Grrl Power #1103 – Interrorgation
And let’s check in with the happenings back in the states. Looks like things are eating up! I’ll show myself out.
Tetsuo Theme.Mp3 for those of you weirdos who don’t read comics and novels with a slew of dramatic music queued up on your soundboard.
Chimyriad isn’t in the Who’s Who because we haven’t seen her face yet. That’s the problem with shapeshifters. Any photo ID of her would be seriously sus anyway.
I think John Carpenter’s The Thing is pretty much the best monster movie ever made. I know, you’re like “But what about Alien?” Alien is, IMO, one of the best horror movies ever made. I mean it’s a horror movie featuring a monster, but The Thing isn’t really a horror movie, so I draw that distinction between them. But you’re like “But what about [insert your favorite genre of scary movie here]?” No, because slasher movies aren’t scary, they’re about boobs and gore. Demonic possession films are all dumb because they’re like… I don’t know. Being scared of radiation poisoning from Microwaves. It’s not a thing. (But people my age all remember those warning signs businesses had to put up by their breakrooms warning of a microwave potentially being in operation, right? What was that about? Maybe early microwaves had shitty shielding and people with archaic pacemakers had to legitimately be afraid of them, but my impression is that it was a new technology and the stupid masses were experiencing the usual bout of unjustified technophobia while everyone with working brains rolled their eyes and patted the dumb-dumbs on the head in a reassuring and definitely not patronizing manner.
What was I talking about? Oh, right demonic possession. It’s mental illness misdiagnosed by the ignorant and pious, and supposedly scary movies about it just aren’t. Also movies/shows about haunted houses/ghosts. The soundtrack is doing a lot of heavy lifting in those. Jump scares are 90% music sting.
Anyway… I love The Thing and Lovecraftian body horror type stuff. If I hadn’t spent my youth drawing my own superheroes and fantasy art, I could have definitely gone down the path of macabre monster art. I imagine I’d be spending a lot of time in ZBrush creating things with tentacles and too many teeth. So I got to practice it a little here. It was fun, but I still like drawing sexy superheroines. Maybe my next project will be Chesty McFadden and the Cthulhu Kid, where Chesty is like a sexy female Hellboy type action detective who teams up with a Shoggoth to, uh… I dunno, save the world from something worse than Cthulhoids?
The November Vote Incentive is up!
I went a little simpler with the art this time, which is to say I didn’t add like 9 passes of lighting and detail work. I wasn’t trying to chintz out on the time input or anything, I’d been browsing around ArtStation since I like torturing myself with all the amazing art there, and found a few people who do nice clean styles that are more Arcane (the League of Legends Netflix show) than Love, Death and Robots, and by LD&R I mean the ones that are like “Look at how realistic our skin textures are!” and not the ones that are more Pixar-y or just like 2D cell art or whatever.
Enjoy variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
It was at that moment they realized they’d f***ed up.
Right idea, but I think fewer words would actually be more intimidating.
Goon: “My hand!”
Chimyriad: “_My_ hand.”
I wonder if the concept of “critical flesh” applies to her … http://www.geist-panik.com/
Extra lives equal to the number of people she’s eaten?
Yes! Hellsing did this too. I love the trope of “Sure she’s an abomination, but she’s OUR abomination.”
A…abobmayshum?
*sad little chibi noises*
OOoooh, that meshed up nicely to my memory of the little girl in this clip – https://youtu.be/0SYpUSjSgFg?t=23
No, Bob Mason was an Apache (Kiwi Country singer, died in 2009)
Chimyriad strikes me as being in love of the sound of her own voice, whatever form that may take
Kanedaaaaaa!
Tetsuuuuuooooooo!!!
This is literally the only thing I remember from Akira.
Saw it when I was like 8 at summer camp.
A possible solution for Chimyriad’s Who’s Who? picture: just randomly pick a picture from the database, and add a few more assorted random pictures so it’s not always someone we would otherwise recognize. And, of course, also the image from panel 9.
Another solution: split the image 8 ways, and put all known appearances into each piece.
… except we didn’t have 8 appearances of Chimyriad to show for the profile pic, do we?
Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. How would we know? ;)
or just a question mark with all those eyes on it.
’cause that wouldn’t be cool and/or freaky at all.
“I bit you, now you’re infected! Soon you’ll be assimilated into the hivemind!”*
*Said while making it appear that his arm is being corrupted.
Good chance he’ll scream and pass out.
Noone mentioned Witchblade yet. Witchblade is very close to what you speak about – a sexy detective teaming up with shapeshifting monster. Only that teaming up is more like symbiosis.
The Darkness would be a better parallel, I think, the fact that Jackie Estacado isn’t a girl.
Prototype maybe?
That works, Witchblade is a symbiosis with a *coughcosmicbeingcough* (also insert eyeroll, the balance and 13 Artifacts while good looking thanks to the artist, were some bad storytelling and worse world building…
Darkness is more a possession and umbrakinetic manifestations rather than shapeshifting, but yeah Prototype, a virus that collects mass forms weapons, tentacles, eats people, and collects memories. and…spoiler….the player character has some existential crisis as they don’t know if they are the person or just the first victim of the shoggoth like biomass.
Um, Venom? Esp the whole Team-Up-With-Evil-To-Defeat-Even-Eviller trope.
Dang i remember The live action Witch blade. Wonder if its streaming anywhere
I Remember the Comic!!
I own the entire series *mostly* a few missing here and there from the 1990s, have the entire 2005 till the end run, including the mangas both original and colored and flipped comic versions…don’t have the small restart they did a few years after the series ended…because I didn’t know they were doing a restart, but it didn’t do well so didn’t last long…really the next generation hand off had already occurred and they screwed it up by the end.
The Blob was a nice monster. Maybe not the best movie, true.
B.O.B. Is a goddam _prince_ among monsters, and I will not hear a word to the contrary.
I think he is taken. He found a lovely platter of lime green jello to spend his life with in matrimonial bliss.
nah, that one evolved into Blobby from Hotel Transylvania
;)
This is now canon.
I think you missed an opportunity for Chimyriad being additionally freaky by making the word bubble tail come from the new mouth in the shoulder too.
“Chesty is like a sexy female Hellboy type action detective who teams up with a Shoggoth to, uh… I dunno, save the world from something worse than Cthulhoids?”
How about they save the world from humans? The Cthulhoids have suffered enough.
I like the touch with her teeth growing to puncture through his finger instead of biting further to do the job.
Considering the main mouth is closed around the hand, it would make more sense the word bubble comes from the second mouth. Otherwise, the suspense is kind of “muffled”.
So is Chimyriad any relation to Boxxy T. Morningwood?
I don’t think many others got that reference…
(For those who want to know search Royal Road for ” Everybody Loves Large Chests”)
Have I mentioned yet how much I like Chimyriad as a character?
My headcanon is that her natural form is baseline human, and she’s just cosplaying an eldritch horror because it’s funnier to watch them freak out than to just slip out of handcuffs and beat them up. Probably more tactically effective too.
It all depends on the specific situation.
Sometimes pure stealth is the way to go. Other times, you need to go for some form of confrontation. Ultimately, if confrontation is the best path forward, you want make sure you do whatever works best to keep you inside their OODA Loop, cycling faster than they can. Shock, fear, comedy, arousal, or sheer, thought-killing horror…whatever disconnects (or at a minimum delays) the cycle between orient-decision, that’s where you wanna live, until the enemy is completely overcome.
Being “Oh-Sweet-Angry-Baby-Jesus-Fuck-All-Is-No-No-No-No-No-Incoherent-Bowel-Evacuating-Oh-God-It’s-In-My-Shoes-What-Is-That-Why-Is-It-Wriggling-Mommy-Make-It-Not-Be-Real” is frequently good for that. But so is a pretty girl giggling at your joke, or that stubbly handsome guy who smiles down at you just like Daddy used to, or the small child that stumbled in front of a car, or the kitten sudden bumping your shoe and mewing, or the random woman crying & hiding her obviously bruised face….or any number of other seemingly mundane occurrences that short your loop, and make you vulnerable.
Just like the supposed team-mate that questioned you about countersign procedure, just before hitting you with the sleepy time cocktail, Ted, you dummy.
But anyway, yeah, suddenly losing exclusive possession of your hand is a great OODA Loop breaker. Very quickly reorients your priorities. Almost better than “The puny mage might actually be a horrible Eldritch Nightmare from Beyond the Outer Darkness.”
What does OODA Loop mean?
observe, orient, decide, Act. rinse and repeat as you go through life.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/OODA-loop
Was originated in military strategy development.
As RED implies, however, it can be applied to a multitude of situations where confrontation and conflict are the primary mode.
From the top:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Sounds about right
I need to catch up with the adventures of Mr. Morningwood. It’s been several years.
It finished up. The author has moved on to writing stories about ACTUAL eldritch beings now.
Who is that standing under the Osprey in the first panel? Looks like Anvil, but Anvil is in Senegal.
Thats not red hair. Its the bald black arcswat marine guy.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-69-well-she-dodged-didnt-she/
(Panel 2, next to Goose)
I think he was also one of the arcswat people who Harem de-shirted.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-112-hot-beefcake-injection/
(Panel 7, on the right)
Thought that he was Hiro wearing a glove on his right hand
He’s not ArcSWAT, he’s one of the Space Marine’s, along with Goose
He is not actually a space marine. Thats just what Sydney called them. :)
Prove it! They are Space Marines until you can prove otherwise
They have not yet been to space.
That we know of
Well yes. We can only base it on what we’ve seen or that have been actually mentioned in the comic as having actually happened so…. yep.
Okay, but what *is* the red thing then?
It looks like those portable stairs that go up to a plane.
Now the scene is making sense, I thought the grey background was a wall, but it’s actually part of the airfield.
Hey Chimy, didn’t anyone ever teach you it is not polite to talk with you mouth full?
Maybe, like in the earlier comment page, her power works like what lots of people initially thought Sylar’s powers worked in “Heroes” – You are who you eat….
Only applies when all are full. This one may not have an upper limit. God idea for a fanart though! How far Can the shapeshifter Shift on a bet?
Hold. My. Feckin’. Beer.
no, I will not guarantee the safety of your beer. someone’s been stuck holding a someone’s beer for over 5 years. its gone flat now. I do not want to get stuck holding someone who can believably cosplay as an eldritch horror’s beer for the next 15 to 20 years as she proceeds to out shift everybody, repeatedly.
Fine.
*partially absorbs bar table and reformats part of the mass to grow a hand to hold the beer before expelling that mass again in order to go win at Epic Charades*
…i’Ll Do iT mYsELf…
Only one of her mouths are full.
Which Mouth?
These are the questions.
X said he was concerned about Chimyriad overplaying her hand – now I wonder if his concern extended to her overplaying someone else’s hand too. 0_o
maybe she’s skipped a few meals and needs a snack.
Tetsuo Theme? Judgigng by the last panel, the Hellsing anime soundtrack might by more appropriate…
Which Hellsing, the first Anime (“Logos Naki World”) or Ultimate?
I would LOVE to see you team up with Nevien Ieliev (Spelling?) to do a everybody loves large chests web comic!
There are four other copies of the information on that phone, why would they not simply include a function that automatically wipes the data when the safe is damaged?
Body Horror shapeshifters and superheroes,
As a kid, one of my first superheroes I ever made, and made little comic strips for was a fleshy slime guy called
Change-O. Unlike some of my other old characters he didn’t really make it into the modern day…well mostly.
I have a Superhero with body horror powers called Lash Fang.
Who I was writing a superhero origin story for…but it turned into a more horror series with conspiracy elements so the worlds didn’t mesh. I actually like the new setting enough that I am going back and doing some editing (anything I usually post online is like a rough draft or first draft), to make into a potentially published story.
-using fiction press as it keeps the chapters together and no questionable ads like certain other sites-
NSFW warning, contains graphic sex (in one chapter) and graphic violence (in most of the chapters), Some may consider the acts of violence as “vore”…of which personally only one time sort of counts *personally don’t feel death and pain is sexual so regard such as snuff and horror not a fetish…but whatever.
first draft version
The Mimic Escort
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3362497/1/The-Mimic-Escort
On second thought, this is better to display current interest in shapeshifting body horror, world building data sheet,
10 true mimics *shapeshifting ones start at 6, inspired by different fantasy and horror, including The Thing inspiring the Red Mimic*,
https://www.deviantart.com/rhuen1/art/10-True-Mimics-914641926
So, uh, the weird Lovecraftian horror is with Uncle Sam?
What part of that surprises you?
In my defense, Uncle Sugar pays well.
You’re surprised?
No, Chimy is, she’s just playing as a Lovecraftian horror for the giggles, the creepy pants-wetting giggles you hear when the lights go out in a crowded room (the bestest kinda giggles)
I wonder if Sydney’s comm ball can see through Chimyriad’s shapeshifting.
And if it can, how would that look to Sydney? Maybe she would be able to see Chimyriad’s ‘original’ appearance?
As pointed out, it’s not an illusion, so Sydney can’t ‘see through it’, just like if someone used a rubber mask
I mean, there’s things you can do that involve both sexy females and lots of tentacles…
Dave, if you have an itch to draw superheroes and monsters, try magical girl genre. As I understand magical girls, they have much in common with superheroines. Just with different outfits and staff of magic missile (Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha) or something comparable.
Man, this exact scene is why I love the Shapeshifter power so much. Perfect Shapeshifting is so fucking cool and can be hella scary if it wants to be. I remember a FASERIP Marvel TTRPG character I played as in college called “Lovecraft” specifically because he would do shit like this. My ultimate goal with the character was to grow large enough to become a giant Biomech Kaiju eventually. Man, that was fun…
Also making my other players squik at the body horror was a highlight (though I tried my best to not make it TOO gross)
How about Self Polymorph, and polymorph other? Any form, animal, vegetable, or mineral!
You know…once you start absorbing/invading/biohacking a target, the self/other distinction gets a little fuzzy, and suddenly all sorts of options come available.
Keep your eyes on the fingerfood.
I can only imagine the warm, comfortable feeling you must get from being utterly certain of things. Thank goodness you don’t let humility, self-awareness, or imagination bring you down.
Are you just talking to yourself, or is this directed at somebody in particular?
sounds like he’s talking about the author blurb, which makes no sense as they clearly have imagination, they made this comic after all.
Imagination, the person writing the blurb also makes this comic, they clearly have imagination.
I have a very active imagination and write a lot as a hobby, but I also don’t get frightened by horror movies and can pick apart the physics, anatomy, and logistics of their creatures and situations out of habit. Lacking imagination isn’t the problem. Different people have different suspensions of disbelief, which may even vary from genre to genre, sometimes its just so long as it is internally consistent, other times it may relate to how close to real life the story is trying to be changing your mental parameters; or if it is making horror based on something real or using an outdated concept that is explained away by modern understanding.
Sometimes too much imagination can ruin horror’s scary factor as you play out the scenarios, and dissect how it works, how their world works, or even try to imagine how different the physics of that reality would have to be to accommodate what you are seeing…
heck my suspension of disbelief is more accepting of possessed voodoo Chucky than robot Chucky just because the former handwaves with magic why this doll can do what it does, and the later is trying to be more real world, which makes me question things like….okay so the software was tampered with, but why did they design the hardware for a toy meant to interact with children to be physically strong enough to overpower and drag a full grown man across a floor and tie him to a chair?
Btw Dave. Love this months vote incentive. It would make a great poster for you to sell at cons.
It’s both sexy and action packed at the same time. Even people who have no idea what your comic is about would buy it. Great for male and female audiences.
Interrorgation indeed.
Dave, with what you just said under the comic, have you ever reached out to Vallejo?
oooohohohhooooo i want to knooooooooooow!!
” Being scared of radiation poisoning from Microwaves. It’s not a thing.” you know it cooks meat with invisible rays.
and you’re made of Meat, right?
Microwave radiation is much, much, *much* more closely related to radar signals than it is to alpha/beta/gamma radiation, because it doesn’t involve spraying protons and/or neutrons everywhere. That metal mesh in the window of your microwave’s door? That blocks the vast majority of microwave radiation from escaping, and anything that doesn’t get stopped by that gets stopped by the water in the upper layers of your skin. Yes, even if your face is pressed against the window.
microwaves ARE radio waves, just high-end, high frequency ones.
They discovered radio waves could cook things by sentries guarding high-end radar towers during the cold war. They’d walk around the front of the radar dish and warm up, cool down around the back, warm up around the front. Then the guards all got ill, and they went in to find out why, and found parts of their inner organs had been cooked inside them.
Research started forthwith, and guards stayed out of the way of radar thereafter.
do you have a source for this? Mythbusters tried, and tried, and tried to cook a chicken this way and failed. my google-fu is not able to filter the stories well enough to find a source or a debunk.
weren’t some of those radar dishes, short distance microwave emitters? I remember stories from soldiers *I am a military brat* talking about the old days of seeing trails in the snow in the paths of these dishes on base as they’d be so hot they’d melt the snow falling between them…of course that could just have been soldier talk to a kid.
But I do know some of these short range emitters used microwaves.
I’ve heard this story as well, it would have to have been microwave towers not radio. Microwave energy use as a cooking options was supposedly discovered when a lab tech melted a chocolate bar in his coat – it would’ve been cooking him too just not nearly as fast.
Also, microwaves are not radio waves, yes they’re both part of the EM spectrum and even adjacent on the diagrams, but they are several orders of magnitude different in frequency. Microwave range is closer to infrared than to radio.
Radar towers use microwaves as their bandwidth energies.
The story about the chocolate bar is probably more true about the ‘discovery’ than the soldiers, but I have the distinct feeling that the soldiers thing still happened, given the pervasiveness of the story.
Also, dig deep and you’ll find the first microwave over… was the Amana Radarange!…
im certain you can tell the difference between “not a thing” and “a different thing”
getting cooked by microwave can Certainly be a thing
being Irradiated by your microwave in the sense of alpha/beta/gamma/proton and or whatever other science word to use that made you feel like regurgitating the knowledge of others without understanding aside
its called “Microwave Radiation”
because it Radiates.
See – I was thinking more like ‘Natsu’s Theme’ – https://bit.ly/3tSWQT2
I’m getting TFS Hellsing Alucard vibes. Like the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7BLGt0wU48 scenes.
The microwave thing is always an issue. Yes, poorly designed ones can cause internal burns and electric malfunctions. But good ones that get a bit inconsistent with frequency tuning can cause internal burns and electric issues, if their disfunction results in somewhat shorter wavelengths. Quantum effect stuff. (Metal whiskers on electronics, and appliances that fix themselves when beaten or threatened… sorry, distracted.)
Funny, because I find body horror kind of laughable as a concept. Ooo, someone has a body part that doesn’t look like other body parts! BE AFRAID! I mean maybe Warhammer & Warhammer 40k have just desensitised me to the sight of abnormal body shapes but it really doesn’t scare me to see someone with multiple eyes or a face on their hand or a bunch of tentacles growing out of their back. At most it might put me off my dinner for a while.
Exposure therapy is real, certés.
That said, go spend some time doing image searches for trypophobia and tell me how you feel.
Well, I did. Still not scared, mildly disturbed, empathetic towards trypophobes because ho boy, that’s a weird and dark one.
She shoulda waited a bit before the reveal, continued to mock them with a jaw hanging from one side.
I wonder how long it took her to practice “Eldritch horror” changes…
I just had a horrible thought, what if Chimyriad was to decide that she wanted a child? Morphing would be a bad idea for the child, it might become used in the morph? That would insanely difficult to manage safely. She’d have to go on a leave and stay “normal’ for the entire time! I know y’all thinking WTF?!? But it is a valid concern.
Ranma 1/2 *if made pregnant the curse locks the person in their girl form regardless of exposure to hot water*, while this didn’t happen to Ranma and the author avoided the question directly, they still made it a plot point for a village using the curse in the Manga.
Alternatively, they could have other conditions, or ignore the logistics like Steven Universe did with “Rose Quartz” being pregnant with a half human child or how that worked wit her gem going to a flesh kid inside her etc…
If there aren’t human you have options, seen some slime and other amorphous shapeshifters form a sack inside themselves, it limits their shapeshifting to have to form around it, but the developing offspring is in there, and the new born is stuck in a base form until either feeding enough or growing up enough.
Same with human shapeshifters and stretchers and the like, a restriction on how much they can do while pregnant, either physically or have to be told to limit it *same with real people having to take it easy and not do a bunch of exercise and such while pregnant*.
I think I asked something similar before, but I’ve gotten confused again. Who/what’s Chimyriad? I figured that they have some sort of shapeshifting powers but do they also have super strength as well? Or are they more like an unlimited shapeshifter? (Or are we not supposed to know this yet?)
Oh.. i see the comic has taken a turn into “Nightmare fuel” territory…
No sleep for me tonight.
From what I recall seeing, they actually were afraid that microwaves could trash pacemakers.
The early microwaves didn’t have very good shielding, and the early pacemakers had none other than the patients own body. We’ve improved all out tech a lot since then, but I can’t recall any mentions of it actually causing a problem.
It wasn’t all that long ago they stopped telling you to turn off cell phones and radios when refueling. That was because theoretically the radio waves could cause a spark around the fuel and that would be real bad. Again, don’t know of any incidents of it actually happening.
Computers and other electronics being banned on airplanes because it could cause the instruments to go wonky.
I find that extremely unlikely, because a lightning bolt within a few miles, a common occurrence, would fry electronics that freaking sensitive to EM. Our electronics for many decades have to be shielded to a certain extent because of FCC regulations, and you can bet the total EM coming off your laptop computer is less than that of a lighting bolt 10km away. I believe this is another of those, because in theory (or hypothesis) something bad could happen we’ll ban it just in case.
As to most “horror” movies, I find the vast majority to be poorly done and boring.
Also, pay for some freaking lighting already! A black screen where you can occasionally make out a shadow of a face is NOT dramatic, nor does it build tension. If you want to build suspense, go study the works of Alfred Hitchcock. He could do all that without using bad lighting or jump scares. (Doesn’t mean he didn’t use those once in a while, but they were used sparingly, and not as a main course.)