Grrl Power #1123 – That’s one way to support the troops
Obligatory. (Futurama clip of them on a heavy gravity world.)
Man, it’s been a while since I broke out the Maxima Power Pentagram. I know it kind of looks uneven, with her being able to do 3 powers at the “Blue” level, but also two powers at the “purple” level and on at the “green.” These are not official designations, I just color coded them like item rarities in ARPGs so they hopefully make some sense at a glance. So don’t forget that Max has a power pool she can feed into her abilities. If you go by Marvel RPG stats, her default power levels are like Incredible across the board. For those of you unfamiliar with the system, it’s a 0-100 scale with 6 being “average human,” and Incredible is 40 points. (Yes, the scale went above 100 to “Shift-X” (150) all the way up to Class-5000 and Beyond, but that was mostly reserved for Thor when he put on Megingjörð (his belt) and Járngreipr (gauntlets) and used “Unfettered Might” and also like Galactus level stuff. 98% of superheroes and villains existed in the 0-100 range.) So anyway, Maxima’s “at rest” power level is 40 on that scale. She used to walk around with all powers at “green” which pushes her into the 50 range, but quickly realized that she just doesn’t need that much walking around strength. It’s actually pretty detrimental when trying to exist in a world made for people in the 4-8 range. So now she keeps a blue on armor and a green on speed and holds the rest of her power pool in reserve. A purple arrow pushes her into the 90-100 range, and as you see, she can pump up two stats like that and keep a little extra for a green boost. She can exceed the purple range, but can only pump up one stat that high at a time while keeping a few points in reserve for other things. The higher she pushes a stat, the less efficient the boost from the power pool becomes, and she can also draw down her other abilities to supercharge one stat if she really needs to.
You can see in the second to last panel, she actually lowered her strength as she upped her flight. The scientists aren’t entirely sure how Maxima’s flight works, but it doesn’t involve thrust. She just moves herself through space at a rate determined by how much power she’s putting into the ability. The advantage is that it takes nearly no power to hover, and she has no flight ceiling, the disadvantage is that while she can move extremely fast if she wants to, she can’t accelerate indefinitely. She accelerates very quickly if she needs to, but once she hits her top speed, that’s it. She’s done very limited testing with flying in space, so she doesn’t know if her vacuum top speed and atmospheric top speed are the same. She hasn’t exactly flown to the moon or anything.
The January Vote Incentive is up! The new on is being worked on. Time for the quarterly fashion show that Anvil puts Maxima through. Can you detect the theme?
Variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon.
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Feh. This guy has access to a super with teleportation powers. They are gonna just use the time to study Maxima, then book it. The base is already compromised, their test subjects, including who knows how many moles or spies or potential booby traps, are freed…there is nothing but a good bit of Intel gathering left for them. So it’s gonna be interesting to watch. Hopefully there will be a good villain pummeling.
I’m not entirely sure either of them are fast enough to get away from Maxima with just the power of portals. Henchwench had some trouble with that, anyway.
I agree that they ‘shouldnt’ be able to get away with portals considering Maxima’s speed and reaction time.
But Hench Wench did get away so they might as well. And Sciona did teleport away once as well before Maxima could capture hera Admittedly I think HW escaped largely because she was a patreon thing, probably.
Sorry on phone. My posts leave much to be desired on the phone.
Sciona’s teleportation included a bladestorm from her wings that forced Maxima back (and Maxima didn’t realize in time she was teleporting), so that one is plausible.
Agreed that HW shouldn’t have escaped.
…is this fight what we we were leading up to with that thought experiment about how Max would need to do to escape a black hole?
It is unlikely Max could accomplish that on her own. However, If Dabbler was with her, they could just teleport out, since teleportation bypasses the intervening distance. And Dabbler could teleport TO her, since magic location detection magic also probably doesn’t care what’s between you and what you’re looking for unless it’s an actual antidetection magic barrier.
I’m pretty sure Maxima’s boned now. Supermassive already won. She won’t be able to move. It will be like when Vehemence grabbed her. I’m pretty sure someone will have to step in and assist.
Unlikely… Seems her flight power is directly tied to ignore gravity. If it wasn’t tied to ignoring gravity we’d still see a bit of no “Shaboing” happening.
She just neutralized his gravity powers (on herself) by turning on her flight, which for the most part removes her from gravity.
He can still drop stuff on her and throw stuff at her and put stuff in her way so on.
When Vehemence grabbed her, she wasn’t able to move because she was all in on defence and Vehemence held and overpowered her. This time, she clearly isn’t being overpowered – she has a lot of points in flight and will be able to move.
She’s… already starting to move…
I mean, if she NEEDED her full power in strength to win, then yes.
But this situation is a bit different from Vehemence. Vehemence had the advantage of having a theoretically unlimited power pool available. He gained energy from violence, and by the time they realized he was already charged up far enough that Maxima had to massively boost her strength to hold him down. Any of her normal, not-completely-overpowered attack methods would only make him stronger. At some point he gained so much power that he could regenerate limbs at will and basically invent superpowers.
This guy, while no doubt powerful, does not have a theoretically infinite supply of power. Nor does he have regeneration, as far as we can tell. He’s probably trained his body under supergravity or something, upping his physical strength to the peak of what a superhuman without strength-specific powers can reach, but a punch from Maxima is still going to damage him, and without a healing power like Vehemence the damage will accumulate.
Meanwhile, Maxima can probably take a close hit of one of her own max-power shots if she completely maxes defense, so I doubt this guy can truly hurt her unless he can make literal black holes. If he forces her to completely spend her energy pool on resisting his gravity powers, she’s still a very strong human with lots of (close) combat experience and military training who has extensive experience fighting other supers.
*Webcomic Author’s Comment Box triggers Frank Sinatra’s, “Fly me to the Moon.”*
Whoo MSH/FASERIP stats!
My first character was named Spiritwrack and had phasing and tracking (decent attributes but nothing like Maxima!)
I love the MSH love. I always expected her to be in the MN (75) to UN (100) range at the base level. Still, she can get up there. I literally had my MSH books rebound as hardbacks to make them last! Awesome to see your thinking, thanks for sharing
Ah, MSH… The fond and not so fond memories.
Fond memories of playing in Marvel’s sandbox. Not so fond memories of the time Magento himself showed up in our game and wiped the floor with us. Literally. We had made a mess and he used our characters as brooms to clean up. (Long story)
That sounds unpleasant. I feel for you, don’t want to judge your GM, but sounds a bit like he was way to powerful for your group.
I’ve noticed that many of Dave’s power levels seem to mirror the MEGS Mayfair used in their D.C. Superheroes game.
My Favorite character I created in that system was a perfect Shapeshifter with a homebrew version of Growth (Giant Man/Ant man) with the limitation that the mass had to come from SOMEWHERE. So he’d eat buildings and metal to become a Kaiju. He also had limited matter conversion powers so it didn’t matter what he ate, just that he ate something. I named him Lovecraft for… Very obvious reasons.
My other players did everything in their power to resolve a situation before I had to.
Same problem as Sydney. The distances of outer Space laugh at your puny “high” mach number.
Yes. In space, anything below 10% of c is low.
c is low. Unfortunately it’s also the speed limit, best we can tell.
I suddenly have the strong intuition that this dipstick is about to do something that will get him on Deus’ radar in a very bad way.
And then he drops his gravity well projects, and she goes smashing through the ceiling before she can adjust. Nyuk nyuk nyuk. Although it depends on whether the shield or the flight is doing most of the work here, but either way it’s pretty impressive to force her into allocating so much of her power pool to defense. Remains to be seen how much mobility and offensive power she has left, I’m betting well above a baseline human still.
Max uses her powers like we use a comb, I doubt that would work, she might fly up a foot, and then launch herself at him in super-speed before he could react, she catches bullets remember? Not deflects, catches them. So far we’ve not seen a bottom limit to her power, she could very well be the same level as superman for all we know! Superman once said in a comic that the world was cardboard to him and he had to control himself very carefully so not to damage everything he touches, I’m sure Max has the very same issue. I seen a joke comic that Superman was having a romantic dinner with Lois, he suddenly sneezes, and the wall and Lois is gone.
Not sure about being said in a comic, but he definitely said it in a movie when Darksaid made the mistake of coming to Earth and hurting Soups’ family
Well, we do know that there is a history of broken handles and shower knobs in Maxima’s past… plus there was the whole “wake up laser blast” situation…
Gravity powers notwithstanding, that’s some impressive body she’s got on that hair of hers. Probably has the tensile strength of a decent grade of metal wire.
Looks like her TK-based flight powers really do nullify the effects of gravity upon her, as just swapping in flight seems to have nullified the effects of his gravity on her.
Now, of course, we’re going to see what else she’s going to get hit with. Her defense did absolutely nothing for her, so it’s her flying that is anti-gravity. I’m guessing like the last time she faced a portal person, they’ll try to send her away while she doesn’t have speed topped out?
Well, Dave did mention that when she shakes water out of her hair, her hair acts like a CIWS to 2′.
Having a vacuum top speed would be breaking physics in new and interesting ways. Relativity and all that.
Actually, there is a top speed for most things in a vacuum. As your speed increases, so does your mass. That’s why light speed is the limit for most things–because at that point you reach infinite mass. Most things realistically would have a lower ‘top speed’ because they’d shake themselves apart. That’s why most scifi settings either have ways to get around this by reducing mass or creating inertial bubbles or having hyperspace shenanigans.
> Most things realistically would have a lower ‘top speed’ because they’d shake themselves apart.
No, they wouldn’t. Speed in vacuum doesn’t put forces on you, in fact any constant speed is indistinguishable from being at rest from the inside.
The top speed for everything that has consists of tardyons is c.
Technically true, but practically false.
The quantum foam emits charged particles which in turn induces drag, further, each inch of space that has observable stars has the presence of bosons – specifically photons. Taking that into account, “empty” space is anything but. Although it may be a lot less drag, space has its own amount of drag, so everything would even still have a terminal velocity from the drag induced by impact with said particles. And that’s before you get into the inertial requirements to accelerate as mass increases.
A “vacuum” in deep space isn’t really a vacuum anyway, there’s gases and dust out there, it’s just so thin and scarce that there’s nothing we could do to use with our current tech. But the faster you go, the more builds up on the leading edge of the ship and starts to cause ever increasing drag as well. That’s the idea behind deflector shields, they forces that space crap off the ship. Look it up, there’s far worse trekkies than this old man out there LOL.
This is a test comment.
“Interstellar space isn’t actually empty” is true, if nitpicky – the velocities where that starts to matter are way above what we’re talking about.
“And that’s before you get into the inertial requirements to accelerate as mass increases.”
That just means you will accelerate slower for a given thrust. But (in true vacuum) the acceleration will never be 0, instead you will asymptotically approach c if you keep thrusting.
Finally it went through … I posted this a dozen times from 3 different devices, getting 500 Internal Server Error every time.
The solution, for some reason, seems to have been typing the quote instead of copy-pasting it.
how long do you suppose it’ll take for him to get that underground lair airborne using his gravity powers? once it’s over people he kinda becomes untouchable
Not really, we just saw that his powers don’t effect her, he’s done unless they have enough other supers to distract her. That base is gone from the moment she landed in there and no one is going to bother to try and save it. Supermassive (ego) more likely is going to keep trying to prove how powerful he is until Hiro sneaks up and lays him out, or Sydney shows up and does the same with her lighthook. For that matter, Harem with a sleep shot.
I think he means that if he’s holding something very large and heavy over a lot of people, you can’t take him out as said something will drop. On the people.
The Power of Breasts Compels You!
One has to wonder if they have a plant guy in house? That looks to be a really old tree. This base has been around for a while, or they have an extreme gardener.
I’m sure there’s someone with that super power out there, Poison Ivy isn’t the only one with herbal-kinesus. Or whatever they call it.
Phytokinesis is the term you’re looking for I think
Hmm, just a heads up, the “green purple blue” made absolutely no sense to me, and I had to look at it two or three times trying to figure out what the colors meant. Eventually gave up and did my best guess at which arrow was longer. I think it’d be more clearly understood if done JOJO’s style (or, Rarity Grade ranks), ranks E through A, then S and S+ if really pushing it.
(Jojo Example)
https://i.stack.imgur.com/OCvLg.jpg
(MGSV Example)
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/metalgear/images/4/4a/Kojima_TPP_Stats.jpg
Just look at the arrow tip, each aligns with one of the rings of the pentagon, with the outer ring being more points invested in a given stat. Including the white outer ring, which we saw utilized (I think for the only time?) when Max put everything into shielding against Vehemence.
A bit later, we saw her overcharging strength, leaving her other attributes below her baseline.
Oh good find, I’d completely forgotten that. Would be nice to get all appearances of her power grid into the new wiki.
I was more referring to the comment section where he talks about ARPG colors, whatever that means. Yeah I can kinda tell which arrows were longer, but it’s not obvious with that small a pentagon. I’d still recommend the Ranking letters, they’re more obvious at a glance.
The color coding looks exactly the same as the ranking for power levels in a game I play on my phone. From weakest to strongest.
White
Green
Blue
Purple
Ok maybe, but my point is, not everyone plays games on their phone with colored items. Nearly everyone instantly knows that an A+ is better than a C.
I’m not sure which game was the first to use it, but a lot of video games now use very similar color coding and names for their ranks of gear or loot. Diablo and World of Warcraft were probably influential in spreading the pattern.
White: Common
Green: Uncommon
Blue: Rare
Purple: Epic
Orange: Legendary
I just searched for “Color coded loot in video games” and got quite a few articles on the subject.
She did the same thing for speed when Lapha was using that slow time dilation weapon on her, which is why it hurt when Brut punched her.
> She’s done very limited testing with flying in space, so she doesn’t know if her vacuum top speed and atmospheric top speed are the same. She hasn’t exactly flown to the moon or anything.
Wow. Sydney really is technically the more well-traveled of the two now, cosmically if not terrestrially.
I just realized, Maxima’s Flight, which negates the gravity power, COMPLETLY negated the gravity power because her hair “floofed”. Its not just flight, its an area around her. Her hair isn’t being pulled downward anymore.
And of course, he has a cunning plan…
Kind of like Wile E Coyote always did. This dweebs plan MIGHT fare better than the furred guy did against the Road Runner. Maybe.
If his plan involved Peri, he’s done fucked up even more than he thinks he has
If his plan involved Death Toll, he wouldn’t just have left Death Toll in the cell while going to take on Maxima.
If his plan involved him, but he planned on getting him later for some reason, he can still do that – he or someone else with a suitable power just needs to push the cell bars away and free him, or maybe(likely, since she came throught the wall last time) Void can open the portal directly into his makeshift prison.
Peri stated that he was also part of the ‘Welcoming Party’
Retrieving him later means he would be late for the party
No, it was Supermassive who said “I am in the welcoming committee”.
Was sure Peri also said that, when he was talking to Vahriah, but can’t find it so was wrong
That is different than was happening here:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-350-its-localized-its-just-not-personalized/
Good example (Max upside down), but probably an example of her baseline flight since she’s just hanging out (ha) at the base there. Here she’s leveled up both shield and flight to the 3rd ring, and I suspect the shield is doing more of the heavy lifting.
I hope he gives her a good fight!
She’s gonna crush him like a coconut between her thighs!
Seems the obvious tactic would be to keep changing the gravity, not just push down but change the direction also when she is fighting gravity in one direction to suddenly changed the amount of gravity to the opposite direction. That way Max is forced to over compensate. As to how any of that will help him in the long run is suspect as I don’t see how it might hurt Max or allow him to “win”, just keep Max from pounding him unconscious.
He’s just pinning her down until somebody else gets in position, would be my guess.
Either that or it’s one of those “I’m not left handed, either” deals, and he hasn’t really cut loose yet.
I wish she would have come in hot and just decapitated him. It would be awesome to see the bad guys totally and instantly squashed when they thought they were tough.
Same problem with Superman… show up, get shot a bit, make a few casual remarks. Get shot some more… then grimace in anger or determination and finish the job in one attack.
Bruh.
I think it’s safe to say that the point of a superhero comic like this one, or like Superman, isn’t the ultraviolence.
Also, ARC-SWAT is a branch of law enforcement. Pretty sure we’ve got plenty of police violence in the real world.
But violence is the way people are supposed to solve problems in the US now. Ever since 2016, that has been the proper way to do things. Either physical violence or emotional. Same difference to many.
I DO like how so many people think getting rid of security forces will solve all their problems. (Police, FBI, whatever) They have clearly never lived in a place with no security or they would not say that. (I have) The US has problems that have been shown in graphic detail in recent years, but only politicians say there are simple solutions to things like gun and police violence. (Hint: If they say such, they are lying)
The USA security forces are barely providing any security though. 98% of the time they’re just “providing” a lot of violence to situations that cannot be made better by violence.
Here’s a nice summary of sources (collated by a leftist mommyblog):
https://www.wonkette.com/police-brutality-statistics.
Also, and certainly related, the USA cops spend too much time doing things that don’t need guns. I think the most recent example of police brutality was a traffic stop which could have been done by a camera and a mailed fine.
I completely agree that you can’t trust politicians with simple solutions. I’d simplify and just say you can’t trust politicians.
I wonder how quickly she will go for blowing off his head. She did authorize lethal force after all.
And by her knowledge, the infiltration team needs a rescue from Skeletor ASAP. She can’t exactly waste time with him here.
I seriously doubt she’ll go for a kill shot unless she has no choice, he’s no Kelvin. Just a man that can control localized gravity, not someone that just grows stronger with violence. He’s used to just making things heavy and winning that way, while Max has military trained control over her powers, hardly a match. He’s just a cocky bad guy that thinks he’s the end-all over supers, like many of his group. Like Buttsniffer, he’s going down.
Apparently Maxima’s flight DOES include personal gravity if she boosts it high enough.
Huh. He doesn’t seem to feel threatened. Then again, he and his buddies seem to be seriously over-confident, considering how Death Toll fared.
Speaking of Maxima’s Power Pentagram, I went back to her big fight with Vehemence to see what it looked like before. The previous shots I found in #273 and #283 were just in blue with arrows indicating the intensity allocated to each attribute. When she goes and send an overpowered spike to strength, there’s a corresponding drop in the central pentagon, perfectly portraying that she’s borrowing points from the other attributes.
I like the colour coding to show where the points are being shifted in the latest comic. Are you likely to go back and retcon the older comics with the same coloring system?
It also got me thinking about the limitations of overpowering a single stat. I imagine it’s like flexing a muscle in that you could only manage it for a limited amount of time and trying to push past that limit would have detrimental effects if it doesn’t already. I’m hoping there might be some other opportunity for us to see something like that again, either in the current timeline or as a flashback.
Villain – “How did you get here? There’s no way you could have traveled that far, that fast! It’s impossible!”
Maxima, breathing heavy after pushing flight to 147% – “Yeah,” spits out feather, “but I do 6 impossible things before breakfast.”
In #258 the Power Pentagram has one more layer than later. :D
Sorry Dave, your Futurama clip/video is restricted by nationalism.
I assume it was amusing. :P
I thought Maximia’s flight powers don’t include localized gravity for her… hair. Yeah, her hair.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-350-its-localized-its-just-not-personalized/
And relativistic effects also start becoming “noticeable” at 10% C
my new favorite sfx