Grrl Power #1291 – Sole searching
You silly primitives and your lack of advanced space medicine. Just invent advanced space medicine already, geeze! Is it so hard? What are you waiting for?
Blowing off a supervillain’s leg when there’s a very good chance that it will get caught on a camera phone isn’t really much better than blowing off their head, at least from a PR standpoint. Of course, if you blow off a head, there’s less chance the supervillain in question will sue you for super-police brutality. Either way, dismembering villains takes the public perception down a specific path – even though Maxima did it in the team’s very first public fight. Arianna would prefer to avoid that path, Maxima would also, but understands the value in showing that the kid gloves come off very quickly when dealing with super powered crime.
But Peggy’s on the team for a number of reasons. She is a pilot and someone Max trusts as an Lt. Also, Maxima didn’t want a situation where Spider-Man is busy keeping a section of bridge from collapsing on some civilian, giving the Green Goblin ample time to fly away on his glider. In Maxima’s scenario, Hiro is keeping a bus from tipping over a bridge, the Green Goblin analog is starting to fly away, and suddenly he takes a 7.62 in the ankle and falls screaming off his glider.
Of course the other important factor after you catch the villain is to not stick them in some ridiculous revolving door penal system like Arkham Asylum. I actually don’t know what is considered canon in the DC universe in terms of how many times various criminals have been incarcerated either to escape or to be declared reformed only to crime again, but considering Arkham was in stuff as old as the Super Friends cartoon and probably a lot longer before that in the comics, it feels like Joker has been in and out of there like 400 times. Like, so many times that the Joker would have to be well into his 80’s if he even spent a few months there each time. You would think that Arkham would probably have been shut down a long time ago. But that’s not really how American comics without a single, contiguous storyline work. Every writer that gets his hands on a title can basically just ignore what came before. The Grrl-verse doesn’t work like that because I don’t have 30 simultaneous books coming out every month!
The new vote incentive is up!
Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I feel the need to post that military trained snipers are trained to make body shots not head or ankle shots.
People who know far better than me can now clarify exactly what a military sniper could do if they put their mind to it in a super hero fight.
If sniper games are to be believed, they like to go for all kinds of cinematic x-ray view shots. The messier, the better. Nut shots are for style points.
Oh it says leg. I thought it said she has a lez, you need a lez, take the lez’
Why not take both?
From what I can tell, for an aetholith *any* walking around body is a prosthesis. So Lapha saying “What’s the big deal?” is quite foreseeable.
It would be like a human interacting with a species that uses automobiles as bodies. “You’re iffy about getting a replacement wheel? Why? You’ve been running around using one tractor wheel for years!”
Assuming she isn’t coming from the conman “She’s offering free stuff! Take it! What’s wrong with you?” Which is also a possible read of her reaction.
Maybe both?
Also, Lapha has had a life where the universe rarely gets anything without major catches or negative consequences. So if someone actually is offering something for free that is actually free, why would you not immediately take it if you need it? Actual charity and friendship in this universe is incredibly rare so if you find an example of it happening to you, you would be a fool not to accept it.
So far, the only person in her life that seems to have wanted to help her without a catch (other than his being in love with her) has been Garamm. The rest of her life is pretty much sucked Where anything she gets she had to scheme for.
universe gives, not gets. Sorry.
That crossover with Wearing the Cape might make Sydney a little more sympathetic, at least if they had a longer interaction.
(minor spoilers) Astra had to use her full strength (overhead press of 10 tons or so) against a cape who *didn’t* have super-toughness a couple of times.(/spoiler)
I think your attitude changes after you’ve seen the results up close.
On the other hand, Sydney did see the results of that space station fight. So maybe not.
She also saw what an un-winder shell does to a hyu-mon body (if she wasn’t already anti-meat, she would have after that :P )
The vote incentive off Dabbler looks like she has two belly buttons… Is that from her alien or succubust DNA?
She maybe similar to the main villain in Planet Earth, Roddenberry gave them two belly buttons to make up for the lack of belly buttons being shown in Star Trek.
Peggy is really luck she doesn’t have the main character problem from the Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
As someone who recently had to purchase a replacement full body, it figures she’d be less sympathetic or understanding this sort of subject.
Come on Peg, They can rebuild you. They have the Technology and if yours works for you, You can go and help some Vets get arms or legs to help them.
See, that there is the question? Can she? Is Cora cool with just eating the time and cost of a seemingly endless supply of war amputees? Sure, she probably could, but much like your choice to donate blood or sign up as an organ donor, that is your own personal choicecon how much you are willing to give. I’m sure the last thing Peggy wants is to give hope only to find that Cora isn’t really willing to do as much as Peggy might promise. Peggy might eben just feel bad thatcshe might be the only one to get access to this tech or the concern that the lure of alien tech will lead to a fresh wavecof military recruits being tossed into the meatgrinder because ‘they can just fix me’ is what they are led to believe.
On a more personal paychological level though, accepting the leg might feel like admittedly that she’s been broken ever since she lost her original one. She’s spent years getting by with a current tech level prosthetic, and frankly I think we’d be hard pressed to argue she isn’t a capable soldier as she currently is.
Lots of logistical, personal, emotional, and philosophical questions wrapped up in this issue.
Densely tactless as ever, Lapha. It’s real easy to be like that when your *whole ass* is both customizable & replaceable.
I see Peggy as a .338 lapua or 12.7×99 sniper not 7.62×51 but 7.62 could be MK 248 MOD 1 and MOD 0 .300 Win Mag which is 7.62x85mm
I feel this is more of a case where a person with a disability associates more with their invested identity in having dealt with and adjusted to their disability and how it is a part of their life. Not all deaf people want a hearing aid because they’ve learnt to function without hearing for years, they don’t see themselves as having something that needs to be “fixed”, or someone that needs to be “fixed” getting one creates a series of challenges and has an impact on your life that can drastically alter what you are used to, and how you see yourself. Amazing as this new prosthetic will be, she’s still giving up a part of herself when she’s managed to build a life for herself incorporating her injury.
Joker was killed in his first appearance, and I think the few after that? He escaped the Afterlife first, how much can you really ask of a mere asylum…
Take the leg…leave the cannoli
Thanks to that last panel, Lapha is now played by Julia Louis Dreyfus in my head