Grrl Power #1313 – Da Ba Dee
The exception to exotic skin colors applied to pre-sexy people is that baby-shit yellow color that major appliances were in the 60s and 70s. You can call it “Harvest Gold” all you want, but it’s baby-shit-yellow. On humans that just looks like advanced jaundice. Almost any other color is fine.
Sydney is being pretty peak ADHD here, explaining a thing to someone without helping them connect to the 3-steps-down-the-road conclusion her brain already jumped to.
“Of course the old Russian Czars were six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon’ed to Caesar. Why else would the Space Shuttles’ booster rockets be constrained by the width of two horses’ butts? Duh-Doy!”
Did you know “Czar” is Russian for “Cesar?” Because I did not. It seems super obvious in retrospect, and now I feel a little dumb.
And just then, one of Cora’s arch-enemy bounty hunter rivals (probably named something like “Forrestal” or “Bellosh”) breaks into the Archon cafeteria and attacks, thinking blue Peggy is Cora!
Honestly, with Maxima and Sydney right there, it’d be a pretty short god damned fight. Cora is somewhere around Iron Man levels of tough, where as Dabbler is more of a Spider-Man. (As an aside, why is Spider-Man hyphenated, but Iron Man is not?) That is to say, Dabbler has less out and out firepower and gold-bricky defense than Cora, but is much more flexible when it comes to ability selection. Actually, I guess Dabbler is more like Batman, if Batman had Spider-Man’s powers, but also used all the gadgets. And also knew magic. And his gadgets were crazy alien space tech. But didn’t have the vehicles… Look Dabbler is in a weird category.
Speaking of Forrestal, did you know he was not only a rival of Dr. Jones, he was a professor at Princeton? Can you imagine, showing up to class one day and being told that your professor was impaled on an ancient (somehow light activated) spear trap? Sure, you might get some kind of bereavement bye on your mid-term, but at that moment you’d also learn that not only is field archeology harrowingly tedious, it is also occasionally winnowingly dangerous. I just like to think of the ecosystem of 1930’s academic archeology having annual “In Memoriam” newsletters and a 30% churn rate in Ivy League professors because they were all getting slaughtered exploring booby-trapped catacombs looking for a moderately-sized gold cross or the foreword page to Beowulf.
This is entirely unrelated to this page, but allow me to digress for a moment. I always find it amusing when Indiana Jones or Lara Croft or that guy from Uncharted or the Goonies stumble across a Rube-Goldberg trap made of hemp rope and wooden gears that is 4,000 years old, and that shit still works? Absolutely not. If Master Chief or Daniel Jackson stumbles across some ancient alien tech that’s 1,000,000 years old and it all still works? Fine. Super advanced aliens obviously have super advanced material sciences, maybe even self-healing alloys and quantum circuits and what have you. Maybe repair drones or nanites. Maybe they were so advanced, they didn’t have planned obsolescence and contractors using the cheap concrete so they can pocket 35% of the cash and don’t care if the building will fall over in 40 years. And look, not to disparage humans of yor, maybe they had some great tree sap/wax/bug squeezing combo that was incredible varnish-slash-twine preservative, but come on. There is a limit.
Okay, yes, I know One-Eyed Willie didn’t set up his cave 4,000 years ago, but the Indikipedia (not what it’s called) says the temple at the beginning of Raiders was 2,000 years old. And… sure, the locals could have been maintaining it… without disturbing the dust and cobweb buildup. Obviously there are service tunnels behind the dart walls and under the pressure plates. The entrances to which are clearly marked with back and yellow striped doors, via OSHA. They’re super obvious, but for some reason, archeologists always approach the temple from the other side. BUT STILL. It does make me laugh.
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.
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I can’t believe there ever was a time I thought I didn’t have ADHD. Not only do I always do what Sydney’s doing right now, I also immediately understood what she meant and got confused at Peggy’s slowness. Now if that could convince a psychiatrist so I could get some life-saving medicine…
Many years ago – when i was home on leave from the Navy, and my best friend was on summer break, my mother and i picked up Joe, then dropped mom off, and went to do whatever we were planning that afternoon.
But as we dropped mom off, she said “I’ve been sitting here listening to you guys for twenty minutes. And you’ve talked about like fifteen things – one of you would say something unrelated to what you’d been talking about, and the other would just follow smoothly along. I couldn’t follow the conversation, but you two…”
I suspect that that’s what ADHD is like.
I was very close to the same page until I thought “Wait… Does she mean the full body as opposed to just the leg?” I was spot on until it went past just the limb in question.
More importantly where exactly did Sydney steal that collar from?
Is it not Peggy’s? Does Peggy have a tactical collar? Why doesn’t Peggy have a tactical collar; and if she does, why wasn’t she wearing it? The rest of the team basically never takes theirs off.
From Max. She is the only one with a Magitech Camoflage collar, for her civilian Stuntman persona.
Harper Dee Lux. Put respect on the name, Leon worked very hard on it and is quite proud.
Max’s collar is heavily modded to work for her specific brand of skin, and can’t be adjusted.
Life helping medicine. ADHD isn’t going to kill you if it is unmedicated.
There are more ways to ruin a life than being the direct cause of death.
If you don’t have ADHD or haven’t had medication for it vs not having medication, you really don’t understand how debilitating it can be. This is like saying you don’t NEED a wheelchair if you’re paralyzed from the waist down, because not having one won’t kill you.
*sigh*
Am I supposed to be amused? Because I’m really not. This is a total non-sequiter plot cul de sac.
I guess you had to be there.
Random Access Mind, do try to keep up. Sydney thinks several steps ahead both in physical fights and in social encounters.
The artist wants to do funny thing. So the artist does funny thing.
Peggy’s expression there is EERILY similar to an expression I have seen Deus make… are they related?
They have an artist in common.
Wasn’t there a man that turned blue after intake of… Colodial Silver i believe it was?
Paul “Papa Smurf” Karason was the most extreme example, but there have been others who have taken on a blue-ish hue due to overuse of colloidal silver. IIRC, Karason was actually making it for his own consumption (there at least used to be a lot of hype for colloidal silver in the “alternative medicine” space of things).
Sufficient intake of either silver OR gold will turn a person blue.
you do know spiderman does make gizmos to defeat his villians…
such as the Anti-Magnetic Inverter
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Anti-Magnetic_Inverter_(Spider-Man)
I remember an alternate universe storyline where Parker never got bit by the spider, which went on to bite Cindy Moon instead (who became Silk). Parker ended up using his inventions to contact her and eventually became the equivalent of Q from the Jame Bond series.
Peggy doesn´t seems to like the color Blue perhaps Green would be better
Ancient technology that still works? The Romans had a glue that they used to glue the padding inside the cheek plates on their helmets. It lasted around 2,000 years at the bottom of the Rhine, until someone dredged up the helmet and discovered bits of the padding still stuck in place.
So first off, 1930’s and 40’s archaeology and art history DID have a surprisingly high mortality rate, mostly due to the ones that went into Europe to try and protect things from the Nazis. So great Indiana Jones tie in right there.
Second, Dabbler is NOT Spiderman. Dabbler is Dr. Strange, or possibly Dr. Doom. She doesn’t really have any ‘natural superpowers’ aside from her glamour, and even that is something she’s trained in- most of her power comes from tech and training in various arts, such as mystical and social.
Syndey is Spider-Man. A wide variety of very specific but all useful and strong powers that have a vague thematic sense to them but actually are really weird as a group when looked at outside of that theme, and whose actual most dangerous contribution in combat is her knowledge and ability to talk the villains into giving themselves up.
Sydney’s social powers are more Squirrel Girl than anyone else. Squirrel Girl is also the only Marvel character to defeat every other Marvel character, villain OR hero (as recounted in Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe).
Cue some fetishists offering to lose a limb over getting blue skin which is what they want, and not even starting to think about offering only a lost toe or even talking the medicine without needing it, LOL
A few cute enough porn stars would make millions more with blue skin.
BLUE gamer girl bath water…
yea, the ideas arent hard to come up with.
That’s where my mind went, too.
It mirrors my longstanding grudge about the graphic novel “Surrogates” (later a Bruce Willis movie I didn’t see because of how irritated the source material made me), in which we’re supposed to believe that Surries are more common than TVs, but that no one is walking around with blue tiger-striped Surries with two tails and multifunctional genitalia. It was a great idea for a story, but the author really wasn’t good at understanding people who weren’t him. Weak theory of mind is a devastating flaw for an author.
Oh, is that where that movie came from? I still haven’t gotten around to seeing it (and mebbe less-so inclined, now, with your critique of it,) but I had thought it was based on/off David Brin’s “Kiln People” (so, y’know…. if you didn’t like ‘Surrogates’, mebbe check this novel out. And Brin is fantastic at mentioning, at the very least in passing, the various unorthodox ways people would definitely use consciousness-cloning technology)
Can’t see her wanting this considering it messes up her tattoos, unless she wants to have them touched up or they have space science to fix it
I was also thinking about this, but if they have the tech to make her skin blue they can probably handle a tattoo touch up no problem lol
Though, since they’re using the re-color choker here and we don’t know what method they’d use for the actual turning her skin blue procedure, it’s possible that it wouldn’t affect the tattoo so badly.
I’m pretty sure “it gives you blue skin” won’t stop most people given how limited modern prosthetics are, especially since clothes+makeup is still technically an option to hide it, and a decent minority would think it cool because space!medicine status symbol or the ilk.
And then it puts them in a bad PR position when aliens call them out on it, something Deus can use to further enhance his own position.
Yeah, just straight up lying about something like that is a really bad idea to start out on.
This reminds me of the story of Paul Karason. He took a homemade colloidal silver treatment for years thinking it was a cure-all for multiple issues. His skin was permanently turned a bluish-purple.
You honor, I would like to enter into evidence in support of the comic commentary…
Zoe Saldana with green skin.
With her pink hair she looks almost like a Mystique cosplay.
Ill say something about those badly colored appliances, they sure did last.
had one that just gave up last year 45 years old.
Spider-Man is hyphenated because the creator didn’t want anyone to confuse the name with Superman. I looked it up once. It still bothers me to this day.
i mean currently its kinda usefull to refer to the 2 pepole currently sharing the name, i try to keep the OG as Spider-man, and Miles as Spiderman
…Asari?
Recently ate a cake with blue icing. The stuff stained everything for days. The stains were the same shade she is but the icing was a more neon blue.
I remember that type of blue icing. It passes through the digestive system intact too.
Nice try, but most people with disabilities wouldn’t care about being blue to get healed (I wouldn’t care) and way too many people would cut off their own arm just to be blue. Looking at you Star Trek, Mass Effect, and X-Men fans.
.
Also obvious lies tend to get detected easily. And if this lie were to be found out… oh boy.
I’d trust 2000 eyars old architecture and technology to function up into old age a lot more than anything modern. Even without planned obsolence, modern stuff just is too flimsy.
Kind of spoils the tat’s, though.
Calling Captain Kirk, calling Captain Kirk:
“Hey, I’ve never had a BLUE-skinned woman ….”
Andorians are blue. I have no doubt he ported his sub in one, at least, shore leave or not.
Not to mention they’re a passionate people.
wouldn’t surprise me if there was a lot of Andorian/Human pairings when the Federation formally formed. We, after all, have the most in common with them out of the three other Federation Founding species.
Nope. If I lost a limb and could get it back with the only secondary effect being turning my skin blue. I’d still leap at the chance. I’m likely not the only one.
Heck, you could join Blue Man Group.
The blue messes up her tattoo, though.
I’ve been getting a 403 error when submitting comments. Is this thing busted?
It’s been happening on and off for me. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’ll get with the hosting next time I see it happening.
Been happening to me for weeks
I appreciate the peer review, where Peggy’s like, “It’s not just me, right? The thing she said ACTUALLY makes no sense without further context.”
One does not walk up behind a military person and put something around their neck without warning. Seriously, that makes for a potentially violent and very unpredictable moment.
Peggy jumped, but Syd is still awake and upright. Good on Peggy for self-control, but that ain’t an outcome it’s worthwhile to rely on.
Gotta say, the fact that she basically slipped out of touch distance of such a well trained sniper should be added to her list of non-orb related abilities. Max definitely let her take the choker though.
Also- is it her glasses that would allow her to program the checker blue for Peggy?
Hm, wonder what’s next up as far as developments. Had a flashback, gratuitous character dialogue, and even the return of Dabbler’s science corner, so DB’s had to have had time to conceptualize the next event. Kinda hoping for more of the Ascenders, honestly. I wanna know what their deal is, and if Deus has any connection to them. We know that Opal and Vektor were known of by Vehemence along with Concretia, and those two worked for Deus, though it did seem very mercenary… also, was it ever discovered who Marble Maiden was? Or if she was caught? Was Marble Maiden just Concretia? Also if Concretia got freed is she gonna return as a new recruit for Arc-swat or nah? Also also we never did find out what Harem was confused about on page 651 when she got ported to the Alari homeplanet along with everyone. She said “There were too many of me” and we never got an explanation as to what that was abut.
The portal to the Alari home world threw those that were transported a little bit into the future as well as to a different planet.
Harem was discombobulated because there were 6 bodies in the quantum-entangled brain-net that is Daphne DeShantis instead of the normal 5 (the 5 expected bodies, plus the 1 that had been transported).
I don’t think this has been explicitly stated in the comic, and maybe not in DaveB’s author comments, but I’m sure there’s a few reader comments that explain it.
That makes sense, thank you for the reply! Whenever I reread the comic I get confused again about it because I dont also reread the comments. lol
Goddammit Sydney, BOUNDARIES!!!
Is ‘ploink’ the opposite of’yoink’?
Actually…
In Russia they were called ‘Tsar,’ not Czar, which is a bad American education trope…
‘Czar’ is the South of the Trump Wall druglords
What’s more impressive is that frix seemed to be capable to follow Sydney’s ADHD train of thoughts. Way to go for her boyfriend !
Sydney you may be drastically underestimating the number of people who would not mind or would want blue skin
Easy explanation for the next support group… start it off by walking in and as everyone gawks…”Ever do something REALLY stupid and then spend literally the next several days looking for a way to undo it? Yeah… I couldn’t find a way….”.. and leave it at that and refuse to discuss the matter further.
Sometimes the ADHD ‘I’m thinking 18 steps ahead’ brain moment actually pays off… not frequently, usually it just confuses people, but it has its moments.
Gargamel had better learn to duck his head with Sniper Smurf on patrol!
So when is she going to sing “I’m Blue da ba dee da ba di…?”