Grrl Power #1109 – Beware the handyman
This handyman is looking to get promoted to security. He practices his taser quickdraw in front of the mirror and phrases like “I.D. please.” and “Move along rebel scum.” and “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” Although good maintenance people are worth 20 security guards. If the doors don’t lock and the cameras don’t work and the A/C keeps going out and the breakroom microwave keeps going on the fritz, then the guards aren’t patrolling a ‘facility’ so much as they are an abandoned shack.
I can imagine the pranks Jiggawatt got up to in school. “Look, this taser is broken.” (zaps self repeatedly) Friend: “Let me try!” (zaps self and collapses backward over the couch)
Actually that’s really the only prank that leaps to mind. Well, she could blow breakers and set off fire alarms easily enough, or make old CRT TVs explode by throwing a few thousand amps through them. Maybe she can electrolysis someone and make their hair fall out.
The November Vote Incentive is still up! The new one is coming along, just working on outfit variants, so it should be up either Thursday or more likely Monday (at the latest.)
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.
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The first ruler security is do not escalate the situation. Second you’re supposed to try and deescalate the situation. So the main thing you should have done if he couldn’t sneak out of there was try to talk them down while secretly opening a line to his boss so that they can hear what’s going on while trying to look like he’s not doing anything but talk to them.
To be fair, he’s not a trained security officer
Isn’t that the first rule of security for civil society, not villain lairs?
Oh, Harem’s face got a snort out of me. That is wonderfully well done look of “Oh shit!”
Even the handyman is evil.
It’s not touched on very often, but everyone needs help. Dr. Doom had a whole country that practically worshipped him, but who cleans Magneto’s toilets?
Pyro, once a month they shut off the cistern, flush to empty the fill it with purifying flame. Sometimes Toad does when he’s feeling naaasty.
think Doom just makes Doombots to do the menial tasks…. like rebuilding the walls he uses as doors
Magneto doesn’t have toilets. He has a very high in iron diet and thus can just float shit outta there.
You know that’s almost cute…. almost.
The forecast for the day is a high chance of localized electrical storms…
To be honest though, I can’t fault the dude for trying. After all, he doesn’t know who or what he’s facing here & whipping out a taser is probably the first, best move as a reflex action.
….he doesn’t know who or what he’s facing here….
Supercops in tactical gear maybe?
Harem’s in costume but not in uniform?
Too much weight for a teleport that’s already risky?
Rather than rendering that guy unconscious maybe they could have a little talk.
TASER in a SERVER ROOM.
TASER in a SERVER ROOM.
TASER in a SERVER ROOM.
Yes, we can fault the guy for trying.
Meh, those metal cabinets should be doing a lot of grounding for any stray voltage, and he’s tagging a person not a cabinet or wiring. You’d have to deliberately zap the hardware directly, and AFAIK most tasers turn off if you drop them.
at least it’s not Server in a Taser Room!
“Let me try mine.” *Uses it on herself* “Works…”
From the commentary, seems like Harem has had a few near-misses with accidental tele-frags.
I like how she ‘ported into the center of the open space to maximize her margin of safety, taking the fall rather than attempt a soft landing by standing on the floor. And while the fetal position minimizes her personal space, I think there’s also an element of trying to reassure herself. It’s easy to forget she’s still a kid, in spite of her wide life experience, and she’s probably spend more time thinking about her own death (via failure of this exact process) than most her age.
Probably my favorite Harem page in ages, very humanizing. And new skill demonstrations are always fun.
I’d have to say the opposite about being a kid. She might have the hormone levels of one, but temporally she’s over fifty. Getting treated like a kid when she’s seen and done more than others talking to her is probably one of her minor irritants that she gets over by hiding just how smart and skilled she really is.
Oh for sure she’s done and seen as much as a 50yo, definitely a pro at lots of things no doubt. But she’s still physically 19, and her brain and hormones still have that wiring. If anything, speed running all that life experience has got to mess with her head a little, probably making her more vulnerable and insecure in some ways than a typical baseline 19yo.
There is a thing that exists in the depths of the Internet, called the “Rejuve Universe.”
Don’t go digging unless you are very okay with the far-end of consenting-adult-sci-fi-NSFW-weirdness.
I mention this thing because there is often discussion in those circles about the neurological effects of what physical rejuvenation might be.
Harem, I think, might be something of a parallel case, based on the “lived-experience” v. “Neurophysiological & neurochemical development” debate that’s been suggested here.
The big difference, of course, would be that Daphne hasn’t yet had a full, adult life. She’s closer to the expectations of society for her apparent age, in terms of how she perceives, understands, processes, and relates to information/experiences. She’s a bit selfish, a bit arrogant, a bit rebellious…your basic teen-twenty-something who hasn’t had to confront the adult world, and mature, adult interpersonal relationships, yet.
…and given her powers & status in society, may never have to. Harem may wind up being a more-or-less perpetual child, sad to say.
Then again, maybe not, given the people she’s surrounded by, in Archon. ^_^
I think this is maybe why I find the character of Mary Louise Dahl (aka Baby-Doll) to be so fascinating. It feels odd that her body & behavior generally don’t match. It seems like her neurophysiology & neurochemistry should be just as effected by her condition as the rest of her. For this reason, I always find the stories where characters ages get messed with to be intriguing…and also, very inconsistent. Obviously the inconsistencies are a product of the story the comic is trying to tell, and those are almost never about the interesting questions & consequences involved in rejuvenation or progeria.
Still, it’s such a trope in comics that the hero or heroes get turned into children of varying ages that expect Dave will get to it at least once. I would hope that if/when the day comes, he explores it a bit more thoughtfully than just the usual playing it for a cheap, quick laugh.
For example, all the supers becoming kindergarteners…which leaves Sydney, Dabbles, and the other non-powered Archon crew effectively on babysitting duty. I can easily envision a very interesting, emotional exchange between Dabbles & a tiny Maxima, as regressed neurology and potentially foggy memories lead to a more intimate (very explicitly NOT sexual) connection between them, and what that might like afterwards, going forward. Or an outing involving Syd & Frix overseeing a trip to Schlitterban for the ARC-kids.
…kindARCgarten…? X’D
I’ve been enjoying The Umbrella Academy and particularly Five‘s leadership and world-weariness as a late-50s man transported back into his 13yo self in the primary timeline.
Five is a fucking _beast_, and I love him.
…I’ve only seen the first season (and a few clips from 2nd & 3rd, no spoilers), but it seems like he’s a pretty classic “adult in a kid body” trope. Done really well, mind you, but still pretty basic insofar as I can tell.
Wrong place, wrong moment to be brave.
There is a VERY thin line between bravery and stupidity.
This poor slob crossed it.
There’s an argument to be made in there that even if your target’s powers are not electrical based, trying to tase someone through their kevlar vest is probably not gonna deliver the results you imagine overall… Big kudos for the “Well, f*ck me…” face in the last panel, though.
Well, to be fair he tried. Sadly, for him, he tried to taser Jiggawatt. It might have tickled her a bit. But at least he tried.
I think she might have gotten a bit of a charge out of it. Actually, I would think her natural feedback would overload the device.
I like Jiggs’ sense of humor, she’s spunky without grandstanding – this is actually a pretty gentle response given the level of irony happening. If she wanted to show off, she could have just grabbed the business end of the taser and arc-welded it down to slag.
Although he probably should have tased her skin, not her protective vest.
Why isn’t Daphne wearing that ARC safety vest?
She has a weight limit for teleportation and, theoretically, it’s less critical for her to keep any particular body safe so long as ONE of her bodies are safe and able to focus enough to haul an injured/dying body into non-existence(1), so far as ‘not dying’ goes. I can see that sort of situation making her somewhat cavalier about armoring up.
(1) we know from previous comics that she doesn’t LIKE to get hurt, but can ‘de-teleport’ an injured body to keep it from affecting the rest of the gestalt. What I’m imagining in the ‘injured’ situation is something like one ‘good’ body teleporting an injured body directly to the infirmary like hauling your broken left arm into a sling with your good right arm.
She doesn’t even need a good copy to move the injured one, assuming it’s still conscious she can just de-teleport it out of existence. Don’t think we have enough info to know what happens if a copy is unconscious though… do all the copies sleep at once? If not, do her dreams / REM cycles screw with her focus in the waking copies?
From Dabbler’s Science Corner Harem only has One Mind for all her bodies and when that one mind needs to sleep all her bodies take a nap. And also established on a patreon comic she has “unique” methods of self-pleasuring.
Uh, i got the opposite out of that. each of Harem’s selves sleeps or rests as needed, while the others do their own thing.
Too heavy!
She’l likely pushing her load limit and what with interference and not liking to do bllind teleports. Yeah, no vest.
It might be because her weight limit for teleportation.
Maybe it is too heavy?
if Harem gained weight, then lost/worked it off, would she be able to teleport up to the larger weight?
He looks pretty shocked
I think that is likely going to the first panel in the next page.
NO, he is ABOUT to look shocked….
Would a taser even work through body armor like that?
The handyman has the perfect ‘this is going to suck’ expression in the last panel though.
I think skin contact is required, so it would probably fail if you hit a Tactical Vest.
Your goal would be to aim for exposed skin – arms and face, in this case. Note how “Glowbug” in the parking lot went for the head.
The ability to aim for such weakspots is why knives can be much more dangerous then guns, for anyone wearing a tactical vest. It would also make tasers potentially useful.
I do not expect this particular set of clothing itself to have any anti-electricity features, given that this is Jiggawatt. But others might have, in case they have to fight someone like Jiggawatt.
Generally yes, but 50,000 volts don’t have a problem jumping through a t-shirt/pants. Sorry Dave, but I was a maintenance man (factory mech) for many years and in all that time never did I carry a stunner or a claw hammer. I did however have a heavy-duty crowbar that I hung on my large roll-around tool box that would ruin anyone’s day though…
LOL
Anyway I can promise you with enough voltage nothing is a perfect insulator. Never mind how many times I had to replace the big substation fuses because a squirrel tried to climb through it (incoming voltage was 1440 V) only to explode! Inside we ran 480 VAC and I have seen the heavy duty motor relays arc and burn. Electricity WILL find a way just like water.
The face of this handyman in the last panel, oh man, i started laughing uncontrollably there. It’s the face of a person who knows he’s going to have to deal with supers, and running away is never really an option so he just waits there for inevitable thinking something along the lines of “they don’t pay me enough for this sh*t”.
And unrelated to that, it’s nice to see more of Harem’s insight into her power and how she decided to teleport in “fetal” position to, possibly, minimize the chance she’ll… uh… intersect with rigid matter around.
… and that just made me wonder. Harem mused few times (including just now) that teleporting into solid matter can’t be good for her. Yet we see her times and times again teleporting into space occupied by gaseous matter without any problems which… I wonder how that works too, huh… But the real question on my mind now is: can Harem teleport into space taken up by liquids? Or let’s just start with water alone, since one could point out that room temperature mercury is also liquid but it could be worse for Harem than a block of foam.
If her ability works for fluids, then certain kinds of glass and glaiciers become “safe” locations.
neither glass nor ice are fluids – the glass case is a fairly common misconception based on a quirk of medieval glassmaking and installation and ice is just the solid state of water
the most likely explanation is that anything her weight can displace quickly without causing harm to her is something she can teleport into
Or maybe she swaps location with the gas that she’s teleporting into. Though that wouldn’t explain her un-de-teleporting herself.
Ice flows just fine — look at a glacier sometime. Glacier ice has a viscosity on the order of 10^13 Pa*s, five orders of magnitude higher than pitch.
Glass will flow: the viscosity has been measured, and for modern float glass, is around 10^40 Pa*s at room temperature. Medieval glass is considerably more fluid, with a viscosity around 10^24 Pa*s, comparable to the high estimates for the Earth’s mantle.
Here is an article on the subject: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glass-liquid/
However things get complicated. There is a sharp transition between liquid water and ice (solid water) at a specific temperature. However, there is an unstable state known as supercooled water ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-fiction-glass-liquid/ ) where water can be cooled below the freezing point without switching to a crystalline structure. There is also a case where water can be heated above the boiling point and stay as liquid water ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating ), although this can also be considered an unstable state. It gets complicated, but the main reason to be concerned is that the rapid transition from an unstable state to a steady state can result in very unfortunate situations such as explosions.
The vorp sound is displaced air…
Headcanon accepted.
Thought that that was already established? It’s Daphne’s version of Nightcrawler’s *BAMF* (minus the rotten eggs)
I imagine one of Jiggawatts best pranks would be to, randomly, charge items with a static charge. Just charge every little thing you could in someone’s house that they would touch in the morning on their way to the coffee maker.
Another good use for static electricity wiykd be giving anyone the worst, bad hair day. She could have been a terror at prom or homecoming to anyone who pissed her off.
um teeeechnically – the static shock you get from touching metal usually comes from your body being charged and the charge dissipating when touching metal (which has the capacity to absorb or provide the spare electrons)
so charging random stuff is not quite going to work
Correct. Usually. But objects CAN hold a static charge. So, most likely, she would be able to, mildly, charge certain objects to impart a shock when you touch it. We’re talking about superpowers here, so it doen’t have to be the likely response, just a possible one.
She could light up fluorescent bulbs pretty discreetly, which in 2011 (and prior, during her childhood) before the widespread adoption of LEDs would’ve been pretty fun. Nowadays not many of those left in most homes, but commercial spaces would still be fair game.
Not on the topic of this specific comic page: A recent comment prompted me to start a Grrl Power comic wiki at Fandom. If you love this comic as much as I do, I’d like to ask you to consider making an account at https://grrlpowercomic.fandom.com/wiki/Grrlpowercomic_Wiki and contribute whatever you can. I would like to structure this wiki along the lines of the GirlGenius comic wiki as I consider it to be the best done of any webcomic wikis that I know of. This is my first time starting a wiki so I’m sure I will screw up often along the way. I will be happy to hear any suggestions / advice / constructive criticisms about how to make the wiki better.
Jim was standing there the whole time, right?
That last panel is the face of a man who knows what comes next is going to _hurt_!
I don’t think this is how you’re supposed to do ARC welding.
Bwahahahahahahahaha!
You’ve got me there, well done.
More like a carbon-arc torch, it produces a “flame” of plasma from the tips at roughly 45,000 degrees F. You can adjust the size and heat by the distance between the carbon rods, the old search lights used the same thing. Down-side is they do produce ionizing radiation, so not so good, you don’t see them used anymore because of that.
It would have been more effective to go for his screwdriver or just a straight up punch. I would say go for the claw hammer, but that would have taken too long.
In fairness to the poor guy, he likely doesn’t have a dossier on potential intruders, and may not even know what he’s gotten into-this might be the ‘legitimate business’ part of the complex.
Legitimate handyman? “Oh shit, corporate spies. Best use the taser-no need to make this a murder scene if I go for the hammer. Wait, that looks like a police vest now that I get a second look…”
Villainous handyman? “Oh shit, supers. Most of them can shrug off a hammer, but maybe they still go twitchy with 50k volts…ah hells, of COURSE I get the lightning-based super.”
isn’t “let me try mine” a reference to Terminator 2 ?
Not sure about Terminator 2, but it’s probably a call-back to this: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-148-just-say-it-its-about-presence/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSSstcZvR4
It’s certainly a reference to the “That’s not a knife” scene from Crocodile Dundee.
Jiggawatt is going to be annoyed if the handyman is a perfect insulator.
As to pranks? ALL of the static electricity effects. Like leaving a charge on a basketball (“But it’s not a balloon.”) or static zaps while swimming (“But static doesn’t work that way.”) and she’d have been a terror at hide and seek (“Heh. They should have worn vinyl. Susie’s at 5-o’clock and 30 feet away, Johnnie is at 11-o’clock and 40 feet away, and Billy… Aha! Billy is standing on the underside of the treehouse. I know a secret.”)
The look on his face says otherwise.
Speaking of pranks, would Jiggawat be capable of replicating stuff like the Minority Report taser batons or whatever, which make people vomit when shocked? Except, instead of vomiting, induce sudden bowel movement, one zap and you shit your pants.
Probably, but believe that that would be more knowing where to zap to cause the sphincter to ‘malfunction’
I think that was just regular taser responses not anything futuristic. Involuntary muscle spasming can definitely induce nausea and mess with your sphincter control.
Wouldn’t this be something, if he is Ted-Prime :)
I don’t imagine any situation (ok, the one and only case If I am working for a very evil company) where I would have a taser in my tool belt, or bring one with me during an electrical maintenance round.
it is like bringing a powerful magnet to a server room…. just in case… (of what? I don’t know)
Unless she has ultra fine control, she can’t make people’s hair fall out by electrolysis. For electrolysis, they shove a metal wire (probe) down into the root of the hair follicle, so, she’d have to guide the electricity down the shaft of the hair to the root for every single hair, without the target realizing what the painful burning sensation is. Also, it’s permanent hair removal, so, not so much a prank.
Not all ‘pranks’ are harmless or ‘fun’, just look at Jackass
Not permanent. After electrolysis, facial hairs grow back in about three years. (As per an old girlfriend who was a beautician.)
Otherwise I would have had it done and not had to shave these last three decades.
All things considered that was a good reaction time. Just poor choice in target and bad choice of tazing location. He should have tried for the neck or the arm. You know, the parts not covered in spec ops body armor.
And if you remain perfectly silent while reading the 7th and 8h panel, you can hear a certain god of thunder sobbing in the distance…
Or hearing him laugh hysterically…
It almost feels like the sound effects are extraneous, when he uses his taser right next to the ARC label.
Harem and Jiggawatt should do a ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’.
Harem: “Whoa woah woah. That isn’t necessary. I’m sure he wants to cooperate. Isn’t that right?”
Its always nice when Dave B joins the punsters.
I 100% heard the Metal Gear Solid warning go off in my head when I saw the exclamation point
Same, especially with the postures.
A taser has no effect on Jiggawatt…!
“The goggles! They have no effect”
“My eyes! The goggles do nothing!!!!”
He hasn’t even bought her diner yet and he already trying to get to first base.
Yet more proof that “super” villains are stupid, arming a Mechanic with a tazor in the bowels of their secret base “just in case”, might as well give the 65 y/o cleaning lady an uzi… (smash-cut to Mabel shooting up a hallway because of a rat)
I don’t know, I’ve known a few elderly women to be pretty feisty but we’re talking supers here, arming staff well or poorly is pointless. Having alarm remotes make more sense. I get it, comedy effect here, maybe give him a jolt and follow up with a sleeping shot so he won’t alert anyone.
I seen this and the teenager in me instantly thought: yeah no thanks on the “handy” LOL!
I would bet that the tazor isn’t standard issue. It probably just gives the poor guy the illusion of having some protection.
Hold on… I just thought of something… Can Jigg cook a steak by running current through it. I know high voltage will do so with living flesh but that’s also high voltage.
No, but she can cook a hot dog like that. And the cooking is amperage not voltage. To cook a steak like that requires brining it to make it conductive, it has to be soaked in a salt solution to make it conduct electricity.
Have you seen any of the videos of a guy using a magnatron from a microwave to arc through a piece of wood?
That’s exactly how anything gets cooked by electricity. It travels through the least resistance leaving a trail of carbon in it’s wake. It’d be like eating a raw hotdog that’s stuffed with rice crispies. The reason the squirrels exploded in the substation I mentioned before is it happens so fast the water in their bodies flashes to steam. Not pretty. And damn loud.
Any amount of current high enough to cook going through any kind of meat will do the same thing, and yes I did try it, once. 240VAC 3 phase, hot dog everywhere… (POP!!! SPLAT!! eww…)
If I had electrical powers, I would totally walk up behind someone and run a low current up their back with my finger. Not enough to hurt but enough to give them the most intense cold shiver ever. Also, massive static electricity to people: wreck so many people’s hairdo. Maybe run a bit of current through the bleachers and create a “hot seat” where the bullies sit. It’d be really easy to fry someone’s cell phone if they really ticked you off, but that’s getting into destruction of property territory and not so much “harmless prank.” She could also send a surge through the school power grid and blow the fuses. Power goes out, no school for the rest of the day while they get it fixed. Though after a couple times, the school would definitely start keeping a pallet of fuse boxes and would just stop canceling school when it happens.
I was thinking for “harmless” she could probably *drain* people’s cellphone batteries almost as easily as she could toast the device, which is a much more repeatable prank. (Though the hitting the fuses trick for the school would work only for so long as the administration doesn’t realize she has powers. The second they know, she’d get detention (or grounded?) every time the power so much as hiccups.
Wait… is that Goon squad’s zero? An electrician?
Shocking, right?
This sort of lack of tactical awareness had BETTER bite them hard at some point. They are in the middle of the enemy base!
oh my god, must you have lived a sheltered life, if that prank is the only one that would come to your mind while sporting a hormone addled teenage brain :p
considering the shit i/we did with electricity without superpowers, the world certainly dodged a bullet there by excluding me/us from that kind of lottery win :p
real life: testing a 9-volt battery with your tongue
powered life: CHARGING the 9-volt battery…with your tongue.
You don’t want to be licked by someone like that, certainly not receive oral :P