Jen Freaking Anniston, and yeah, 50 doesn’t look that horrible.
May the Fourth be with you, and Happy Force-Day as well!
You’re not old yet. Heck, you’re not even well marinated!!!
Actually it would be pretty funny if one of the so-far undefined orbs ripped Sydney’s clothes off as a side-effect when she used it.
Happy Solar Orbit Day, Dave! I’ll be right where you are in 7 months, so I know how weird the notion of 50 is to contemplate. The upside to being a creative is that we can do it pretty much as long as we want to. Keep up the great work! It’s been a hell of a ride so far. Oh, and big ups for mentioning Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. One of the best Start Wars ripoffs out there, by my estimate. I could totally see Silica and Dev DeBrimi wandering around Fracture Station with Arthur parked in the ship bays.
Woot! StarChaser
“Some men are honest, Some men are thieves. Only Dag Dabrini is both”
I have stealing this line for years.
The first time I felt old I was 30 when the nieces and nephews were watching Bambi and I realized it had been 25 years since I last watched it.
Their mom was 24.
A fully older than legal drinking age adult started breathing more recently than I had last watched Bambi. To this day i still haven’t watched it again.
Similar here. It’s when you hear from someone you knew in primary school, and now their kids are going to secondary school…
Mental powers useful for subjugating large numbers opponents without causing anyone permanent harm should be welcomed on a Superhero team. Maybe not to the point where the people put themselves in legal jeopardy, but at least a mass Stun or Sleep type skill would be very useful.
Dabbler already has a Sleep type spell. Which she has in fact used before, during the restaurant fight. Multiple times, actually. SAVA LAVA CUTI.
First against Glowbug or whatever her name was.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-235-the-rad-muncher/
She also tried using it against Vehemence but he was too powerful and kept shrugging it off until he finally gave up.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-256-tactical-shift/
She also used her succubus abiities to alter someone’s mind at least once – with Jabberwokky.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-237-the-tongue-is-mightier-than-the-sword-as-are-boobs/
Which wound up lasting a lot longer than it should have because of Jabberwokky’s powerset.