Grrl Power #1178 – Aftermarket alchemy
Ingsol has known a lot of politicians. Well, mostly kings and such until fairly recently. They usually didn’t have pander to the serfs, but depending on the kingdom, some had to play nice with the rest of the gentry. You behead some particularly obnoxious guy, but then you have to elevate his nephew to Vice-Viscount to appease the rest of his family, stuff like that. Politicians being mealy-mouthed hemm-hawwing panderers is probably a fairly new phenomenon? But maybe the Senators of ancient Rome were like “Rumors of people going crazy from lead poisoning is just liberal fear mongering. I fully support lead pipes in the aqueduct expansions.” And then he pays for an extension to his house with all that sweet payola from Big Lead. Actually, that seems like a dead certainty. I take back what I said. Politicians who can’t just behead anyone they like are all going to be just a little bit disingenuous at times. I bet Vlad the Impaler never had to pander to anyone.
Ah! Flat colors! Hopefully this won’t be for too many pages. I’m still sick, but I think I’m getting better? The doctor gave me some industrial grade cough suppressant, which covers my primary symptom, though I still have an entirely capricious need for random naps. I’m hoping I can get back to the usual look sooner rather than later. In the meantime I’m playing around with slightly different art for some of the characters. Scarlett there looks a little Disney princessish. Which I mostly like. The question is will she look anything like that the next time we see her?
My main problem as an artist is that I like way too many kinds of art. I think Joe Madureira is about the best American Comic style penciller, but chasing his art pulls me away from more cartoonish styles like anime, which I also really like. (Depending on the anime.) I also really like… I’m not really sure what to call it, but the best examples would be stuff like League of Legends and Blizzard style hero splash art. It’s sort of halfway between Joe Madureira and Pixar. Of course, I can’t turn every comic panel into an amazing painting. I know there are some very fast artists out there, but stuff like this takes like 30 or 40 hours of work. At least until AI replaces us. But that’s why the comic pages tend to creep towards higher levels of shading as I “improve toward exemplars” I until I realize I need to pull back for my own sanity.
My computer setup is an ultrawide curved monitor on one desk (I have two corner desks pushed together, so I have like a half-circle desk arrangement) and my drawing monitor on the other. Then on a monitor arm, I have another monitor just above the drawing screen. If I’m not watching Rifftrax or old MST3K or binging some series on it, I usually have it displaying some picture from my vast “Good Art” reference folder, in order to continually torture myself with amazing pieces to aspire to. It’s supposed to be inspirational, but sometimes I feel like I’m taunting myself just a little.
The June vote incentive is finally up! Maxima is prepping for her night out.
And in the Patreon variants, she gets (un)dressed and takes a look through all the makeup options.
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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
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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.
Sorry you’re still down with the cold/crud/whatever. Given your descriptions, I’m amazed you can still produce.
It should be interesting to see how you play out the Sciona’s new role as senatorial aide, and if she is, in fact in cahoots with Deux.
I thought it was understood that sciona worked for deus
Sciona’s VERY independent. The Alari exiled her to Earth for being too bent on conquest. Now that Sciona and the Soul Buddies (that’s an interesting band name) are bodyjacking corpses, they’re going the subtle route of invading Earth while the main Alari refugee group are busy helping Deus conquer Africa. (for now)
Actually, no, she wasn’t exiled, she just… didn’t have a way back (that we know of)
I think that’s called “stranded”.
Nah, she was sent here to do a job, she never completed the job before Alari Primal got sent back to the Neolithic Age
No, she’s acting as a senator’s aid/secretary. Or as I’ve come to call many of them, sexretary! Anyway she’s still in hiding, and I doubt with a human body she’s anywhere near as powerful as she once was. There was plenty of time to join the rest of the of her kind and hasn’t, so she’s got another plot cooking.
Given that she’s gain the ability to induce bliss in someone with a touch, and has most likely used it to gain control of the Senator, I’d say “sexretary” is an apt term.
Judging how that girl suddenly started acting, I’d say it was more like a powerful drug that she got through the touch, think MJ on steroids, or maybe the best orgasm ever, so it’s more likely she got him high and used that to get him to agree on crap to help her. If the other’s can do that as well… I don’t want to think about it, I’ve killed off enough brain cells because of the Kardasions! Argh! I remember them, now I gotta do it again!
I think you are confusing Sciona (Alari blood mage and body hopper) with Loriara (Alari employed by Deus as some kind of secretary…oder sasscretary – just to contribute to the word-playing).
No. Lorlana works for Deus. Sciona just had a business transaction with him.
It would be interesting to see what ai can do to your workflow
If it only did the colouring.
I know/hope you mean well. But suggesting AI to an artist is beyond bad form. There are no current AI models right now that have ethical training sources. And the training databases that do exist are predatory to people like webcomic artists. So, politely, take AI comments elsewhere. Preferably nowhere.
Not true of all of them, although yes the vast majority are based on stolen work. But I know quite a few artists are super excited for the possibilities as those issues get fixed, e.g. training a model on your own work and letting it take care of all the backgrounds or going from a roughed-in page to a 90% finished page ready for finishing touches.
And lest you think I’m out of touch since I’m not a full-time artist, I’m a software engineer which is directly in the AI crosshairs as well. Definitely going to change the way I work, but not eliminate the need. Just like ATMs and software changed the way bank tellers work, but there’s more of them than ever.
I can tell you are American. Everywhere else there are hardly any bank tellers. Some branches of our largest bank do not carry cash at all ever.
Exactly the point – there aren’t that many pure ‘tellers’ here anymore either. The job has been elevated from “make change at the register” to working on loan applications, business services, etc now that the computers handle the tedious math and record keeping. The workers started providing higher-value services, attracting more customers, and the demand grew enough to require more workers.
Still tellers down here, not as many but there still are some (it’s the branches that are harder to find)
So is it unethical for a human artist to train themselves on those same sources?
I think it would be, if human artists could be cloned, knowledge and all, at virtually no expense, and offered their output for free on the interwebz, and had zero pride about developing their own style or content, and zero qualms about imitating other’s work to any extent at all up to and including direct copying, and gave zero acknowledgement of where the style/content/etc was learned/copied from. (Not sure direct copying has happened, but I doubt that any existing AI would avoid doing that if a request happened to be say the right thing.)
This is partially a word game – “training” an AI is only superficially the same as “training” a human. Humans come with a lot of pre-installed libraries, including API regarding IP, etiquette, and ethics, while at this point AIs are still just enhanced xerox machines.
Not to mention this big called “Creativity”, where an artist can take one and two and add them together to equals purple female in barely-plausible skin hugging suit in spaaaaaaaaace…
Try telling an AI to do that. Without a wordy prompt, and LOTS of sampling of what others have already done.
I mean just the colorization part. e.g.
https://github.com/lllyasviel/style2paints
it has workflow for human part.It is just there to save time, not to takeover the entire creative process.
Interested in trying this out just for fun – it would be great to flesh out some of my art ideas without actually having the skillset, which takes years of training. I expect I’d make anything as good as a “real” (traditional) artist would, but I also wouldn’t be replacing one commercially. Net gain, 1 artist and whatever art I produce.
*”wouldn’t make anything as good” – yikes that sounded arrogant. I can do a mediocre sketch at best, absolutely no experience with coloring and shading.
“…compromise is the way of the politician.”
In 2020s USA? Not hardly. Wish it was, we might avoid civil war if that was how things actually worked.
No real-world politician balks at half-measures either. Half-baked poorly thought out stopgaps are usually all they deliver – aside from platitudes and buzzwords, which this guy does have a handle on.
that’s because there’s a branch of the press that makes money stoking fear. this isn’t the first time, it probably won’t be the last. As long as that crap goes on, the politicians who mistake the editorials for reality will be slaves to the tiger they are hitched too. sadly, the rest of us are lunch for the tiger. the ones riding are dinner/dessert (high fat content).
These days it’s all about money and power, they don’t give a squat about much of anything else. “You don’t agree with us? Oh look, here comes a hooker you hired back in 1980 when you were an intern, let’s see what she has to say!” And a “news” crew just happens to be near by…
Yeah, seems like most politicians have learned that people have no long-term memory, and that the best way to keep getting elected is to promise all sorts of things and never deliver. If they made good on any of their promises, they’d have to find new issues to get people riled up about!
Yeah, unfortunately, I think you’re probably right about that civil war, simply because our politicians have decided to see how much they can get away with before they get strung up, forgetting that the only way to really determine that involves crossing that line and getting strung up.
To be clear, I vote to try to change things, including virtually never voting for an incumbent during the primaries (there have been a few local politicians who have been doing well by their constituents and living up to their campaign promises or explaining why it turned out that was a bad plan and here’s what the new plan is instead. Two of them were even in my district, so I voted to keep them.) But other people are not me, and especially on the federal level they seem determined to give some people no survival option but to go to war.
Let’s be honest. It’s not “our politicians”, meaning all of them. It’s only some of them, and basically all of that some are in one party, and that party is not the Democratic party.
So many see war as good for business, never realizing how much of a mess a big war will make because very few have seen war and of those, very few have seen large scale wars. All the politicians and wanna-be leaders generally know is what they see in movies, TV and on the news so of course, why wouldn’t that be a good thing so no one ever really dies in those? (Scary thing? That is almost a direct quote!)
That is leaving aside the people who are either too incompetent to see the repercussions of their actions or they are psychopaths who simply do not care about how many people get hurt or killed as long as they get what they want. Why should they care after all? It is not like the damage, death and destruction could possibly come THEIR way, now could it?
Politicians CAN be concise.
Many choose not to be for many reasons.
Oddly enough, despite the obvious… superiority? (still early, mental thesaurus still not working) of your finished art over the flat work, I rather like this, as well. Interesting change of pace and still looks good.
“Blood of the Anemic!” heh heh.
I actually dont mind the flat look for what it’s worth. Kinda has a unique look to it, although I’m also reminded of the cover of “a scanner darkly”
It was actually a shock. You don’t realize what you have until you lose it.
I like it. It reiminds me on the early nineties american cartoons.
I’m pretty sure this is everthing Superfriends wished it could be.
Heh, I’m thinking that Ingsol’s weakness is mind-numbing political speeches, more so than religious symbols.
Kind of the same thing, really.
just imagine if the person making the speech had garlic breath!
The story-line still holds.
Your artwork still is above average.
Watch out for your health.
A few days without your work – bearable.
Without it at all – not so much.
I dare say you speak for many of us. Take care Dave.
ok.. that’s just jarring… skipping some steps in the name of expediency?
Shading is a very intensive work because it takes a lot of tiny adjustments to make it look right. While we’re so used to shaded comics that this is jarring, imagine how it would look with bad shading. In this case Dave chose to just use purely flat colors because he’s currently too sick to spend a lot of time in a chair devoted to this shading.
Looks like Sciona is running some plotting considering the note she passed. She’s been awfully quiet since she came into the room.
When you are the puppet master you don’t need to talk. IRL a good administrative assistant can be very handy for wrapping up meetings in just that way. At a pre-arranged time they come in with an important message or your pager goes off and you say “Okay, I have to be somewhere else, this is what we are going to do. ” and the meeting is over. Yes, I did carry a pager until I retired in 2015.
Despite his deliberate nonsense spiel, he sounds more like a “Sir Humphrey.”
It’s the thin end of the wedge!
Biscuits!
DaveB, you’re the 4th dev I’ve noticed (in the comics I follow) that has come down sick. One said they are fighting covid! Hang in there, you very rarely miss a strip, unlike SO many others. We can wait!
Illness conspiracies activate!!
Most likely people that are sick and STILL don’t bother to cover when they are out and about.
My wife, my son, and I caught the swine flu back in 2011 simply because my son was working as a cart pusher at Wal-Mart and brought it home with him. 3 days we were too sick to do anything but sleep, too weak to call 911 or anything. I still don’t know how we lived through it. No food, barely drank anything, just sleep.
I had a flashback to reading Heavy Metal and the movie of same name.
Very 80’s very Hurlant.
The 2023 models of Lycanthrope are pretty nice, but it’s the 2024 Ly-con expo that’s gonna have all the cool stuff!
the Therianthrope sneak peeks you can view in Japan have more varied models, tho, and some even come with tentacles!
It just hasn’t been the same since all the major species started pulling out to do separate direct events.
As to the Art,its fine if you added in a “news / pulp print” filter like JL8 ( example http://limbero.org/jl8/270 ) it would be cool sort of retro effect.
Been there with the codine level caugh.. not fun hope you get better soon.
Back in the day…
In the late 50’s Codine laced cough syrup (Cheracol?), was an over-the-counter medicine. Having a bad cough I purchased a 6 oz bottle before starting my (teenage) job of setting pins (pre-automation!), at the local bowling alley. On the job, whenever I would start to cough I would take a little nip from the bottle (which soon became empty). (The cherry flavor was quite enticing.) It fixed the cough and also lowered the local gravity field. I noticed that I was floating over the alley dividers. At the end of the evening, when I finally read the label, it said to not take more than 2 teaspoons in 4 hours! Since there are 36 teaspoons in 6 oz – a bit of an overdose. …But a cheap high !!!
Interesting that I still remembered the name of the syrup after 60+ years and that the internet has images of the (discontinued) product box and label. Quite the info age! I wonder how much the younger generations appreciate the ready access of the wealth of information at our finger tips instead of (at best!), trips to the library to search for encyclopedia entries.
My experience was Upper resp. infection (possibly atypical pneumonia ) the week before a major convention.. evidently on the way up I maintained conversation with the others in the mini van.. I have no recollection till past half way on a 5 hours drive.. by Sat (went up thrs) I was back to normal.. thanks to Z-Pak dayquil and codeine syrup.
Dextromethorphan cough syrup will make you hallucinate if you take enough of it. It takes a fairly enormous amount and it will make you psychotic but i have known a couple of individuals who where addicted.
One thing that seems weird here is that the senator cares about mana generation.
He really should not do so. Or even have much of an idea about why it matters.
Whats important to Archon is potion ingredients.
What politician cares (or even knows) about the exact details of crude oil or uranium or any other natural resource? Any natural resource is the same to them – it’s valuable, it can be extracted and commercialized, and their job is to oversee the rules and access around utilizing it.
However even without Sciorpia’s guiding hand (which is nicely alluded to in her possessive grip on the seat of power), he should be putting in serious effort to learning the basics of this new industry. It’s important to doing his job effectively, and at a personal level he’ll be making some very powerful, exclusive contacts and be perfectly poised as a consultant and lobbyist even if he later leaves office.
one of the compelling arguments against term limits is, with long serving legislators they can become surprisingly knowledgeable on one or more subjects on their own. this can be helpful when the lobbyists try the smoke-up-butt technique. suddenly the price of ‘tweaking’ the rules a bit can get rather a lot more. or, the legislator can become a very effective ally as they are a known expert in that area.
politicians are not universally stupid. they are just bribed that way.
What you don’t see is, behind the scenes, he’s maneuvering to have those dungeons built in his state. Short-term: more jobs in construction for his state. Longer-term, his state can lay first claim to potion ingredients coming out of those dungeons, or at least tax them. Even longer-term, the rise in mana level in his state will likely have benefits for their inhabitants: more naturally-gifted wizards per capita over the next couple of generations… Yep, these dungeons could be the next military base contracts.
He just had a meeting that explained it though..
In case you were wondering, the Romans were quite aware of the risks of lead poisoning. That’s why wealthy Roman homes were closer to the water source – less time in the lead pipes.
Nonetheless, they viewed it as preferable to epidemics of waterborne diseases. Better the lower classes be dumb and violent, than have half your city killed by cholera every few years.
Worked parallel to. They both raided the same magic vault, one of her crew was a freelancer that deus had worked with. The lead in the aqueduct pipes was nearly a nonissue, the minerals in the water calcified over them. However they put something known as sugar or lead into their wine. So there wasn’t really an abundance of caution. Same way people smoke or drink or overconsume sugar today. We know things are bad for us but gimme that good stuff!
Okay, I laughed at Werewolf Fleamarket
Agree, excellent venue choice. Besides, they already have the latest lycanthrope model right in the room with them.
Yeah, Kat is the best of the new models
I would be down for Werewolf Expo where you pay to be bitten by your favorite were-being.
Probably already an available black-market service at some comic conventions.
I think I would prefer it as a calico-market service MROWWW! *wiggles eyebrows*
just be careful it’s not inside a were-house
“When you said ‘Cathouse’ I was think of something a little more pedestran…”
really? I think most folks take a cab there
Haha not the only one who went and read the description for the art info there!
Ah… maximum strength cough syrup.
Last time I was that bad off, the doctor’s prescription was for a FULL PINT of CODEINE-BASED Cough Syrup.
Yeah… I was feeling pretty good while taking that stuff. :-D
Maxima should’ve gone with “Symposium” instead of “Expo”… but then there wouldn’t have been the joke to be made.
maybe not, but a ‘werewolves, the musical’ does sound a little less far-fetched now.
I’m actually quite happy with this level of rendered detail for daily comic pages. The big splash pages, of course, can be super fancy (they’re splash pages, they’re splashy!) but honestly I think over-detailing during simpler scenes pulls the attention away from the ‘acting’ and dialogue. It’s like in Star Wars Episode II, when two characters are having an important conversation and there’s starships and skimmers and alien pedestrians moving around them, and enormous digitally created cityscapes. Like, neat, cool, you were able to cram all that into the scene, but are you SURE it wouldn’t have played better with the two meeting in a conference room?
You should do the first “Dungeon Crawl” page in a “The Order of the Stick” style for fun. A shame it’s too late to do it on April First.
September Fool’s day is a Friday this year.
Ok, I’ll accept that it doesn’t work that way if you can explain why not in iambic pentameter.
Flat colors actually don’t look too bad, gives the comic a bit of that classic print feel.
ima thinken the good senator was body jacked
No, way too much information lost – Sciona had none of Escorpia’s knowledge, and mind-wiping a public figure with classified info would be a massive waste of a valuable resource. Far more valuable to just steer him for as long as possible; as his assistant, she’s already directly in the know and decision making process anyways.
yes but Sciona has an ego and has mad-on for archon and maxima in particular. there few ways to gain knowledge of thy enemy than to suborn the money bags bankrolling them. also Sciona is an accomplished blood mage and probably has several ways to get the information required for a successful impersonation. the thing that got me thinking of this possibility was pose and speech of the senator in panel 4, his robotic hand chop and the speech bubble on political high point came across as if he was reading from a poorly practiced script. and Sciona’s eyes giving the impression that she is irritated with her “co-worker”. and Sciona being who she is id rather be paranoid.
You could try a vampire auction house. Very high end stuff, but the bidding can get really intense.
Yeah the bidding can really suck you dry.
The speaker in panel #2 looks like the actor Michael Peña
The author literally said that in his notes on the page the character was introduced.
Many people still don’t read the Blurb, almost as many as don’t realise when the comments have reached page 3
They don’t read the blurb, they don’t read other comments, I question whether they even read replies to their own comments. They don’t always even seem to read the comic page itself! I will surmise they’re just here for the pictures.
Dave, back in early 2019-ish I caught a cold-like something, and while I got over the main illness in a week as expected, I kind of still had half of it and a lot of coughing for months afterwards before I finally felt fully fine again. My wife went through the same thing.
The next time I saw my doctor I mentioned what we had gone through, and she said, “yeah, that’s been going around, I had it too, and it drags on for about ninety days.”
Whatever it was, sounds like it could be what you’ve got. If so, hang in there, it does finally let up.
Home Remedy Discussion: (because I know Dave REALLY wants to hear a lot of half-baked ideas right now)
I had a friend who emigrated a few decades ago from Odessa. His cold remedy was (phonetically) “WOD-ka and SOW-oo-na!” You hold a shot of Vodka on your throat for as long as you can, then swallow and go sit in a sauna. Fastest way to bake it out of your system. Anecdotally, it worked for me. Probably works with Bourbon substitution, if you prefer.
Mum and me use Opal Nera (Black Sambuca) for coughs and mouth and throat aches, we started using that after they changed the formula to Vicks44 (it also tastes similar to Irish Moss, which helps :) )
Okay I’ve never drunk Coors Light. What’s wrong with it?
Two things: it’s Coors, and it’s ‘diet’ Coors
It’s even worse if you paid for it.
It’s American “Beer”
Coors isn’t bad for mass-market American lager, but that’s a very low bar. Adding “light” does less than nothing to improve it.
No kidding? I only know it by its adverts which call it “Rocky Mountain refreshment”. Like I said, never drunken it.
@Gromnir Il-Khan, It politely would be referred to a “Love in a Canoe” beer. That is, “F**king Close To Water”. Avoid it.
You can abuse the serfs, but you can’t abuse them TOO much.
The Tzars of Russia found that out.
Opposing the buying and selling of other species in their own markets is risky. Maxima would wind up accidentally opposing the right of… that body swapping race earlier in the story… to buy new bodies.
Granted Maxima knows a bit about what lycanthropes are, so she isn’t completely going in blind here.
Vlad the Impaler had to kowtow to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, for more than a decade.
He also had to kowtow to the turks, alot, until he got his famous name for going apeshit on a turkish jannisary regiment.
Quite true. His was a complex, bloody, and cinematic-worthy story. I’d love to see a miniseries.
He was also the only one standing between the Turks and the in-bred in-fighting Europe
And before the regiment, he had an ‘issue’ with a Turkish emissary who refused to remove his hat (issue solved with a few nails)
Buying the latest model lychanthope = bad
Birthing dragons to harvest their kideys = good
Also: Sidney already has a lycanthrope BF and he would be a great fashion model. If we pretend he is an actual lycanthrope and models are shirtless.
Actually, Sydney has a Woof boyfriend, who is an alien, and has absolutely nothing to do with lycanthropy.
Still thinking the skull soul Alari are doing the subtle body snatchers approach and that senetor was killed in a private limo *or brothel* and their body snatched.
if that’s the case then the body snatching ones, who other than being thankful don’t know why else they’d follow Sciona, definitely know that there is another group of Alari *one of which is in that room with Deus..who has been oddly quiet this whole meeting, over in Africa as a colony, with demons.
Because I wasn’t getting a “rule in another’s name” vibe from the Alari, like the old *the aliens are disguised as politicians and the wealthy and ruling through thought control methods* and more a Klingon *we are a warrior people, toughen up* vibe.
Unless there was more than one faction within their empire with different approaches to conquest and their planet getting wrecked was the first ice breaker to schism these factions to act against each other.
I would rate the body snatching of the senator as likely but not necessary. Sciona in Escorpia’s body brings enough to the table to keep a senator bought. Having a low level super with Sciona’s intelligence, ruthlessness and knowledge of Alari society as you personal assistant seems pretty tempting.
Working out pretty well for Deus, I wonder if he and the senator will compare notes at some point.
DaveB, it would appear that you don’t have an “ingsol02.png” for the Who’s Who.
I am ENTIRELY in favor of one of the characters looking like a Disney princess…
Ahem, on second thought.
I am ENTIRELY in favor of one of the non-Deus characters looking like a Disney princess.
Math? Stalwart? Ren? Actually Peggy would be a pretty interesting take with her tattoos and missing leg.
just call it Star Trek The Animated series style
Actually really like today’s art style. I wouldn’t mind if we did this for few weeks.
You got something against Colorada cool-aid?
I honestly prefer this style to the “faux-high-def” style. I disliked what it did to the character models and most angles weren’t particularly flattering. I prefer the original 2D style that you used before the “Upgrade”, it was much more enjoyable to look at and the character models were simple and easy to read, compared to the frankenstein between 2.5D and 2D art that the last several hundred pages have been.