Grrl Power #1055 – Lifestyles of the rich and eccentric
I’m not going to lie, this is one of my favorite pages I’ve done in a while. Even despite all the fiddly background stuff. Panel 5 cracks me up every time. Just the thought of that playing out in a TV show or something. Maxima’s eyes slowly tracking up from the trapdoor to Deus, her voice that perfect balance of exasperation and the exhaustion women experience around men doing stupid shit. “Seriously?” Ah, good times.
And I’m not taking any bets on whether he “accidentally” showed her the panels with the women in metallic paint. I mean, honestly, that could swing wildly in either direction for him.
And then there’s Deus’s pure joy at being able to finally show off some of his toys. Look, if I was a billionaire, I would 100% at the very least have a secret room behind a bookcase somewhere in my house or office. It wouldn’t even open up into a room full of weird shit, just like a little personal lounge with a mini fridge and a comfy chair for reading, with acoustically treated walls and a nice sound system. I would also probably have a room with a bunch of flip around panels, because WHY WOULDN’T I? I honestly question the sanity of anyone who has literally billions of “walking around town” dollars who doesn’t have some silly indulgent thing in their home or office. What is the point, otherwise?
Yes, Deus’s control pad is just a USB Novation Launchpad which is usually used for playing back sampled music, but I’m sure you can map those keys to anything.
Drawing this page made me think about trap doors in the floor. Like, now Deus has to walk down to the floor below him and carry those chairs back up. Yeah, he probably has some building maintenance people who can do that for him, but still, until they get around to it, he’s out of seating in his little office up there.
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If I was a super rich supervillain….hell if I was super rich, I would 100% have something just like this. Maybe with one mode dropping a disco all and make out music….
He’s my kind of supervillain.
He is NOT a supervillain! He has done more for the world than over paid muricans acting as superheroes he is awesome.
True true.
some supervillains do more for their domains than superheroes, doctor doom, lex luthor …. most of the reealy smart ones are invested in improving those around them …. themselves FIRST but others as well, never know when you will need good hench men and if you are a compleat jerk to your employees and potential employees you will only get the idiots …..
Indeed. Sometimes the supers even realize it.
Would not have figured Alfred for a Labor man. X’D
Luthor ain’t a supervillain, he’s a businessman who hates immigrants
If your racism is so virulent it drives you to a lifelong quest to kill immigrants, you just might be a supervillain.
Not all immigrants, just one in particular
After all he really is an Illegal Alien.
Ditto- if/when I ever get rich enough to build my own house there’s guaranteed gonna be at least one secret passage/hidden panel behind a bookshelf or through a wardrobe or underneath a cabinet or something.
I’m getting like a “If I Had a Million Dollars” vibe but for supervillains. And yes, supervillains would still eat Kraft dinners.
yes, but shaped into little people and deep-fried
DC Identity Crisis shows they play Risk. Granted, they weren’t supervillains there.
I see this as absolute win
Absolutely nothing beats Big D’s expression in panel 1.
That is a level of pure childhood joy that I have been longing to reexperience for 35 years.
I am so jealous of that, it hurts.
He had a similar expression right before he made Dabbler BSOD with his explanation about supers.
You only need to become as rich as Deus to… actually, you don’t. If you have dealings with children you probably know how it works: Tell’em there’ll be treats in the future and live toward it (*and* live up to it). It works remarkably the same with your adult self.
A little fed up with trying to get excess weight off the old rack, I promised myself fast food on friday. And I got myself fast food that friday. I still remember being happy as a child with it, years later. (The excess weight went too, eventually.)
But it only works in moderation. Here, Deus of course overdid it, the storage for all the panels is probably as big as the room itself. But so chances to show off are rare, and so he finally got that chance to actually use^Wshow off with the set-up.
“But why?” Seriously now, Max, you gotta ask? (Yes, yes she does, obviously. Even though she has her own company “car” and gadgetry division. “But that’s work!” Dear Max, please, you’re not fooling anyone.)
I get the same giddiness on a smaller level from having a book safe and a hidden safe. When I eventually build my own house I am definitely having a hidden room.
I was doing research into something else and found there’s a whole industry of hidden things using linear actuators to open them up. the TV in the ceiling is actually not a bad idea.
There’s also a TV which you flip over and it looks like a painting of the family. So that people might not even konw you have a TV :)
there’s a Samsung TV that comes in a picture frame. it displays full screen fine art in screensaver mode. so you don’t need it to flip it over.
I want two big screens mounted on a wall displaying one of those aquatic screensavers. that way I can have fish and not kill them. one reason I like Lego botanicals is they refuse to die. the Lego fish tank is in my build queue. I will let you know if I manage to kill those fish. I’m sure I will fall to pieces in that case.
You can also jack a $30 streaming stick into any TV and drop it in a frame for the same effect. The last couple companies I worked for did that in the conference rooms, nice giant art piece when not in use for presentations.
Except you can tell when a painting is actually a TV. What I’m saying is they have TVs that, on the other side, are acryllic or oil paintings so when flipped over, you can’t tell it’s a TV at all. Thieves are less likely to steal a family portrait than an 85″ TV. :)
I suspect frames 4 and 5 would’ve been slightly funnier if Max had been on one of the chairs (or at least standing on the trapdoor) and didn’t move…
Yeah, I had the same thought. :)
Because having an arsenal behind hidden panels is cool, that’s why.
Doesn’t everybody want a kitchen like this?
https://youtu.be/wBzHNoDyGQ4
Kitchen? Try my whole house! If I had that kind of money believe me there wouldn’t be anywhere I couldn’t reach out and grab something loud and nasty lol. Although hand grenades are a bit much…
Honestly? No. I like to cook. Hate to clean up, though. Especially messes like from accidentally putting in an olive green lemon or potato.
It’s good over-the-top movie material, of course. The kit is conspiciously well-matched to each team member. But day-to-day use practical, not so much. Oh, Bharda: Compare “getting the pig” from that other movie starring the same actor. (It also has an arsenal scene, but much more straight-forward.)
the secret panels make the room smaller, or the adjoining rooms smaller depending on how you draw it.
the trapdoor makes the floor weaker. I’ve always thought that some movie/show needs to have someone walk on the floor and realize something’s wrong with it because at least here in the US the building trades could not produce an imperceptible trapdoor.
now yes a concealed door is awesome. I’ve seen a YouTube video where the guy concealed the door to his basement workshop. and If I could have such a thing, I would. I’m fond of the bookshelf with extra movement myself.
sadly I think concealed doors and secret passages are far more common in fiction than life.
It’s not that hard to make an imperceptible trapdoor. You just have to make the whole floor solid enough that the people walking on it don’t get any feedback from it, and instead of counting on gravity dropping the door, have it actively moved. Then you can make it solid enough people won’t notice it.
Yeah, I agree, US carpenters do not get training in building proper trap doors. You need to import building trades from Cagliostro, where it’s a standard part of the training.
Making the room smaller doesn’t matter if you can just get a bigger house.
Additionally, it seems like an excellent way to sneak a bomb way too close to a VIP. Especially the rack of bondage toys; put a proximity or motion sensor on a high explosive disguised as… well, anything, and you can be reasonably assured of who is going to set that baby off, or at least that the boss will be relatively close when it happens.
I mean sure, they’re going to be pretty paranoid about letting anyone into Deus’ arsenal, OR into his private weapons locker, but you have to pay your minions pretty well to get them to consistently look very closely at a bunch of sex toys to make sure they aren’t the wrong kind of traps.
In nearly 60 years on this planet I’ve only ever seen one actual concealed room. The building was in a small town in southern Oklahoma. It was a two story frame structure dating back to the early 1900’s. By the time I saw it in the 1970’s it was just a dilapidated residence but it was near the railroad tracks and I was told that it had at one time been a hotel. Shortly before it was torn down there was a sale to get rid of the contents. In wandering through the building I was walking down the hall and noticed a hook and eye latch on an otherwise bare, papered wall. The latch opened a door that was flush and papered over. It opened into a short hallway that led to a honest to goodness, no shit barred cell with a lockable door. There was one high window that was also barred. To this day I wonder who was kept in that room.
My family’s cottage on the lake had a concealed compartment, built back in, oh, I guess it would have been the 1930’s? It was used to store life vests and the like.
The real difficulty with concealed rooms is that unless a house is large and rambling, it becomes just too obvious that there’s a room sized gap between your master and guest bedrooms, for instance. Real secret rooms and passages require houses that are confusingly laid out.
In England (Due to the change back and forth between Catholic and Protestant Churches) a lot of manor houses had “priest holes”. The were little hidden compartments or entire rooms to hold hiding priests.
As my parents used to take me around stately homes during holidays I’ve see quite a few.
Just thought you should know the “less clothed” versions of the vote incentive are not showing up at Patreon.
I like the sfw one. It is cute.
I don’t get the joke on her ice cream and Krillin shirt.
they are continuing the banana split wish, with much more impish results.
I understand the scenario, I’m just having a hard time parsing the joke on her shirt. Is the shirt about alternating wishes for ice cream and bringing Krillin back to life?
well bringing Krillin back to life is a sport in dragonball. Kinda like weaponized staring.
Oh, oh! I do weaponized staring, but only during bikini season! O.o
that is Master Roshi’s special skill.
I forgot to schedule it. :P
It’s up now.
Daddy’s little brat
Okay
Deus is just a male version of Sydney, isnt he? I wouldn’t be surprised if him acting like super villain is him just wanting to look cool and pretend to be a hairy Lex Luther.
Sydney is VERY well paid, and it’s only a matter of time before she starts tricking her home out with awesome stuff.
Sydney’s home, sometime in the future….
Tip back the hardcover of “50 Years of MARVEL” to reveal her stash of comics she’s collected from BEYOND.
He really is. He’s obviously _capable_ of world domination, but I’m not sure he’s temperamentally suited to it… he gets much more satisfaction from playing the villain than from actually enacting villainy.
Well said! ‘Capable, but not temperamentally suited’. Deus is having so much FUN! I already liked him because, self-described-villain or not, he is doing more to help normal humanity than any other group or government shown on Earth at this time. He is full of himself – has ambitions, goals, vast world-spanning plans, but he -cares- about people and wants to drag humanity – kicking and screaming if needs be – along with him.
But I just love him for having so much FUN as he does so.
So, is the implication here that for his super intelligence, his memory is still average, or that he is pretending to hit the wrong buttons to show off his secret panels?
What makes you think he accidentally called up those other things before he got to the weapons?
He probably did it on purpose to get a reaction out of Max.
Who knows, it’s entirely possible that he worked out all of the functions the buttons do, didn’t bother to assign them a particular sequence, and then just used a script to assign them in bulk. He might have literally never pressed some of those in the past, and that’s why this occasion is so exciting to him. Not too long ago he didn’t reside in a mansion in Galtyn, so maybe it’s just never come up yet.
I really think most of his memory lapses and the like are just him having fun screwing around with the people around him. You have to do SOMETHING for humor when all your jokes just go wooshing over people’s heads unnoticed.
Agreed.
If I ever win the lottery and build a house? There will be a semi-secret lair. I.e. The necessary authorities will know about it, but no one else.
First? Anyway that bad, trapdoor and panels are very Deus.
I mean, he’s right? Who wouldn’t have secret panels in their home if they could afford it?
But, yeah, he really should label those. (Although, super intelligence: He’s just pretending he doesn’t know which button does what, for the lutz.)
Given the movement, I think he the panels are on a conveyor belt of some description. Notice how the panels slide back, THEN to the side. He probably couldn’t just ‘call up’ the ‘wargear’ panel, he had to cycle through the ‘tasteful metallic erotica’ panel set, then the ‘toybox’ set, and THEN he could get to the ‘wargear’ set.
Presumably there’s either more panels past the wargear than there were proceeding it, OR there’s something he didn’t want to show Max in that set of panels.
or he legit forgot which way he needed to cycle them.
I think Deus is going to become my new favorite character of this series. He’s just got too many cool gadgets and it feels like he read whole Evil Overlord List. Not that he necessarily applies all of the ideas from it but… he does a pretty good job regardless.
“Like, now Deus has to walk down to the floor below him and carry those chairs back up. Yeah, he probably has some building maintenance people who can do that for him, but still, until they get around to it, he’s out of seating in his little office up there.”
Oh, he’s got extra chairs behind a hidden panel.
Of course he does… he’s _totally_ the kind of villain who would have some spare chairs to replace the ones that fell down the trapdoor. It’s the kind of attention to detail you expect from a proper mastermind.
Old money will have rooms full of furniture they’re not currently using. Oh, 1960s shag is back in style? Send the boy to room 3 to redecorate the parlor and smoking room.
A trap door may not work so well against flying supers.
He probably have a hidden tube in the ceiling to suck the flyers down to the dungeons.
Oh man, I would LOVE seeing Deus wearing the ball gag, restraints and being paddled! His man buns are to die for!
Are you Guesticules’ twin from the opposite universe?
Because if not for the last sentence, I could see Guesticules saying the same thing.
Don’t be rude, seeing SmugD paddled is a disgusting thought!
Oh, and a ‘man-bun’ is a style of haircut
Man Bun is the hair, Man Buns is his sexy butt. No need to deny the feelings for the Big D!
Whatever, just take a hairbrush to it!
Kinky! Prong side down leaves some lovely imprints on the cheeks doesn’t it?
Didn’t come as a surprise that Deus is a bdsm sub.
We have known he’s into BDSM for a long time, but he’s probably a dom. The bondage frame in his office definitely doesn’t fit someone his size.
Switch probably, but definitely not a pure Dom. His PA accidentally outed him at the restaurant regarding him in the “suit of the cat.”
Doesn’t specify who’s scourging and who’s getting scourged.
We’ve known he’s into BDSM for a while, and he’s more likely a dom – the bondage frame in his office isn’t for him, as wouldn’t fit a man his size.
We’ve known for a while he’s into BDSM, but I don’t think this implies he’s a sub. In fact, he’s probably a dom or maybe a switch, considering the bondage frame in his office (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-416-meta-analysis/) wouldn’t fit a man his size.
Yeah maybe. But I think it would be in his style to want to be dominated by a female superhero. Especially one with golden skin.
Lorlana also already let that slip at the dinner date back in the US.
He is begging for a pegging from Maxima.
Deus should have paid attention to the importance of health & safety in construction, as seen in these instructional videos from the Evil Organisation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDedpreZH-0
‘Secret panels of the rich and famous’
Do we really want to know?
IKR?!
WRONG LEVERRRRRR!
Why do we even have that lever?!?
Why does she even have that lever?
She likes having her ‘levers’ Krunk’d
Deus is 100% my favorite “villain” of all time
You know… i have considered it before, but its just super, super apparent from this panel – Deus is a lot like Sydney is, just with money. (and business instead of say, gaming)
I think you underestimate just how well paid Sydney is. She has money. We haven’t really seen her spend any of it yet, though. Part of that might be because she had a professional helping her manage her money so it doesn’t all get blown all at once. But I would 100% be expecting Sydney to be spending at least something on random goofy stuff.
somewhere in the back archives after she gets back from her ‘vacation’ she starts a swear jar on base with 50K in bills! so she’s saving up for a cash down payment on her wedding I imagine. its going to be an event. a big part of the budget is going to be the grooms security detail that will ‘encourage’ the groom to show up on time.
It’s $10K actually, and she pulled it out of her paycheck mainly as a funny way to start a conversation with Max. She was on board with being responsible, but is also now making more in a single paycheck than she used to in a year – we should definitely be seeing some nerd merch now and then.
Lets be honest… Half of the reason why Dues would not go full evil is because he enjoys PLAYING a super villain and going full ham. He just enjoys it far more than doing some boring dull “Take over the world through generic X”
Besides how else could he show off his stuff? Just look at all the buttons! Even Sidney would squeal at all the possibilities that could be done!
Deus giving off some serious dorky-dad vibes with this page. It’s both a bit of fresh air since it’s a departure from his usual posturing and… in line with how Maxima feels, a little disappointing. XD
First, absolutely no way Deus didn’t “accidentally” press a single one of those.
Second, God I love Deus. He’s absolutely one of my favorite villains.
Well,at least he did have what she was looking for.
Okay, you’ve made me like Deus for the first time ever.
Note that her near-invulnerability doesn’t make her immune to sudden-onset stupidity-induced headaches.
I would be more worried about having my uniform sandblasted away and having to continue the battle as the Naked Golden Goddess….
Put. the. candle. back.
“Seda-give?!”
This is your reminder that super smart does not mean super boring. Or mature, as some people prefer to call it.
Looks like there’s no govt-based Health and Safety in Galtin, because they’d have problems with Deus’ office.
Like in this Mitchell And Webb sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDedpreZH-0&ab_channel=RegeeneHo
Okay, first Deus has artistic tastes… granted they are nudes but they are tasteful. Second… bruh that is WAY too many “fashion accessories” on the blue walls. But it is nice to know that he is always ready to fight.
That art seems to have a theme heavily based on Maxima’s physical aesthetic though
And once again Deus being my spirit animal on things I’d do as a supervillian billionaire. Though make sure if you do label those buttons, make sure to invent your own personal coding to do so. I’d personally use animals or old newspaper comic characters. As long ad my brain knows whose face to associate with what button, I won’t have to worry so much on someone turning my office against me.
A Mr Burns trap door button in the office is a must for any billionaire.
Maybe a Rancor in the pit below.
Hmmm, interesting that the paddle would say “Daddy’s little brat”. I mean, concerning the WOMAN with the SHINY, BLACK SUIT of the CAT thing. Two possibilities here, either he’s a switch, or he’s bi. Maybe both. That’s interesting to know… for reasons *cough cough*.
Though to be fair, I wouldn’t say no to secret panels, especially with a table full of buttons that go “mr. Burns trapdoor”, “porno room”, “secret gear”, “secret gear (wink wink nudge nudge)”.
Lifestyles of the rich and eccentric.
Yes, I would also have hidden panels everywhere. For clothes, drinks, books, entertainment systems, safe storage for armament, *hrm* for self defence of course. I would also install a hidden garage to store cars, bikes and air-planes as in The Bat Cave (yes, i would also have smoke machine for when it rises from the floor, because COOL!)
haha he gets more and more ridiculous