Grrl Power #1227 – The really yucky breath of life
This page is a tad busy admittedly, but I couldn’t resist a little aside back to the base to show Arianna just… aging a little bit each time Sydney’s name suddenly gets a bunch of social media hits. I don’t know why I made her drink of choice roast coffee rum, other than I didn’t want her to be another whiskey drinker. The comic already has a few whiskey snobs in it.
When I look back through the comic, I think the biggest issue with it is the density. Since I want every page to tell it’s own little segment of the story, there’s no big splash pages (except for page ~100 I think, where Sydney gets dropped off at the base for the first time) or larger establishing panels that showcase new locations. The result is that the visual pacing is kind of homogenous, which is to say, dense, cause every page has 9 plus or minus 2 panels, which is really a lot for a standard comic page. I’ve considered trying to draw larger panels on occasion to vary to pacing, but then I’d have to post twice as many page, like doing those tall double pages I’ve used on occasion, in order to have the same amount of story per post. Unfortunately that would almost definitely mean more work for me. Probably not double, but if I used those larger panels for some establishing location shots, it would mean quite a bit more background work, which would benefit the comic I think, but man I am slow at them. And I don’t even do very detailed (or good, if I’m honest) backgrounds. Like look at that first panel. No comic shop has bare walls like that. There’d be posters all the way to the rafters, and there’s be little displays all over the counters and tent signs and all kinds of visual clutter.
Honestly, when I look at those artist that seem to delight in drawing some anime witch girl sitting in front of a cauldron in some shop with a 4 dozen bookshelves and plants and papers scattered all over the place and a bunch of owls or cats lounging in all the nooks and crannies, I’m like… that’s 60 hours of work, right? Drawing all those spellbooks in the shelves, all different heights and widths and some of them canted slightly and the little compasses and vials and jars full of eyeballs or whatever… that has to be like a week and a half of 8-5 work for that one picture, right?
Anyway, that’s why Sydney’s comic shop is really… uh, tidy.
The new vote incentive is up! Crimson and Scarlett have a present for Ingsol!
It’s them, they’re the present. They’ve decided that “Sire-versaries” are a thing and Ingsol has to be convinced this is a good idea each time. Everyone thinks his pair of names-that-are-synonyms-with-red sirelings who are both women and who were both turned in that age range that ensure peak hotness means he’s a dirty old man, but he actually isn’t. It just worked out that way. And don’t forget that while it looks like there’s a 25 year age gap between the girls and him, it’s actually much worse, as he is 700 years old, while Scarlett is something like 180 and Crimson is only 40. But at the same time it’s meaningless as they were both fully adults when they got turned, so it’s all copacetic.
As usual, Patreon has the pair of them in various states of undress.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Why are they called spin doctors? They almost never seem to spin it in a healthy way.
Sometime you can’t spin it that way and have to settle for “Non panic-inducing” or “please don’t sue my client.”
I don’t think this situation requires too much spin. “A group of extradimensional persons engaged in combat with miss Scoville. In the process of defending herself and others, miss Scoville rendered them unconscious. She then rendered aid to prevent loss of life. Because the fight was a result of cultural differences and had no ill will involved – the demons simply considered it to be akin to a sporting competition – miss Scoville has declined to press charges, and we at Archon are honoring her decision.” Then probably ban them from entering the country for a while, considering they came over illegally in the first place (although given there is, presumably, currently no official procedure for extradimensional persons to enter the country legally, they may be willing to let this slide).
A picture is worth a thousand words; you’re going to need several hundreds more if you hope to turn this around.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the US, in this world, had a mutual extradition treaty with Hell. The lesser-known infernal realms, perhaps not.
thanks.
apparently you don’t do much “breathing” anymore. cage-crushing is the only needed gesture. assisted breathing should be unnecessary and will come back automatically once the heart beats again
> apparently you don’t do much “breathing” anymore. cage-crushing is the only needed gesture.
> assisted breathing should be unnecessary and will come back automatically once the heart beats again
This is mostly true, although you do get cases where people do have a pulse (if weak) but aren’t breathing even when there is no apparent obstruction. I have anecdotal empirical first hand evidence.
As a counter point, the recipient has been inhaling a semi-poisonous gas, so forcibly exchanging it might do some good. Also, there’s the point that just because a character thinks something, doesn’t mean the author doesn’t know better.
That’s true now, but at the time this comic takes place they’d definitely still be teaching people to breathe. We’re still in what, the mid-late 2000s?
2010 or 2011
No, the breathing part of CPR is still important, Humans (and presumably these Demons too) don’t just need their blood pumping through their body, they also need relatively fresh oxygen to keep all the vital organs functioning. Chest compressions keep the blood moving, but blowing into someone’s lungs gives the blood something to move around. Sure, it might be 2nd hand air with a bit of carbon dioxide in the mix, but it’s much better than leaving their brain with nothing to refresh itself with despite the moving blood…
Been a while since I did my full First Aid Certificate, but I still remember the whats and whys…
That’s mostly true but current standards focus on chest compressions for at least the first three minutes. A body will still have oxygen in the blood and if you need CPR you are probably in a state where that oxygen is mainly going to your central nervous system as emergency life support so that O2 can last a while before you need someone to breathe for you, also chest compressions will cause small amounts of air to leak into the lungs due to their natural elasticity so the patient will be getting a bit of new oxygen anyway.
The most important thing for survival is not actually getting new O2 in it’s getting the old CO2 out and chest compressions do that by forcing blood to circulate through the pulmonary artery and veins like it normally would, exchanging the carbon dioxide for the small amounts of O2 in the lungs.
Source: Nursing degree
and possibly reduces the chance of the patient vomiting because you’ve blown air into their stomach
Would this apply to drowning?
Drowning does seem a close parallel for this character’s SCUBA background training.
We still do not know all that went into her Montage training, and she may not either.
I can’t think of any education I’ve had so far that brings up drowning victims as a special case. So based on what I know currently, you should treat them the same but start giving rescue breaths right away since they are unconscious from oxygen deprivation instead of collapsing from a heart attack or something similar.
Keeping in mind that I am way out of date on CPR standards, I think the idea of focusing on compressions is that compressing the chest will also force air out of the lungs which will at least partially refill during the interval between compressions since compressing the chest changes the volume of the lungs.
Kraken: for when you absolutely, positively Need A Fuckin Drink.
They don’t pay Arianna enough to be Sydney’s PR team. Not. Nearly. Enough
Seriously, at least she has good tastes in rum. RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!
I’m disappointed in how the demons are shown as opponents. Apparently no attempt to prevent Sydney from bubbling in Parfait, no attempt to free Lulu to help them in the fight.
Good idea! Nothing can possibly go wrong with that! Magical mind control is no match for idiocy. Yes, let the slave into your defenses so she can betray you to her master and have bad things happen to you JUST so that arm chair quarterbacks and generals can debate.
Sydney actually is showing a bit of restraint in not trying to fix something she knows next to nothing about. Dabbler’s explanation of succubus society may have gotten through Syd’s addled head, it may not have. That said? Sydney is dealing with the situation as best she can.
… what?
I was saying the demons should have freed Lulu. Nothing about Sydney at all.
According to the society, they can’t.
Then again, according to SOME people across the US now, slavery was not only right, but should come back so they can be the absolute best kind of assholes that they can be. Luckily, those are all fringe type nutcases, except that one who is sitting in Congress and maybe one in the Supreme Court… Go figure.
The demons probably see nothing wrong with Lulu being bound to Brex. It is just the way their society works. But we HAVE to input our own values on alien cultures no matter to cost to ourselves or said alien culture because we HAVE TO. Do we really want to go back to the 18 or 19th century even in the US? I kinda LIKE clean water, indoor plumbing and most aspects of modern medicine, myself.
For me? Slavery is wrong, but then again, so are rape, murder and treason. Funny how all this really bad things become okay when the ‘right’ people do them.
We have seen Lulu is not happy with Brex’s ownership but we have no other context besides Sydney’s talking to the demons. So, we should free the slave and then leave her to die of starvation. Sounds historically accurate to me.
I was talking about the magic restraint Parfait put on her during the duel. They should have untied her, so she can fight Sydney alongside them (under Brelx’ orders), as opposed to uselessly wriggling and moaning around.
Nothing to do with the slave bond (which, by the way, is very different from real slavery, so all the political things you said there aren’t really relevant anyway.)
Free Lulu from what? she is literally enjoying it? And Lulu wouldn’t have helped she already explained she can’t disobey orders and she wasn’t forced to become that guy’s succubus, as dabbler explained the species isn’t forced into servitude it’s a choice. Sydney also only expected to make them pass out so no need to protect Lulu if she’s just gonna pass out and that’s it.
You also seem to have misunderstood me, thinking I was talking about Sydney. I was saying Brelx & Co should have freed Lulu, so she can help them fight (which she would be guaranteed to.)
What’s going on here? Looking back, my comment still looks semantically unambiguous to me, so why are people misunderstanding me?
They were kinda busy fighting Sydney to worry about Lulu, plus, it’s possible only Parf could have released her, and she seems in no hurry to do so (not even after the fight, she has her slung over her shoulder in the next to last two panels)
They started the fight, they could simply have chosen to attack Sydney only after freeing Lulu.
“it’s possible only Parf could have released her”
This doesn’t fit https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1222-afterglow-escapologist/, where they talk about doing a tie-breaker if neither of them can escape after 15 minutes, as opposed to “there’s nothing we can do, only Parfait can release this, if she can’t escape, they’re both stuck like this until she runs out of mana.”
!: Have you ever seen someone do mouth-to-mouth? Gross. Like get a fire hose to clean Sydney down after Demon Boy barfs all over her, mop, squeges and buckets to aisles 5 through 15 for cleanup kind of stuff. There is a reason the ‘good’ pocket aid kits have a ‘resuscitation shield’ in there. (Yes, I have, thankfully long in the past, its something that every First Aid course glosses over).
2: Maybe, for locations like the Comic Store, that are going to get reused a fair bit, make up the various walls, save them by themselves, then use one of the fancy ‘Art’ programs to tilt the wall to give the right perspective for each scene. Should also work for a bunch of generic furniture like book cases, water coolers/fountains and wall hangings.
2: I was going to suggest something similar. Spend the few weeks drawing all 4 walls of the store and several shelves in excruciating detail, preferably in 3D with a zillion layers. Then rotate to select the view angle for today’s comic, tweak it a tiny bit if you want, export the view into your preferred daily comic software, and insert the characters.
-or-, partner with an art school to assign backgrounds for homework assignments. Pay them in Ramen noodles or something if you pick one to use [just kidding… don’t roast me].
I don’t know about other 3D packages but C4D Mograph would handle hundreds of book spines of assorted colours quite well (though varying the text would probably require scripting). Alternatively, that seems like a very good job for AI image generation.
Hey at least you didn’t suggest getting AI to do it!
Dave doesn’t need to go there and demon puke could be several times worse for humans.
Gay Dean best Dean!
Biggest rock best rock!
you know it doesnt need to be whisky,, arianna could have had a sherry bottle or maybe something like yeager maelster, or if she is realy fancy something like ice cider or bleu royal gin
it’s not whiskey. it’s black rum, and that bottle in particular has coffee flavoring. The Kraken is one of my personal favorites.
Agree, Kraken quickly became one of my favourites.
That might be how it’s pronounced with some accents, but the spirited beverage is spelled Jaeger Meister. A pleasantly cinnamon tinged schnapps. It is markedly less pungent than Fireball. I like Jaeger and Coke myself, but I have been known to knock back a few straight shots of Jaeger. I believe the name roughly translates as “Fighter Master”.
Close. “Master of the hunt” or “Chief Hunter.”
I really eclectic hashtag selection that is.
If its an active search, i’d be missing those though: #blue glass #unmaker #forest fire #invasion #heist #chinese food #apocalypse …
That excerpt shown here is certainly not the full list.
She’s probably got an advanced search on the Sydney-relevant hashtags that shows the hashtags that are included with them
Could just be general social media monitoring system that alerts her if any of the team member’s names/pseudonyms/nicknames are trending and spits out the list of top tags used together with those. Definitely something I’d see a PR rep having set up.
Thankfully, the PR copy for the press release almost writes itself, except for what is going to remain classified or not. So, who is making and streaming the video?
Everybody who was in the comics store when this went down?
She’s not kissing a demon, she’s giving CPR to an alien that happens to look like a demon. Perfectly normal these days.
Okay, this one time, I feel sorry for Ariana.
Kraken Roast Coffee… Arianna has taste. and, with multiple shot glasses, she shares. she’s definitely a real hero herself.
>Shares
No…no, those are all for her. If she needs more than 4 shots of Scoville Kraken, she just starts chugging the bottle.
Dook dook dook
HA! i thought the same thing. not a huge fan of coffee.. or.. like it at all… but the smell is devine, and i could imagine capturing just the scent in a rum with out the disgusting taste of brewed coffee.
Arianna and maybe Max,might be having some words with Sydney….!
This probably won’t bode well from her Archon career?!?
Why? Some illegal aliens came to her store looking for a fight, she handled it the best she could with minimal collateral damage (this time, the forest fire wasn’t her fault), when she couldn’t avoid the fight she attempted to end it quickly without major injuries, when she realised she may have caused three she went overboard in remedying it
Overall, she handled everything fairly well
You also do recall that she will, eventually, become a Corporal, right?
why?
Yeah, using CPR on interplanetary humanoids is frown upon by the military. They prefer to let them die. No matter how green our diplomacy with them is.
¬¬
I assume that the hypothetical “anime witch girl” manga you used as an example is one of those mangas that are successful enough to have an entire team draw it.
Don’t worry about the backgrounds because I usually only glance at them. I understand that artists want their work to be as pretty as possible, but outside of establishing shots they never get the attention they deserve from me. Heck in e.g. Replay the forest backgrounds are literally just colored blobs and smears and I hadn’t even noticed that until she pointed it out. It really just looks like forest that’s out of focus unless you pay close attention to what’s actually been drawn there.
Hmm, got a tiny bottle of Kraken (recognized the bottle before reading the label or the blurb), didn’t know it came in Coffee flavour…
In Sydney’s panic, did she forget she can create oxygen with her green ball?
Also, doubt her hitting Brelx would actually do anything, she may be fitter but she still punches like a wet weasels fart
Surrounding someone’s head with oxygen won’t help if they’re not breathing
I’ll worry about Arianna when she’s drinking sterno.
Ahh, squeezings. Good for what ails you, if not being blind is your affliction.
Social media going to media I guess, but it doesn’t look like Sydney is “making out” with a demon in the posted picture. It looks like she’s giving him CPR, which is in fact what she’s doing. They don’t look much alike!
As for the comic density, I think you trade off establishing shots and full page panels for a higher density of rambling jokes and digressions. Which… I don’t know, I get this is a humor strip but sometimes I think going a little leaner on the jokes might be better. One-liners rather than multi-panel shaggy dog stories.
It doesn’t have to “look” like anything to go viral on social media. Just the headline is enough for a not-insignificant portion of the population to believe and share.
Plus the people taking pictures are quite a bit farther away and behind her, so maybe their picture look more incriminating.
Yes seing the stupidity of viral social media , is a lesson in misanthropy.
If it’s a perfect hogwash it will came viral , the Pizzagate is a prime exemple and had triggered the alt-rigth french weirdoes in Paris against the pizzeria Pizza Girl Paris , who had followed their Qanon guru.
Social media is a conspiracy of morrons … who had tinfoil theories for everything..
Pr relation could lead to two endings , for the responsible of it convincted people is gullible morrons:
1) Make his/her own sect to make profit of it.
2) Advocating for eugenics.
Social media is full of weirdos ,with the High School Diploma level of below, completed with continued training at the counter of some bar , provided by Budweiser …
Platists , Trump supporters and Qanon trives here , because one universal law “idiots dare to do anything, that’s how we recognize them”…
In France farmers (400 000 ) pretend that Paris and suburb inhabitants ( 13 064 617 ) are not french … and threatens to block them.
Farmers are leaded by a millionaire Arnaud Rousseau , who embezzle European fund, they had elected him in 2019 at 55,31 % direct vote.
Okay, looks like there is an ecnalubma and paramedics onsite (one is seeing to Tenri in the second last panel), so… why are they allowing Sydney to assault a patient like this? She clearly has zero idea how to do this effectively (seeing it on tv, or worse, reading it in a comic is not good enough, it’s why medics have to take arduous training before they are allowed to do it for real)
If you were an EMT responding to a call and showed up to find your patients are unconscious demons, you might be thrown off your game a little too. It also doesn’t look like there are enough EMTs for the number of patients; totally possible one of them helps up another demon, then looks over and sees what Halo is doing right after the last panel.
There’s probably a fair number of EMTs in the world who wouldn’t interrupt a superhero like Halo, even if they thought she was doing it wrong. Lots of reasons to not stop her (hero worship, fear of media backlash, convinced she knows something about demon physiology you don’t and she is doing it right, etc)
In theory, CPR is not that difficult: I learned how to do it as part of a 1-day first aid course mandatory for my driver’s license (germany).
That said, Sydney doesn’t appear to even have seen it on TV, because what she’s doing doesn’t even remotely look like what it’s supposed to. The paramedics should definitely stop her.
CPR training assumes a human, Sydney has access to Parfait who’s going to have a better understanding of their biology. Whatever she’s trying to do being the appropriate for the situation makes more sense than no one training Sydney in basic emergency medical treatment.
If it was a demon specific procedure that Parfait just told Sydney to do, wouldn’t it make more sense for Parfait to do it herself as the resident expert?
Also, what Sydney is doing doesn’t seem to make much sense as a CPR method, demon or not. The physics of respiration are going to be similar.
Was very much expecting “You’ve never given up on anything in your life, now *fight*!” from Sydney (from the CPR scene in “The Abyss”)
The alcohol when you are both too sober to deal with this shit but need to stay awake to deal with this shit.
Sounds like Tendi is pining for Brelx (I can’t type Tendi without thinking of the Lower Decks character)
Sydney…. SYDNEY!! Stop, he’s alive, just sick! Jeez girl relax and let things happen, plus he yielded so the fight’s over. I’ll grant you Ariana, she’s enough to make anyone want to drink, but I’d still want her to have my back. Sadly there’s enough morons out there to believe the crap the lame shock news BS types come up with, it is enough to make drink, or at least take out the mini-gun and start spraying….
On the subject of the work involved in creating a webcomic, I am repeatedly amazed at how Ashley at Unsounded is able to produce 3 highly detailed comics each week. I have never seen her mention in the comments that any other people work on it with her so I’m assuming it’s a one person effort, unlike, say, Girl Genius which has multiple people creating each comic.
If ever there was someone I thought would be a wine drinker it would have been Arianna
What she needs to do is practice the tendril air clear, chest compressions via the bubble with air~
Half decent rum f*cked up beyond all recovery by adding crap to it, catering to people who like the idea of pirates but can’t handle rum.
Not a fan of spiced rum or anything other than the blackest stuff I can find.
Black Diamond isn’t made anymore :( but Gosling’s Black Seal, London Dock or even Capt Morgan’s Black are decent swills.
‘Pusser’s Rum’ as was served on His Majesty’s Ships would have been a good choice for emergencies for her;)
It’s a lot more expensive than even the overpriced squid ink she has under glass, if you can find any, it’s getting scarce.
Regarding Sydney’s CPR chest thumping, are demon alien hearts in the same place as humans. Do they even have a human type heart? Could be some kind of impeller type thingy. For all we know she could be pounding on the equivalent of a liver, spleen, kidney, gorthlak…Whatever.
You want the main organ pumping your circulatory fluid armored given their passing similarity to humanity is safe to assume that their heart is underneath the rib cage. Therefore pounding on the rib cage will make the heart pump even if it doesn’t want to and will compress the lungs assuming they have lungs.
Central casting syndrome is actually a real feature of the Grrlpower universe; Apparently the first race in a galaxy to achieve high tech then seeds the place with variations on its own genetics, so all the intelligent races are just riffs off their own design, which is also why you’ve got a ridiculous number of different intelligent species at about the same level of development.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-690-gotterdammermcguffins/
Crelm toothpaste! Eeeeeeeeeeee!
Seriously? Didn’t anyone get that Monty Python’s Flying Circus reference?
Waitaminute… whose the fourth wall a perspective from?!
Whats funny is, you can see Daphne/Harem approaching on the last page while all the civvies are still out near the parking lot / comic shop.
Makes me think it was Daphne that posted the original picture to Twitter (or equivalent).
can’t count on the internet to know what CPR looks like lmao
“When I look back through the comic, I think the biggest issue with it is the density. Since I want every page to tell it’s own little segment of the story, there’s no big splash pages (except for page ~100 I think, where Sydney gets dropped off at the base for the first time) or larger establishing panels that showcase new locations. The result is that the visual pacing is kind of homogenous, which is to say, dense, cause every page has 9 plus or minus 2 panels, which is really a lot for a standard comic page. ”
Reading this is hilarious to me – yeah some of these pages are dense, but most of them are not story, or not new story. They’re mostly a page of setup for the latest joke, or some other clever idea the author wanted to bring up, with the story being a backdrop for it. Which is why time is barely moving, and most of the plot threads the comic had seem to be left by the wayside.
Hopefully Parfait actually told her that CPR was appropriate. Otherwise, it might actually count as demonic foreplay.
demm.. i hoped for the cthulhu cpr
“Crelm Toothpaste, now in Dirty Grill, Exhaust Pipe, & Never Been Cleaned Oven!”
Hey! Two of those actually sound pretty good.
Having someone as popular as Sydney in your social media charge is a real monkey’s paw situation.
Though in fairness Sydney was right up front with what she’s like; The mistake is just thinking you can get used to it.
Pipe organ pipes are arranged tall to short, also going from wide to narrow, and the largest are essentially long wooden boxes. Not that those who care about such things would have quietly let them leave the organ there. And speaking of making all those books, would people who put fake books on shelves really put the exact same book panel over both shoulders? It kind of screams, “I’m pretentious and demand that you notice!” Or does one book panel turn on the bat-signal, and the other turns it off?
“But why do the bat-buttons look exactly the same?”
“So if the bad guys break in here they won’t know which one turns it … sigh … The contractor screwed up, OK? Have *you* tried to get one of them to fix something after you paid them?”
Apparently Widowmaker from Overwatch is a demon.