Grrl Power #1305 – Save 50% on roller skates
Is there anything a bossomy hug can’t fix? Well, yes, but that’s no excuse not to keep trying.
I struggled with the layout of this page because I really wanted to include the above group hug panel on it, but I just couldn’t figure out how to fit it all without shrinking other panels to unacceptable levels. So it’s a bonus panel. Still totally canon though.
I don’t know how it works when you have a catastrophic accident and you require surgery and all that. Sure, in civilian life, the hospital would contact family members and presumably you’d probably have someone waiting there for you to wake up, assuming you weren’t in a coma. But in the military, I don’t know if they would assign someone to sit there so you get a SitRep the moment you wake up or not. If it’s a busy day and there’s people rushing around because there was an ambush or something unexpected exploded, they might not have the staff to have someone sitting at your bedside – and I don’t even know how critical it is to do that, but I’d think that if someone is going to wake up missing a limb, finding a way to ease them into that new reality would be preferable.
Realistically, I assume in a military setting, you’d probably have a row of cots where a few people can keep an eye on multiple patients, but Maxima pulled some rank as the commander of a dark and mysterious special ops unit, and got Peggy a private room. She obviously didn’t drop her off at a field hospital. Max flew Peggy back to Camp Bastion, and not some Combat Surgical Hospital, which is a big half-pipe tent. The modern version of a MASH unit.
I would also fully believe that the military would allow Peggy to wake up by herself, and the only explanation for her situation would be a clipboard with Form MF-40156-b, requisition to replace missing boot.
Of course you really only save 50% on footwear if you know someone missing the other leg. And they have the same taste in footwear. And the same size foot. Not for socks, but it wouldn’t help Peggy if she knew a 6′ 3″ dude missing his left foot. Presumably he’d wear something within ±1 of a U.S. 12, and at 5′ 4″, Peggy’s probably rocking a 6 – 8? Plus women have about a million times the shoe options that men do. Most of which are more painful than most men’s shoe options, but still.
I suspect if I was a woman I would have a decent size collection of cool boots. Every time I google women’s boots for Maxima reference, there are a ton of cool and/or sexy results. 90% of which Maxima would never wear, but they make me regret not being a transvestite.
Okay, not really. Is it weird that I think about my “if I was a girl” wardrobe? It just occurred to me one day how different most of my life would be if that 50/50 coin flip that determines our sex came up the other way. Not the broad strokes, of course. Me being a boy or girl wouldn’t affect where my dad moved our family due to his job, or what schools I went to – at least not through high school. But would I have been into sci-fi and fantasy movies, video games and comic books and D&D if I’d been a girl? It’s not impossible, certainly, and I might have appreciated the physique of my He-Man action figure in a different way, but it’s probably a lot less likely. All of my drawing came from wanting to draw my own superheroes and Vallejo/Frazetta/Elmore/Parkinson/Caldwell style pictures. Would this comic exist? I think there’s like a 10% chance. Of maybe it would be called Man Power, and it would feature a bunch of muscular, shirtless dudes with effeminate faces and dazzling cum-gutters. Sydney would still be named Sydney, but he’d be built like an 11 year old boy… Okay, Sydney wouldn’t change much I guess.
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.
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.
Sometimes I forget just how emotional Sydney gets. Honestly the extra pick of the entire crew hugging her and her going for 1 minute to 5 minutes is just priceless
Amazing job on layout. You really nailed the emotion here without the need for dialog.
Agreed
Oof. It’s like a kick go the shin, but I took it right in the feelings.
We all need a sympathy hug sometimes.
“Where’s the rest of me?”
There was a college friend of mine (a LONG time ago…) who had feet that were 1-1/2 sizes different in size. He was a member of a nationwide group that matched people with different-sized feet. He had a list of people who had the same size differential in their opposite feet, and if anyone wanted new shoes, they would post it to their group, and one who wanted a pair like that would buy a pair in the one size, and the other in the other. Then they would swap appropriate shoes.
Was this the Odd Shoe Exchange? I knew somebody who worked on technology to support that. I think it was actually pre-Web but Internet era, so the comm infrastructure was there but nothing fancy.
dazzling cum guttters hahahahahahahaha
Awwww~! T_T
*Adds Hugs!*
There were a few television series to drop out of the Afghanistan war. One was Bluestone 42, about a team of British combat engineers tasked with disarming/destroying IED’s. Action/Comedy.
Another was Combat Hospital. Multinational Hospital ER Drama. Flatlined.
I low-key love that Garamm is immediately getting in there for the hug.
Was going to make the same comment. I really do like him so much. So glad he and Lapha are going to be part of the team. <3
He loves love! And apparently has at least a passing interest in mental health, if not an actual education. Given the arrangement of bodies and arms in the panel, it looks like he was the first one to jump in there after Sydney, and then Frix, Sylv, and Cora. Funny, given that he’s the one person at the table who is the least familiar with any of the others, but that just seems to be his personality!
Welp, I get the joke at the bottom. Haven’t heard that one in a while. The IHOP bit is new for me though, we don’t have them over here
Now I’m wondering if Dave chose the name Peggy because of the pegleg thing.
Outstanding work on Peggy’s expression, Dave. Wow.
My stepson just recently (as in, a month ago) had a bi-lateral amputation of both legs about 6″ below the knee. (For him, he knew it was coming because both his feet had become largely necrotic due to his Type 1 diabetes, which killed off his kidneys, and put him on dialysis as well.)
No matter the cause, and I’ve met a number of people who had had limbs needing amputation for a variety of reasons, there’s always going to be a lot of anger and resentment at first (even when you’re in the military and know the risks). You’ve just had your life drastically altered and have to adapt to a new way of life. There’s a lot work going into making sure a prosthetic fits properly after the site heals. There’s having to work with the site and getting it used to feeling tactile sensations again (we’re using those foam paintbrushes with different materials attached to them so that he learns how things feel in that area).
Then there’s the PT and OT. You’re going to be bedridden for a while at first and suffer a bit of atrophy, so you have to work on the muscles again. For him there’s also learning to self transfer from a bed to a wheelchair, or a bedside commode, or from a wheelchair to a regular chair, and so on. And trips in a car can be difficult… for us I’m the one who often has to physically lift him from his chair and put him into the passenger seat because his upper body isn’t re-developed enough.
We expect that he will be able to learn to stand in his prosthetics in about another 4-6 weeks, but then there comes learning how to walk again almost from scratch. He’s fortunate that the amputation is below the knee so there’s only the “ankle” joint to deal with, where above the knee means learning to walk with a fake “knee” and “ankle.”
There’s also psychological trauma that goes past the whole “phantom limb” issue. Not just in having your body almost be a stranger or not working the way you’re used to… but also adapting as well to how other people are likely to react to you and see you. So there’s also learning to deal with that a lot of people in general will likely have at least some pity in their expression, people who’ve known you for a while may take it in stride for the most part while others will have to adjust a lot.
As strong as Peggy is… she’s still in for a rough ride for about the next 4-6 months at least.
A friend of mine had some car trouble, and learned the hard way that you don’t lay down on the shoulder to take a look under your car; Above the knee, and ended up in a wheelchair. By the time I met him he was pretty matter of fact about it.
I have trouble with Logic, and even I wouldn’t place myself under a vehicle at the side of the road.
ok, that extra panel there must be colored, it’s a crime not doing it to such a cute momment
Pretty much any recovery-from-anesthesia situation requires constant monitoring, and she’d have waaaay more wires and such hooked to her than a single IV drip and oxygen tube. Knocking someone unconscious and keeping them there without causing permanent damage / death is serious.
Usually this would be a staffed recovery room with lots of unconscious patients, who are removed as soon as they wake up. If Max did pull rank and get Peggy a private room (why?) there would have been someone in there with her the entire time she was recovering from anesthesia.
Yeah, I’ve recovered from anesthesia more times than I like to think about, and there has ALWAYS been somebody sitting next to me when I wake up, or at least I’m in a crowded room with people walking about. Even when I was single. OTHO, I think I generally was just on an IV and O2 by the time I woke; They know you’re stable long before you regain consciousness.
Under the circumstances, maybe a field hospital with very limited staff? But it’s awfully spacious for that.
I will validate this comic plus add that while “the military” may seem uncaring, those in it are not. Even if I hated Peggy with a passion because she had stolen my girlfriend and she had won fifty bucks from me by cheating at poker, I would be in the rota to be there when she woke up, because you don’t allow a fellow soldier to face that alone.
I read this as the reality, you can see one of those dividing curtains to Peggy’s left, implying that she is in a ward, versus the feelings of isolation and loss that we can see in panel nine.
Healer might have made the extra medication unnecessary.
her leg is cut of yes, but is perfectly healed over perhaps
Yeah, this. Anyone sedated/anaesthetised needs 1:1 care by a specialist nurse (excluding COVID-times), not just a carer-nurse, to ensure they don’t collapse/pull out their airway and suffocate silently. Recovering them from anaesthesia is usually a highly risky time as they’ve been anaesthetised for a reason (probably moderate to major surgery, we don’t like GA’s anymore if we can avoid them) so they’re at risk of all the immediate surgical complications like bleeding, uncontrollable pain, destabalising (whether on their O2, resps, BP or anything else), or just not coming round quickly enough, or taking too long, or pulling an artificial airway out before they’re really ready to maintain their own……
There shouldn’t just be a recovery nurse by the bed (or if they’ve gone somewhere else, someone should have Direct Line of Sight to the unconscious/semiconscious patient) but also a recovery nurse in charge of the recovery area, anaesthetists, surgeons, orderlies, scrub/theatre nurses bringing other patients in and stepping them down to a ward area. That place should be a hive of activity!
That said…..
Often patients are still a bit groggy/drugged up on return to the ward area (from recovery), and sometimes don’t remember their time in recovery at all (mebbe 50%?), or the various conversations that the surgeon assures us they had with the patient about their [cancer diagnosis/ need to do more work/ inability to do the intended operation] and it ends up falling to the ward nurses to navigate that conversation delicately enough until we can get the surgeon back in to have the whole convo again. But there should still be orderlies doing patient vitals checks every so often until they’re DEFO awake and with it, and less often until they’re 24 hrs post-op.
Hey, fun fact: your odds of being a guy are not QUITE 50/50.
There are approximately 105 male births to every 100 female births, meaning around 51% of babies born are boys and AFAIK no one is quite sure why, yet.
Pretty much every health outcome after that though favors females, so that’s why women live longer. I’m not sure at exactly what point the ratios even out again.
According to CIA.gov it pretty much levels out from age 15 through 64. There are variations from country to country.
If I recall correctly, when comparing age groups by gender it is at around 35+ where due to higher male mortality that the gender ratio evens out, then starts to cross over into more women than men alive. One can look up recent census data to verify if they want. Granted, this is probably going to be accelerated in areas and eras in the middle of warfare.
Biologically and socially, males are the disposable sex. It only makes sense to produce some extras.
Does it, though?
In theory, a population that was mostly female with only a few males could increase it’s numbers much faster than on that was split more evenly.
So just for reference, Dave, ‘transvestite’ is an older term we don’t really like to use nowadays, as it’s considered derogatory. Someone who dresses in clothes associated with the opposite gender without being transgender is a ‘crossdresser’ (or possibly a ‘drag queen’, if they’re a man who crossdresses for the purposes of performance), while someone who was assigned one gender at birth but identifies as and optionally dresses as a different gender is ‘transgender’.
Yeah, I know it’s annoying to keep track of this stuff. I sometimes get annoyed and I’m actually trans!
A surprising number of webcomic artists I follow on social media have come out as trans. I don’t *think* it’s me.
The timeline of a gender-bending webcomic artist:
https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns2/comments/1bnybz9/when_youve_got_about_9_years_of_history_denying/
Haven’t seen a counterexample yet ;p
There is “Real Life Comics” by Mae Dean also.
“Nimona” wasn’t really a surprise, but I didn’t see “Dresden Codak” or “Goblins” coming.
Yes, thank you! I was going to say just that, but not nearly so eloquently.
I assumed if Eddie Izzard can call
himself, sorry, herself an Executive Transvestite, then it’s probably okay. Of course, that sketch was recorded almost 30 years ago. Oh, well, times they a’changin’.I think there’s a difference between what people within a category call themselves and what people outside the category call themselves. But anyone who objects to you *self-describing* as a transvestite, if that’s what you wind up doing, can fuck off into the sun. (Izzard I think uses “gender-fluid” nowadays? I’m not sure.)
yeah. kinda like how I sometimes use the word “tranny” to describe myself (though mostly for pun purposes), but wouldn’t appreciate being called that out of the blue by random people because of how often it’s used as a slur.
With terms like this (and the N-word) it’s normally okay for someone to call themselves it (if it’s in good faith) but not okay for people from outside that group to call them it (without explicit permission from the person being referred to).
I wouldn’t consider your usage here to be considered calling yourself it unless you actually identify as it (which it seems you don’t).
Also, a lot has happened in the last 30 years to cause terms to change, and sadly there has still been a huge amount of discrimination and bigotry. The main time you’ll hear that specific term it is one of three things (an older trans person who identifies with it, outdated medical documents, or bigots using it as a slur).
Sorry for the long comment.
I recall hearing about a linguistics conference where everyone’s nametags had a slot for pronouns. One person listed ‘N****r’ as their pronoun. It put everyone else in a serious bind — on the one hand, you want to be respectful and call someone by their chosen term. On the other hand, you don’t want to say the N word if you are not African-American.
In national polling support among Americans for LGBT issues declined in 2023 and 2024 for the first time in decades and things like policing language aren’t helping.
the depressing thing is.. sooner or later waking up alone without the limb happens. but, it does not make the morning any easier. so day one or day nth, this is going to be her experience. Hugs are good, get permission first.
Peggy’s private room is apparently an auditorium. I suspect Max invoked ‘RHIP’
We’ve already seen that Peggy has some altered perceptions in these memories. Could be that her memory has morphed to look like how it felt.
@Dave in regards Comment:
You DO realize being a girl there’s no reason to assume you wouldn’t be a lesbian, and nearly every lesbian I know plays D&D and video games. So yea… not much would change.
Awww, Sydney is sweet X3
That reminds me, back when I was in rehab after some serious spinal problems (cauda equina), there was another patient who had had a similar rude awakening: he had gone under for (IIRC) some exploratory or knee surgery and woke up to find himself short one leg. When they had opened up his leg, they had discovered that it was completely rotten inside…
I know we just saw something awesome/poignant/emotional and I love Dave and this story all the more for it but I can’t help but have this intrusive thought.
” OH! Peggy is a brunette!”
There’s no rule against wearing cute boots while being a guy, you know. I know plenty of folks who traded up for more interesting clothes and many of them have even kept being guys afterwards. (Unlike me, I admit.)
Sadly there are unspoken “rules” against it.
Also it’s just a pain to find them in certain larger shoe sizes.
Nods mournfully in shoe size 12,5…. (47, in French sizes. And my three younger brothers all hover around the same size)
Forget getting fancy/cute, I count myself lucky when I manage to actually find shoes that fit and do not trigger a fit of cursing about highway robbery…
Should probably check out information on the Warrior Transition Unit (WTU)Dave- they are specialists that handle that sort of thing, and Maxima probably pulled rank to ensure Peggy’s case was seen asap. Additionally there is usually a support liaison assigned to the soldier who solely has the duties to be there for the soldier, attending to needs and wants and acting as a buffer against both family drama and any in battalion drama that might occur. Typically that Soldier would be there as soon as the soldier awakened, and it’s taken extremely seriously. Unless the hospital itself was attacked there would be someone there for support. (They’ve learned the hard way that the extra support is super important)
I was in a Warrior Transition Unit and then a Community Based Warrior Transition Unit from mid 2009 until mid 2012 after getting injured in Afghanistan. My situation was different from Peggy’s in that I was not evacuated and finished the deployment with my unit and was separated once we were back stateside when it was apparent the cumulative damage I’d taken was more serious than could be fixed in just a few months.
While you describe the way things would ideally work, except for a few that were in short comas, I didn’t speak to anyone that actually had the process work that way. Everyone that had been evac’d spent at least a few days in a hospital as just a patient still officially assigned to their old unit before the decision is made that recovery would take more than 6 months and the paperwork all submitted. At that point a member of the WTU would show up and they would assign the soldier a Nurse Case Manager and a Platoon to officially report to. Some still lived in the hospital for awhile until they were well enough to move to WTU housing. In the WTU your primary duty is to attend to your medical needs, seeing docs, physical therapy, etc. If physically capable you appear in morning and evening formation to be accounted for and participate in PT if able. You coordinate with the nurse case manager and your platoon sergeant regarding your schedule and any admin needs as you prepare for a Physical Evaluation Board to decide if you’re well enough to return to your old job, need to be retrained for a new job, or need to be separated from the service altogether. If the latter is the case a Med Board will review and see if you should be medically discharged or are more seriously disabled to warrant being medically retired, and a Physical Evaluation Board Liason Officer, PEBLO, may be assigned to assist you. You can try a last ditch appeal with the med board to stay in the service, either through a PEBLO or by physically appearing before the board itself to make your case, but generally the board decides if you will be medically discharged or if you’re seriously disabled enough to warrant a medical retirement. If you will be separated the WTU helps you through the process.
At best the WTU/CBWTU system really helps soldiers and does get the majority returned to duty, or at least makes the process easier and more efficient. At worst they’re a horribly frustrating entity that seems to do nothing but waste time and paper. I knew several soldiers who were so tired of the whole thing that they faked how well they were recovering so they could return to a normal unit early, or stopped fighting to stay in and went along with an expedited medical discharge. Even in the best case scenario it’s usually a long and frustrating experience. Military efficiency.
The next step is “the hundred fucks,” each covering an emotional arc. From shock, to realization, to loss, to disbelief, to anger…it cycles as necessary. Often repeated. Then there’s the flood of fucks, followed by the long final fuck… It can take minutes to weeks for the fuck cycle to run its course.
Most common in soldiers.
Kinda want to see how many minutes Peggy allows if Maxima hugs her X)
Depends on if Max has a bra on….
There’s also a possibility that Peggy woke up alone because she was unconscious and one or two of the most likely things for her to say on waking up were classified. Not only do you have to have someone to watch the patient ’til she wakes up, but it also has to be someone with the security clearance to know about the officer with the peculiar skin tone that Peggy’s going to be asking about the instant she wakes up.
> they make me regret not being a transvestite.
Well it’s not like God or nature or the government hands out special licenses for that—if you want to, you can just start :p
Yeah, this. You don’t need dysphoria to be trans, you don’t need to be trans to wear fun/cute/awesome outfits, and anybody who gives you shit for it? well that’s *their* problem.
100%. even before I came to the conclusion that actually my gender is fucky, I experimented with skirts and cute shoes. life is too short to not wear all the things you find comfortable and/or pretty to look at!
no matter how tough you are, you gonna feel it hard if you lose a limb
unless you’re already made up of interchangeable parts, that is
Awwww the last panel was too cute
Missed opportunity to do a ‘loss’ meme, Dave.
Maybe there’s something wrong with me.
Yeah, that’s got to be a huge feeling, since Peggy likely didn’t even consider that a possibility during the previous few pages. Sydney is adorkable here. Love the bonus panel hug scene.
Anyone else want to know where @Dave is finding these boots he speaks of in the commentary?
I would think that if I were a One Legged Woman I’d make friends with someone who owns a shoe store, and try to get a discount in exchange for Display Models. I take the good foot, they keep the bad foot, and set it out as the display model for that style.
I just got the joke.
She’s got one leg. And her name is Peggy.
Heh. “Broad strokes”.
As a female who is very much into all of those things…you would still be very much into all of those things, trust me. Don’t believe the BS propaganda that girls are only ever girly (“because they’re somehow supposed to be girly”). Total BS. And in most hospitals they *don’t* have a person by your bedside when you’re stable. Even in the CCU (critical care unit, much more closely monitored than the ICU, intensive care unit), they don’t have enough staff to have one nurse, etc, physically present per patient. But what they DO have is a LOT of machinery they can hook up to you in the CCU, and they have big monitors with all the patients’ vitals in columns across it, and they absolutely DO pay attention to those monitors.
My dad spent 36 days in the CCU, having gone from a very physically fit man in his 60s pushing a 95 pound lawnmower 8 miles a day…to not being able to breathe on his own, in just 12 hours. (Myasthenia gravis, where the immune system goes haywire and attacks the myelin sheaths around all neurons attached to most types of muscles, except for the “smooth muscles” of the heart and the digestive tract. He literally could not even autonomously breathe, never mind consciously.) …Let’s just say that December 1999 was hell for many reasons, and I hope most of y’all never have to spend Christmas or any other major holiday you celebrate with a loved one in the CCU. (On the bright side, when he finally got out mid-2000, after months in rehab literally learning how to breathe on his own, they gave him 10 years to live. He defied those odds and made it all the way to 2022. RIP Dad, you gave me Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and so many other geeky, wonderful things!)
Dad actually took me (barely 5yo) and my older sister to the 70mm showing of Star Wars way back in the summer it first aired, when they did a “second release” of the movie. That version (70mm, not 35mm), they did NOT cut out the Jabba the Hutt scene…so it puzzled the heck out of me for years afterwards, constantly thinking, “Where’s the fat guy in the furry vest that Han talks to??”
He would also refuse to come to the dinner table until after Star Trek (in syndication) was done, which annoyed my mother, but we girls were spending “Star Trek Time” with Daddy, so she put up with it.
And he and my mother got me a “book of the month club” for one year, where they would take me to the bookstore and I could pick out ANY hardcover fiction book I wanted…which was a big deal because we were quite poor, b ut both of them wanted to encourage my reading. Dad encouraged me to get The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, as well as the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes, and several others, most of which I still have!
Having come out from ‘under’ several times after surgery, I can say that you’re always put in a recovery room where you can be observed to make sure you’re not choking on your own vomit, which can happen, never did to me but my throat was always so sore and dry from the intubation I wouldn’t have noticed. After you’ve ‘recovered’ you go to your room, assuming you get one, but you’re hooked up to monitors so if anything goes wrong the staff knows immeditely…this includes wires getting pulled off accidentally, they’re fast !!!
The same applies to the military. Most hospitals are run like civilian ones and except for the smallest aid stations, most are designed to give some sort of privacy with at least a curtain around the bed. Luckily I only ever had to be hospitalized twice, once after as car accident and another for observation after a concussion. Each time I got the best of care, mostly because I was the only admitted patient at the time and all the nurses and medics wanted to recertify their skill tests on a real patient for a change ;)
And yet my limited experience with the VA would be to expect not only
“I would also fully believe that the military would allow Peggy to wake up by herself, and the only explanation for her situation would be a clipboard with Form MF-40156-b, requisition to replace missing boot.”
And another form indicating that the VA has yet to determine if said injury was service related.
I hear that..sort of…my high definition quadrophonic frequency modulated multiplex tinnitis from twenty years of turbines, explosions and small arms fire was refused out of hand while reservist clerks who had a few blanks go off a hundred yards away got cheques…note, our reserve system is completely different from the US.
I should make that clearer. I was only hospitalized twice in twenty years while in the military, my civilian track record for extended stays isn’t nearly as good, well over a dozen and climbing.
WAIT IS PEGGY A PEG LEG JOKE??? Has it always been???
Yes? Ish?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-140-open-mouth-insert-foot-to-just-below-the-knee/
Should totally finish that drawing and just have it be its own page of the comic. Group hug therapy deserves it!
Sighing, looking at the guesses for footwear sizes for various genders with my size 16 wide friggin feet over here…. bleh.
Also, please never type the phrase dazzling cum gutters again.