Grrl Power #1128 – Get the heck out of dodging
I thought about attributing Super Massive/Suck Hole’s speed to actual gravitational time dilation, but he’d need to be putting out a lot of gravity to for it to register as super speed. Like, if you’re standing or sitting, relativity is at work, but the difference in the height of your head would be like 1/1×10^36 of a second. Someone who somehow lived on the peak of Mt. Everest would, over their lifetime, accrue a few nanoseconds over their twin brother who was born at the exact same second due to some weird dual C-Section incident and who lived on the bank of the Dead Sea all their lives. GPS satellites have to correct for relativity due to their speed, but also due to the fact that they orbit at an altitude of 20K kilometers, so they’re far less affected by Earth’s gravity than the average GPS receiver usually is. Still, it’s only 7 microseconds per day.
So in order for Super Hole to achieve noticeable super speed? Well, I did some googling and have no idea if this is right, so feel free to offer corrections, but one source says that you’d need 520 million gravities to halve the passage of time. Double speed definitely qualifies as super speed, but as Maxima says, her default is “many times faster than human,” so if Suck Massive is faster than her, then the amount of gravity he’d be able to produce could basically kill anything and everyone.
Also, gravity falls off at inverse square, so the amount of gravity and time dilation those around him would experience would change massively if they moved even a few feet closer or further away. That’s the real reason things like black holes are dangerous, because you can get close enough to them that the gravity leaps up to an unmanageable level. Yes, also the whole event horizon thing, but I’m just talking about gravity here. For instance, if you were standing on the surface of the sun (which is just a maelstrom of exploding plasma, I realize the sun doesn’t have a solid surface – at least, not on the “surface”) and it suddenly became a black hole, the amount of gravity pulling on you wouldn’t change. In fact none of the orbits of anything in the solar system would change.
Okay, yes, there’d probable be some violent event as the sun somehow “became” a black hole. I mean if a Q came along and did a flashy snap solar swap out. The difference would be that now you could get much closer to the source of that gravity. Instead of being stuck at 695,ooo kilometers from the center of the sun, you could get within 1.25 km of that gravity source. Now think about that inverse square law and you’ll see why black holes are scary as fuck.
All of this is to say, Super Massive has impressive gravity powers, and moderate super speed, not Class-5,000 gravity powers (in Marvel RPG terms). Or to put it in JRPG terms, S++++++++++++++ class.
Now, about that final panel. One, yes, I just got through saying that his gravity powers, while impressive, are not a star-system-level threat, and yet he’s bending energy beams around him. I don’t know what to tell you, it’s a power stunt. Two, he himself should be distorted and look like a ripple in a pond because how is he bending the energy beam around him but not the light in the room? Well, Maxima isn’t shooting a laser, she fires particle beams of some sort. I don’t know what sort, maybe it’s mesons, top quarks, W bosons, maybe it’s even a stream of protons. The point is, they have a lot more mass than photons, which have literally none, so they’re easier for him to affect.
The January Vote Incentive is up! Time for the quarterly fashion show that Anvil puts Maxima through. Can you detect the theme?
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.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Um… from that last panel, I can see why the Ascenders made sure SuperMassive was in the welcoming committee.
BEND energy beams? Max might be in serious trouble here
I predict area of effect energy attack next.
Super Massive is fast and has gravity, that’s already a lot. I’ll bet his jaw is glass.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall? Super Massive is going to fall victim to his own gravity, judging by the name and the phrase…
Seem like he’s been taking some of the experimental power enhancing crap they’ve come up with. Or it’s that fancy glowing helmet/mask he’s got on!
Also worth remembering that things run SLOWER the deeper you are in a gravity well, so he’d have to be producing anti-gravity around himself, not gravity.
Which I guess makes sense, because her beam, headed straight towards him bends away before circling and bending back onto its original path, which would require concentric shells of gravity and anti-gravity to pull off, adding together to zero.
Apparently he moves gravity around, and only creates gravity in one spot by creating anti-gravity in another, which is why no extra gigatons of mass are involved.
He has gravity themed telekinesis. If he was manipulating gravity that much he’d be pulling the ground below him up.
Gravity falls off with square of distance though, which is why he’s concentrating it close to things he wants to affect. He has no limit of the Schwarzschild radius so he can pull extremely hard on the target, and still have the effect fall off next to nothing mere meters away.
No, normal gravity would be it.
The one who is experiencing things as slowed down (dilated time) is the one who is moving faster than their surroundings.
If I am experiencing 1 hour for every second you experience, I can do an hour’s worth of things in the time your second lasts.
Relativity is that different observers will experience the same thing differently: You will think I am speeded up, I will think you’re slowed down. The end result is the same, though.
You’re talking time dilation due to relative speeds. Dave is talking about time dilation due to gravity.
Yeah, time dilation due to speed is a special case.
Well gravity is spacetime curvature, so maybe his power is not JUST gravity, but spacetime curvature itself, which has Gravity as an incidental side effect.
My thoughts as well – he’s not altering gravity, just redirecting or magnifying it by bending space. That would explain his super speed too, he’s not faster he just takes a shorter path.
I concur.
He’s bending space like a cartoon, more or less locally, and it unstretches itself over a few centimeters or meters depending on the power stunt.
Super speed can be a possible time effect.
In that case there might be space (distance) effecting power also.
Any attempt to apply physics to what’s happening here will rapidly devolve into a “spherical, frictionless cows in a vacuum” scenario.
He has gravity powers, he can do gravity stuff- don’t try to make it make sense.
Obligatory XKCD on frictionless vacuums.
I don’t see why it bends *around* him. If he exerts a gravity field to redirect the beam away from him, why would he bother exerting a second time to force the beam to resume its original vector?
Look up “gravitational lens”.
Basically it’s a trick where you use an object’s gravitational field to view AROUND/BEHIND the object and can actually increase resolution of what’s being seen. It also allows you to see things that aren’t normally going to be within your visual field.
He, himself isn’t necessarily the CENTER of the gravity power stunt.
So by changing where, EXACTLY the effect happens, he changes deflection point.
Gravitational lens doesn’t bend light *away*. It bends *towards* the lensing object. Remember, light tends to move in every direction, and the lensing object is just focusing the cone pointed its way, *not* repulsing light headed straight at it.
Gravitational lensing bend light in one direction. Bending energy or light like SM do would require 3 gravity sources. One high for that sharp first bend. Another smaller centered on himself to bend it around himself, and a third for the final sharp bend. Basically tripple the complication to look cool. First bend would be enough and far more dangerous to bystanders as he choose the redirect and maxima cant predict where. She would check background before firing. This way is far less dangerous for bystanders or infrastructure. Like much in this comic it is rule-off-cool and not physics.
so basically it would be insanely complex but look cool
you realize this guy literaly calls himself “super masive” and has detachable clothes just to show off his muscles right?
Concentric spherical shells of gravity and anti-gravity would do it if your gradient was right.
What she needs to do is hit him with a wide blast, not a focused stream. Being surrounded with anti-gravity will deflect anything that’s not precisely on center, but anything that was exactly in line would reach him anyway. Heavily attenuated, of course, but she can dump a LOT of energy into that beam if she wants.
Of course, this dude appears to have been using their research to collect super powers, so maybe he has some invulnerability, too.
> “anything that was exactly in line would reach him anyway.”
Only if the forces in those shells were oriented radially in/out from the center of the sphere of influence. If instead the forces are tangential, say orbiting around a vertical pole (or transverse horizontal, or even better different axes on each shell), perfectly centered paths would be diverted.
There’s a topological theorem which says that, no, there’s no arrangement of gravitational forces that wouldn’t leave SOME path for a particle traveling fast enough at SOME angle.
It’s the same reason some people have cowlicks, amusingly: The Hairy Ball theorem!
For sure, always a path in. But a defender could shift that weak spot from directly in front of them to directly below or behind, and keep moving it around to their most defensible angle. No reason to risk a frontal hit.
That’s why she needs to hit him with an area of effect attack, so that targeting doesn’t matter.
That, or just concentrate on grabbing his arm during one of his punches, and start breaking bones and his concentration.
The Hairy Ball Theorem applies to surfaces, and continuous fields. His fields can have depth, and likely also dincontinuities (when he caught Varia, the field seemed to be constant around Varia, non-existent away from her.)
Could just be concentric spheres of gravity and anti-gravity. Maybe he just redistributes gravity while the net amount of it in his area of influence remains the same?
I’m just waiting for Stalwart to climb out of the basement, so that this guy’s attention is divided. Of course, they’re both using super speed, so this fight hasn’t been going on very long yet.
I think it’s not “gravity” the force that he’s changing, but spacetime curvature, which creates the apparency of that force.
Thus, he bends the space her blast is going to move through so that a straight line through that space moves around him.
This is why gravity is often considered pseudo power.
It /is/ the shape of the local spacetime, not the effect of a field or particles.
From the point of view of a particle bending around a massive source of gravity it is moving in a straight line. It is just the curvature of spacetime that makes it appear to bend around that source to an outside observer.
Gravity cannot cause a particle to move away from it, that would be anti-gravity. Which is not a thing under either special or general relativity (not without assumptions for constants that have no reason to be assumed under current observations).
All this points that mr Super AH either is gaslighting or really has no understanding of how his powers actually work
(it is also likely why the theory of quantum gravity has remained so elusive despite a lot of very smart people bending their well above average intellect towards figuring it out)
My guess is he is basically creating a bubble of altered gravity around himself- either his powers always affect an area and he gets to adjust the minutia of gravity in that area, or this is some technique that cancels earth’s gravity as part of him throwing himself around for super fights that bends certain things around him, OR this is him specifically bending gravity around himself as a force field.
Also note that it doesn’t precisely go back to its original vector, so the gravity bubble isn’t perfect.
He has “gravity themed” telekinesis.
Actually looking at this further, this might be just a side effect of that superspeed technique, him creating a zone of altered gravity centered on himself, letting him accelerate as much as he wants, with the basis of said acceleration being gravity based side stepping the risk of g-forces.
Maybe it is basically a Alcubire drive, using gravity to bend space around him a bit for speed AND defense simultaneously.
If Space Time were being bent directly, then such effects would also warp apparent light effects within proximity.
Black Holes don’t actually slow down “Time” since time is a concept that has no place in the ‘real’ world. It’s actually cooler than that.
They have so much gravity, that light itself Slows down from the force, which makes things appear slower to an outside observer used to standard lightspeed.
So even if he could effect Light Photons with his gravity, he wouldn’t move any faster. It’s just everyone around him would see him moving slower than he actually is moving.
If the object closer to a massive gravity source only appears to be slower to an outsider because light is slowing down, then why do GPS satellites need to do daily corrections for relativity? They aren’t using light to communicate with GPS units on earth?
Or was that example that Dave gave from a bad source?
(I was about to add/ask about that concept of people who are theoretically moving faster through space aging slower than people on earth, but that may be an unrelated phenomena that happens for other reasons).
I am not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying I don’t understand how to make your answer fit with my limited understanding of astrophysics and what Dave posted, and hope you can explain it in a way that a layman would get. Thanks!
GPS uses signals in the microwave frequency band, which are not visible light but otherwise have basically all the same properties as every other electromagnetic wave, specifically travel speed for this application. The satellites orbit at 20,000 km every 12 hours, so there’s a significant distance and speed involved relative to the surface of the Earth (~6,370 km, 24 hour period). Even at that speed difference the effects of relativity are only ~7 microseconds per day (7e-6 or 0.000007 seconds), but at those distances that uncorrected error would be many meters and compounds rapidly.
No, that’s extremely incorrect. Gravity does change the rate at which time flows. We had to take this into account when setting up the Global Positioning System, because the satellites are higher up in the Earth’s gravity well and therefore are experiencing less time dilation due to gravity than we are on Earth. Their clocks literally run faster.
You can see this effect by taking two synchronised atomic clocks to different places with very different altitudes – say, the top of a very tall mountain and the bottom of the ocean – and then letting them run for a few days. You’ll eventually notice they’re a a few microseconds out of synch due to experiencing different gravities.
Gravity – and speed, for that matter – slows down the rate at which entropy occurs. We call this rate “time”. The idea that time is something we made up is ludicrous pseudo-science and I hate that so many people believe it.
Watch Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins, or The Wizard Of Speed And Time (or both)
It’s even weirder than that. Gravity causes time and space to mix somewhat. When you experience gravitational force, it’s not actually a force, it’s that the centre of the gravitational field is now slightly mixed into your future. As you move forward in time, you naturally move in the direction dictated by gravity. Now, under what we normally consider “typical” gravitational fields, this effect is very weak – a relatively low spatial acceleration in the opposite direction is able to offset it. The event horizon is the point where the gravity is strong enough that no amount of spatial acceleration can reverse it – your future is literally now a black hole.
(Also, technically speaking, photons do have mass. They have energy, therefore they have mass (E=mc^2 and all that – the energy of a photon is E=hf, therefore hf=mc^2 and you can solve for m to get m=hf/c^2). They’re said to have zero REST mass, but that’s a bit of a meaningless statement because under current understandings you never get a photon at rest. It would be more accurate to say that they have zero INERTIA, and therefore even the smallest amount of energy is enough to send them whizzing off at the speed of, well, you know…)
Wow, I’m actually first for a change? So can he fire off singularities or Cast Demi or what?
Time for some AOE shits!
I mean… if all he has is the gravity powers, that’s impressive, but not ‘take Maxima head-on’ impressive. Dude has got to have seen the equivalent of ‘game tape’ on some of her fights and was totally confident he could at least put up a good fight. Not saying he actually has the power to take Maxima down, mind you.
So, my bet would be gravity powers + some general superhuman physical abilities – speed, strength, toughness. The latter two would make sense as a way to survive exposure to his own hyper gravity or something, and there’s no way you can survive superspeed with a normal human body in any case. Could be his gravity powers helping him cope, but that would mean one slipup and he tears himself apart, with gravity or superspeed.
Like Teksura posits, I think he really only has gravity powers, or gravity plus some basic physical enhancement- his gravity power is just good enough to fake other powers.
This superspeed trick looks like that gravity punch he used on Maxima earlier, which I think is basically him generating a gravity effect that makes “down” in a specific direction very strongly- so here he is basically freefalling or running down a very steep hill, and since its due to gravity control and not some sort of generated thrust, he doesn’t have to worry about g-forces, so he can turn as tightly as he wants, barring some need to avoid his “backwash” if the area he is altering gravity in is large enough.
So he can pull off flight, superspeed, superstrength and if he isn’t physically durable that defensive trick means he is effectively super durable vi shenanigans, all of this on top of that gravity pinning he keeps using to disrupt Maxima.
I can see why he felt confident going up against her, he basically covers all the same bases that she does, but with a trick to restrict a foe instead of instantly end them like Maxima has in her beams.
Maxima is going to win unless SM pulls out something more impressive though, he is stoping her from fighting back effectively, but not really doing any damage. I mean maybe thats the idea, he is just keeping her out of any fight so the organization isn’t easily defeated in a few minutes by her alone, but going by his talk before, I am not sure he sees it like that. Realistically this fight is just going to keep being like this until either Maxima figures out a good balance of her stats to keep SM from locking her down(like maybe going hard enough with her flight will cancel out gravity enough to deal with SM just with her baseline or by balancing a priority of flight and speed), SM pulls off some supermove to actually hurt Maxima (unlikely but it would explain his confidence even more), SM tires out or makes a mistake that Maximal can capitalize on, or some third party intervenes(either SM’s teammates trying to land a knockout blow or some esoteric attack while he has Maxima occupied, or an Arcswat member lending a hand- like the guy who has vague gravity powers that could be an edge against the same).
yeah gravity powers are extremly powerful, gravity is one of the 4 fundamental forces of the universe after all and one that we dont fully understand yet
If he just used gravity to power up his punches and has no durability, he’d just shatter his hand on Maxima’s body.
The lines in the last panel really illustrate what he is doing well. But they also got me thinking. What if he only has ONE superpower? All this talk about gravity and super speed, what if all he is doing is variations on bending space? Bending it one way and you can move through a given area faster because there is less space there. Bend it another way and you can, for all intents and purposes, up the gravity.
So, he’s Vista? Next thing you know he’ll be making a spot on the ground right next to a spot in near earth orbit and either YEETUS! or short out the ionosphere.
Beat me to it. The ability to bend space-time in that manner *could* be indistinguishable from gravity. It could also allow Suck Hole to do things that gravity cannot. Whatever he is doing, it does not obey the inverse square law. I make that assertion based on my assessment of how much mass would be required to induce the degree of curvature that would affect Max’s energy beam like that and on how that much mass should (but isn’t) affecting the general environment. Additional hand-waving and/or techno-babble is required to address this issue. :-P
gravity is space time bending, gravity is just the distortion of space caused by super masive objects (well everything generates gravity really, is just that gravity by itself is soo weak that you need a shit ton of mass to accomplish anything)
And this is why M:tA players can use Correspondence to terrifying effect with minimal effort.
Cor 3, Life 3 allows you to effective warp someone’s personal interaction with space enough that they treat all distances as X times greater. It’s a good, nonviolent way to remove a threat from the board until you’re ready to deal with them.
I think you’re overthinking it. You don’t need a separate ability or space-bending levels of power to accelerate at high speeds with gravity powers – just create a gravity well in the direction you want to go and “fall” that way.
Bit of conundrum.
Regarding the sun, I’m pretty sure it isn’t close enough to being massive enough to stay a black hole. After whatever magic that made it a black hole ended, things would get very “interesting” for a femtosecond.
Actually, a black hole of a solar mass would need far more than the age of the universe to evaporate.
Oh, it’s plenty massive enough to stay a black hole. Just not massive enough to naturally collapse into one in the first place. But if you could compress it into a 3km diameter sphere, it would stay that way.
*theoretically
We’ve yet to see any experimental evidence of such small black holes and since we cannot see inside them then we’ve no idea if those theories would actually hold on that scale.
I, for one, vote that we don’t perform experiments on methods for collapsing stars using our Mark I model.
*theoretically
We’ve no experimental evidence for such small black holes and we obviously cannot see inside any of them so it’s quite possible that current theories are totally inadequate in such extreme situations.
This is another fight where Maxima’s kryptonite is shown to be her overconfidence in her powers and abilities. This time she doesn’t have Sydney around to dig her out of her hole. I foresee this going badly and ending with her defeated and imprisoned
…. cue Sydney, Dabbler and Anvil (And Deus) being the rescue party
The gerat disadvantage he seems to have is that all of his powers require active use. Thus, he may be felled by something he does not perceive coming.
“OK, you are impressive enough to make me take off the kid gloves. But I have to warm you that I can’t garantuee your physical integrity and/or health if I do. So, last warning, better for you if you surrender now.”
Okay, he’s not manipulating GRAVITY gravity. He’s like Krona, rewriting the space time math. Here’s why. If that purple blot is enough to push maxima down, it’s also pulling several tons of earth UP. Maxima can easily break the 9.8m/s2 that is earth’s gravity, so suckhole is definitely exceeding that. That means that ground fall up as much as maxima push down. Even if he drops it below the surface, that doesn’t help because the surface will ‘fall’ sideways towards the distortion. That’s really bad for things like foundations. And the heavier a thing is, the MORE it will be affected. Strength increases by the square, mass increases by the cube. The ground is a lot heavier than Maxima is.
So instead he’s rewriting the rules for certain things. Like ‘particle beam, have X gravity effect in play’. Only the particle beam is affected. Maxima have gravity Y effect in play. Technically it is gravity power (because gravity is just motion along spacetime) but it’s not ‘gravity field manipulation’ because then it would affect all things in play. This is just ‘gravity telekinesis’.
“just” ‘gravity telekinesis’ ;)
Alternatively, his powers are what they appear, which is not what he thinks they are.
If you didn’t talk about the physics involved but just what things he could do with his powers, chances are good a high school student who was a superhero enthusiast and versed in physics more or less to the degree they were taught in my high school my junior year, he would think all of these powers were gravity.
That doesn’t make the powers wrong. That just makes Suck Hole suck at understanding his own powers. That probably means that he has at least one weakness due to his lack of understanding his own powers.
Could be, but someone else has to figure out what his powers actually are in order to exploit it.
Seems like he’s locally deforming space, which generates the apparency of gravity. Not sure how you can exploit that.
He may or may not know that that’s what he does. However, his level of control seems to imply he knows exactly how his power works.
I wonder if he really has super-speed, or just enhanced reflexes and careful manipulation of gravity. If he’s suddenly “falling” towards Maxima, he’d need roughly 13,200 Gs to instantly hit 40 MPH. Still a disturbing thing to subject ones self to, but far more achievable than 520 million Gs.
It seems likely that his strength is a mix of a good training program and being able to work out in enhanced gravity.
As far as bending energy beams goes – are we sure about that? All he really needs to do is use gravity lensing to make it look like he’s a foot to the left. That’s a “mere” 28 Gs or so, plus remarkable precision, but not beyond possibility.
He doesn’t need to “look” like he’s a foot to the left by bending light. He would instead create a very localized distortion that stretches the space between him and Max’s fist by a foot.
If Max ever encounters anyone with the power to distort probability or use “cartoon physics”, how would that turn out?!?
Badly… for them, she already has Bugs-level screwy-skin (or however Vahriah described it)
it seems like Sidney could have a better matchup against Supermassive. does her lighthook have mass?
Honestly, Sidney’s ‘I am a spaceship’ powerset is probably specifically designed to counter gravity issues. After all, gravity is the biggest issue in getting to space.
Depends on how strong Mr Buble truly is (we saw how close it came to collapsing on Alari Prime), or if it can even block effects of gravity and she can only have two of her balls active at a time
I rather doubt that Supermassive has energy output anywhere near the level of that thing that visibly damaged (but still didn’t break) her shield on Alari Prime. And given what it does to Harem’s teleportation and Vehement’s auras, it seems likely that Sydney’s bubble can block anything that doesn’t overwhelm it.
Time to grapple, perhaps? That way, if he yoinks at her, she can pass that force onto him simply by keeping her body together. All of a sudden, all the oomph she is pouring into keeping it together becomes an offensive force.
I don’t see any issues with Adding some super speed, strength and toughness to him, along with his suck hole power XD
Hiro has some of those general powers but also some further ability around sound wave absorption and release.
Lots of superheroes will will have some such abilities tacked on to some other special ability. Toughness usually being one, so they can take some blunt force trauma.
When he said ‘W Bosons’ did anyone else think ‘M Bisons’?
or is that just me….
hello?
Bueller….? Bueller…?
After careful analysis, Maxima’s energy beam consists of very small bananas, easily moved by gravitational powers.
you know, if he just uses antigravity, anything with mass could be simply repelled, anything with mass would just go in the opposite direction, be he would also… but a stream of particles don’t have that much mass too… so there’s that.
See, this is a person who has studied thier powers in the way only a nerd truly would.
“Ok let’s see, can I make more than one gravity source at a time? Can I… Oh can I fly? Let’s see how well I can mimic flight, super strength, all the basics. Am I able to withstand my own gravity or should I be careful about that?”
as others have mentioned there are a couple of ways in which a gravity bender could “fake” super speed without needing time dilatation
for once the easiest would be falling, if he cannot only control the strenght of the gravity but also the direction of gravity he could simply shift the direction of the effect that he isnt as much “moving” but falling towards the target, you add 10 times the gravity and he starts accelerating at 98 meters per second, increase it 100 times and he starts aproaching mach speeds
another more complex way but that it would allow to absolutely clown maxima is to create a warp bubble, basically you expand space behind you and compress it in front of you allowing you to move faster because there is physically less distance between you and your objective, and you dont even need to move to accomplish insane “speeds” because you arent moving, time-space is moving around you, this could even be used to accomplish FTL speeds so suddenly even interstellar distances become a joke
this is theoretically posible IRL we just have no idea how to manipulate gravity in a way that would accomplish this effect but hey if you can literaly manipulate gravity to your will…
Dave, sir. i love that you explain and justify, and just plain help us understand your mind and work that little bit more.. but i assure you. you dont have to. you can just put it out there and let us debate, and theorize, and ponder. all that being said… thanks for that little brush up on physics maths. @.@ i need a nap.
I really like this use of gravity and gravitational fields. It’s nice to see someone with G-force powers doing more than a “lift and throw” form of combat. People take for granted just how fundamental gravity is to basic functions of the universe.
Dodge my beams? Well dodge an area blast.
Burn all the O2 in area and tha grav boy will slow down a wee bit.
Bet he can’t control grav at discriminate levels to pull enough O2 into area depleted of O2. Or Crack CO2 or water.
Ahh, I see. So it’s not that he’s actually fast so much as he’s manipulating gravity to pull him and his punches aren’t so much power as gravity repulsive power.
Yes, he is very repulsive
If he’s increasing his own gravitational field, the effect should be to bend things passing him inward, making them more likely to hit him (or making them do a gravity assisted course change like a spacecraft passing by Jupiter). The illustration makes it look like Max’s beam is bending outward, which suggests a repulsive gravitational effect, something not known to physics. I would suggest that the source is somewhere away from him, but the path seems to have him at its focal point, making him the origin of the field. So there’s some seriously weird physics here.
Maxima’s beam being twisted feels like a reference to her OWN lesson about if you use your beams assume you’ll miss. Gonna be interesting to see where and what that blast hit
Also seems like a callback to Sydney’s beam squirreling around the Squiddy shield and back onto its original path. Wonder if the same scientific principles are involved – there really should be a lot more (voluntary) scientific research happening with powers. Deus is totally right to be pouring money into supers, he’ll be first to market (possibly galactically) with some amazing tech.
Tactics change. Make the air unbreathable. He can probably warp an AoE blast away from himself, but he can’t replenish the air once the blast front passes. And even if he pulls all the air back, it will be super heated, probably even ionized.
He hasn’t demonstrated the ability to make his own air. And even Gravity or Space-Time bending powers won’t give him an air purifier. Max has better, but not perfect, endurance in that regard. She won’t have her own lungs pulled inside out by her own thermobaric blast.
There is no evidence that Maxima’s blasts do anything to the air (except heat it up, which could work). They aren’t powered by chemical reactions.
Just a suggestion- steal Star Trek’s physics for a bit. Let’s say he’s not telling the complete truth about his powers; rather his real ability is to generate various flavors of mass particles. That’s how ships in trek warp space time without getting squished themselves into black holes- they generate field of particles with complex mass between the nacelles (Trek calls these particles of partly imaginary mass nadions, but y’all can make up anything you want.)
The particles distort space time, but don’t affect normal matter because the warp field is skewed to normal reality, but they can also generate particles of normal mass when they want, which ios how they play games with artificial gravity and inertia.
In effect, he’d have all the powers of a star trek ship- shields, super speed, super toughness, and the ability to affect the mass of other objects around him.
He’d have some sort of energy limit of course- star trek ships burn antimatter to explain their abilities, but even with limited power this would end up being a real fight for Max as he can match almost any power she has, just ina different way.
The ability to manipulate gravity is amazing… but the more amazing part is being able to manipulate gravity in such a way that you don’t affect anything else but your target. Because the gravity necessary to bend light rays would have the building collapse towards the gravity source if he couldn’t only selectively bend the principles of physics.
Okay, this asshole ain’t getting taken in alive, or one identifiable piece
I think it would be funny to see her pretend to get turned on by the fighting and get close enough to him to throw him into space, using his balls as a handle.
LOVING this! Maxima’s facing a real challenge now. Even her chances of victory are uncertain. Which means we’ve got some genuine conflict here; beating this guy will be a huge accomplishment for her. (And even if she loses, that means she’s got something to work towards for the rematch)
Ok if he’s powerful enough to use the gravity lens effect then the answer is simple, let him keep “flexing” until he’s collapses himself into a singularity and disappears forever. I half expect he’s going to say something like a many of collage guys, jocks, and your classic “redneck” death knell; “Hey guys! Check this out!” or “Here, hold my beer” or lastly “Look, a bear cub! Isn’t it cute? I wanna pet it.” while it’s mama is charging at them.
Betting there’s a whole new category of Darwin Awards in this universe for budding supers. Many of them still starting off with “hold my beer.”
imagine that being the only power they had, if they said ‘hold my beer’ you’d be forced to hold it no matter what they did to you, until that beer was finished
(drawback, you could finish it for them, and they’d have to start from scratch again)
Coming up on boring soon.
Yup. This is dull.
Yeah, either Max needs to channel Sydney or Sydney herself needs to jump in. I’ll bet she could troll this guy to the point he looses it and does something really dumb like ignore Max. He would wail on Mr. Bubble trying to shut up Sydney and suddenly feels a light tap on his shoulder, and gets rang like last call bell at a sports bar during a late night Superbowl game.
Sadly, Sydney is on the other side of the ocean and can’t get over, even if she figures out how to recharge her orbs.
Easy solution – his gravity powers are actually the power stunt on a space-manipulation power-suite.
If he can compress/expand/fold space, that allows for superspeed (he compresses space in a very narrow envelope around him, that moves with him, so normal movement becomes superspeed to anyone not inside the folded space)…
It also allows the bending of the beam (it’s actually travelling in a straight line, it’s just that straight lines go around him) without bending light (if his control is fine-tuned enough, he could literally bend space JUST for that one event, and not any others, or along a single plane, which is what seems like it’s happening in the panel).
And since one theory of gravity is that it’s just space deforming around large masses… when he compresses space in a general manner (no fine-tune-control like the two above examples) it results in something that is indistinguishable from a gravitational field.
Shoot. At that point, it explains why that last power seems like the strongest – it’s the “brute force” pour all his energy into a general effect… whereas accomplishing the speed or dodge effects requires finesse, and thus less power.
Basically everything he’s done can be better explained by generalizing his gravitational powers to “space warping” powers.
I would like to say, I’m kinda enjoying that Max is having a bit of an issue dealing with someone for a change. There’s no doubt she’s going to win, because its Max, but it’s a bit refreshing that it’s not just her curb stomping anything and anyone with no challenge.
It does raise a question: Are her bruises bronze colored, or rose gold?
Agreed, a truly invincible character gets boring quickly, which is why ol’ Soupcan has not only Kryptonite but so many colors of it.
I’m wondering how a fight between Supermassive and For Whom the Death Tolls would play out…
Just thinking…
Also getting annoyed at the power creep the villains (and some major cast members) seem to have.
Power creep? In what way has the average power level increased, or the range changed?
I would generally recognize power creep as the top end of the scale repeatedly moving — that what was once considered powerful has been demoted to mid-range, and there’s a new scale in place with a higher cap. Maxima has pretty much defined the top end for the comic, and I don’t think her powers or their representation has particularly changed. And I think Dave goes more for variety and clever use of powers than really rating them against each other. I don’t think Supermassive is being portrayed as particularly strong, not in Max or Vehemence’s class, but just particularly well matched against Maxima.
So who in particular do you think is showing some power creep?
I haven’t seen power creep on the villain side… Vehemence is still the top of the chart, as far as I can tell.
And all but two of the heroes have remained static in power level; Varia has always had the ability to do what she’s doing. And of the new heroes, none of them are coming close to Maxima, Pixel or Halo.
Yes, Sydney has “power creep” herself if you want to call it that (unless her orb depowerment turns out to have lasting consequences,) but since the comic clearly focuses to some degree on her “unlocking” power advancements using a actual, RPG-like power tree, her “power creep” kinda seems to be the point of her character.