Grrl Power #1344 – Charity-ish
Yes, this page is just so Dabbler can debut a dumb shirt. But I hadn’t drawn Dabbler at the construction of the dungeon, which she would definitely be involved in, so I guess she was off doing something, be it going over engineering plans or just “charging up” for a day of heavy magic use, but this amused me more than her just arriving by stepping in from off panel.
Max is going to get suspicious when she notices Dabbler backing away from her and strafing side to side like she’s the little staple thing from Tempest and Max is the source of all the sparks and lines. A tortured simile, admittedly. I just mean Max is likely to notice Dabbler conspicuously taking pains to remain facing her. Not that it’s a big deal for her to change her shirt. Dabbler is probably wearing a generic tank-top or a basic baby-doll-Tee and has a glamor over it. Easier to do glamors over a similar thing. It’s why Dabbler can only make herself look like beautiful women. She never learned the advanced stuff to make herself look like an old witch selling poison apples or whatever. Despite the obvious utility of more flexible glamors, she had a choice between “Glamors 401” and “Particle Weaponry 401” and wound up becoming a TA in that class before even finishing it. And then annoyed the professor by incorporating 601 level concepts into her mid-term and accidentally turned an overflow parking lot into a seething cauldron of exotic particles gifted the school a new pool. A heated pool. Heated by exotic particles. But that’s okay, the next 75 years of students in the advanced magic healing courses got a good education.
I’m going to try something with this new vote incentive.
This month, I’m closing on a new house, selling my Mom’s house, finishing packing Mom’s house, moving city to city to the new house, forwarding mail, canceling utilities, all that. And after that’s done, I get to start the process of selling my old house, which needs a little work before it can realistically go on the market.
SO. I’m going to try and do this vote incentive in stages. Currently it’s just pencils. The TopWebcomics one will update with colors and detail until we get to the no clothes versions, then that will continue over at Patreon. Also there will be a comic or two in between each version to fill out the story.
I know it’s hard to tell from just the pencils, but this is Heatwave and Jiggawatt. The comics will explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. Although I feel like even saying that much makes it easy to guess, but hopefully the journey will still amuse.
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.
lmfao always read the contacts front and back XD
-keels over laughing hard!-
:D
Snickering Positively Evilly Rather Maniacally
I have to guess that Max has just reached her daily limit of “WTF?” and is preferring to ignore the connotations of Dabbler’s shirt in favor of doing something like telling her to ‘get rid of the shirt’ and Dabs interpreting that as an order to go around topless.
Realistically, Max could solve this very easily by telling Dabbler to change her glamour to a opaque monocolor t-shirt and jeans for casual wear while on duty, or just implementing an official Arc-swat uniform like other branches of the military.
This scene is purely for the gags.
Looking at this inside the setting, I can see Max having probably tried that once. Dabbler made the uniform a size or three too small, and the ‘monocolor t-shirt & jeans’ made her look like she wasn’t wearing anything (it’s not her fault that humans can’t see in ultraviolet, now is it).
Demons & Devils are rules lawyers after all. :)
That would fail the requirement that the outfit should be opaque.
You’re not dealing with a rules lawyer if they don’t follow the rule at all.
If it’s opaque to ultraviolet light, that still qualifies as opaque, even if it’s transparent to what we consider “visible light”. Most of the things we consider opaque are transparent to other radiation, or even parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Definition for Opaque from Oxford:
not able to be seen through; not transparent.
I get you’re trying to make this work, but opaque and transparent are defined relative to what can be seen by human eyes. If it’s transparent to the visible light humans can see, it is by definition not opaque.
“You cannot gainsay a word’s inherent nature. Twist it, yes. Guide it, yes. But not contravene its definition to imply the very opposite.”
-Oromis, The Inheritance Cycle.
Where does it state that it has to be opaque?
I specified that in the first reply of this thread right before the word monocolor. I have copied the contents of that reply here.
Realistically, Max could solve this very easily by telling Dabbler to change her glamour to a opaque monocolor t-shirt and jeans for casual wear while on duty, or just implementing an official Arc-swat uniform like other branches of the military.
This scene is purely for the gags.
I mean, probably.
Dabbler is, however, the sort of being that will TOTALLY try to pull the most annoying rules-lawyering, to get a rise out of people.
So I can still see her doing that, and finding the resulting rant and growling amusing.
And a species that saw in a different range of the spectrum would also probably define “opaque” and “transparent” in terms of their own visible spectrum. The point was that your limited perspective might very well be a minority in a universe full of different species.
Said species would also have their own non-human language (barring the extreme improbability of parallel language evolution), so what you’re talking about would be a translation error.
The comparable words for opaque and transparent relative to their own vision would not be precisely the same as opaque and transparent in a human language such as English, and thus using the English word (as I did above) rather than that alien equivalent does specify what radiation range the statement is referring to.
Or… use that fancy colour-changing tech so that the monocolour in question is exactly the same colour as the skin under it. Naked barbie doll costume!
Well, you could specify a particular monocolor if you wanted to prevent that potential result. :P
If I remember correctly, Dabbler is technically an external consultancy, so that wouldn’t work, and any threat of firing her would be counterproductive, since they’re the ones most interested in having her on ‘their side.
This is probably the biggest hurdle, rather than her being deliberately and contrarily provocative (that’s second place, of course).
There’s a limit, of course. But given the shennanigans she’s gotten away with so far, I don’t think ‘dress code’ is part of her day-to-day contractual requirements.
It was established in comic #666 that Dabbler does listen to dress code requirements Max specifies for activities on base.
Admittedly, the extent to which Dabbler followed the dress code was cooking with apron and underwear rather than just an apron, but it did establish Dabbler will listen when Max tells Dabbler what she can and can’t wear.
Sciona, nearby (thinking): “I wonder if I can get away with offing the succubus…”
Also, I know more than a few gay guys that would love to have that shirt.
Many people has attempted to get off with Dabbles, not as many have succeeded (or remembered :P )
it’s possible you misunderstood what Man in the Mists said; “get away with offing” means not get caught after having murdered someone; tbf, Sciona has been shown to be sexually active, as well as a violent blood mage
I think you’d be surprised by how many have succeeded in getting off with Dabs. She tries to make that number as large as possible. Among other things.
Possibly. It would be a bad idea; trying to murder someone who fought Maxima to a draw would be very difficult.
Dabbler knows a lot about Alari, she may even have weaponry and tactics countermeasures specific to fighting Alari. These are likely somewhat common among space people for some unknown reason…
So it would depend on total surprise and her superpower ace in pocket. Which is very much situational; if she can’t get within arms reach it’s useless.
Best chance would be mind controlling someone superpowered to have an unreasoning hatred of Dabbler and also to forget his or her encounter with Sciona. Oh, and some sort of suicidal impulse to make it more difficult to trace back if Dabbler takes a prisoner instead of indulging in amusing overkill.
That person would have to be very powerful, and also have some ability to get Dabbler separated from the rest of Archon. Attacking her in the middle of the team would seem to be futile.
Altogether a tall order, and I think Sciona realizes this. Though long-running plots do seem to be her preference.
Should also be noted Dabbler is one of a few people who’ve managed to tie Maxima in a fight. Sciona’s strong. She ain’t THAT strong.
Maxima will have her hands full of Dabbler overflow containment if she isn’t very careful with choosing her words…
I was obsessed with that game for a while. Can’t remember what level I got to; though it wasn’t all that far.
ROTFLMAOSTC
*Rolls eyes*
I guess at least there’s some visual wit on display this time.
How is that a feminist issue?
Also, I’d wear a “In the rear with the gear” shirt if I saw Dabbler like this.
Sperm donation allows women who want to be mothers but don’t want to have to bump uglies with some dude to do so. That’s my guess as to what Dabbler’s referring to here.
Well, by the same logic egg donations would be a men’s issue, right? I.e. in my opinion in both cases it’s your own problem and not a gender equality issue if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
Feminism can neither be reduced to “women’s issues” nor “gender equality issues”, so no, that’s not the same logic.
In this specific instance it is though, so it’s definitely the same logic. Otherwise you’d have to make the argument that this topic is not a women’s issue and I’d love to see you try, given that Dabbler convinced Maxima of all people. :-)
Men can’t get pregnant though, they still need a female to carry the fertilized egg
Well, not safely, anyway. You could pull it off with proper hormonal supplementation, the placenta is generated from fetal tissue, and is happy to connect to any vascular tissue; The abdominal wall, intestines, your liver… But carrying an ectopic pregnancy to term is not the safest thing in the world, and then you bleed to death on the delivery table.
As noted, a woman is still necessary, absent exowombs (which we don’t have yet). Basically, the logic behind sperm donation being a feminist issue would be something like “Women should have the choice to become a mother if they wish to be, and shouldn’t be forced to have a relationship of any sort with a fertile man to do so.” I could see that reversed to “Men should have the choice to become a father if they wish to be, and shouldn’t be forced to have a relationship of any sort with a fertile woman to do so,” for some sort of “masculist” movement, but men don’t actually need egg donations for that – they can instead find a fertile surrogate and donate their own sperm to fertilize [i]her[/i] egg(s). Granted, there’s normally something of a business relationship in that case, but there it is.
I would say “Women should have that choice IF they can find men to donate sperm to them.”
Women can only have the choice not to be with a man if they don’t want to be, but you can’t force men to donate sperm to them if they were to not wanting to do that, no matter how much they desire to be mothers.
I know, I know, finding a sperm donor is not hard, there’s plenty to choose from, and just one “load” can fertilize a huge number of eggs, so I don’t see any problems here, as long as they don’t all want the same man, because “same DNA stuff”, but in the same line of logic I don’t see the need for Dabbler to advertise for sperm donations except for her joke.
Really, it’s not. DaveB tends to… not write feminists very well. (I don’t mind, in the sense that I know that by now, and enjoy the series for a lot of other elements, but I would not regard anything any of his characters say to be indicative of actual feminist beliefs, and that goes treble for Dabbler.)
And of course, sperm banks are not charitable institutions, anyway, so would not need shirts calling for giving them ‘support’. It’s all in service of the joke, so don’t bother thinking about it too much.
I don’t think any of his characters are intended to be particularly sterling examples of feminists. They’re characters, with a variety of viewpoints to generate conflict between them, not mouthpieces to advance a particular position.
Or sterling examples of (insert here)
They are sterling examples of people with their own flaws and personalities
This is one of those instances where I think we’re in per firm agreement. That characters should be characters first, rather than just proxies to promote or disparage a particular ideology or class of people. Characters with complex thoughts and behaviors and motivations make for far more interesting stories than those that serve no purpose other than to moralize or signal the author’s virtues.
This reminds me of those 7-up shirts. The make 7 in the front and -up yours in the back. Real teen rebellion stuff.
Dang it Dabbler!!!
DOH!
Too bad i cant do a donation, since you know, different universes
Love me a good classic arcade game reference. Tempest was a featured in the cult sci-fi classic “Night of the Comet”. Highly recommended.
I was more of a Qix man myself.
I played a few video games (Asteroids, Missile Command) but I was really more of a pinball wizard. Elvira, yeah!!
Galaga was my favorite but Tempest ate a lot of my quarters as well.
Galaga also for me, and Sinistar.
Never played Tempest, but after briefly looking at the clip, have played similar game(s)
Nothing like working practicals for healers.
Odds are Dabs is setting up Max to order her to take the shirt off immediately in front of a crowd. Gotta be a bingo box on someone’s card.
Any chance Dabs sniffs out Sciona’s scent? At least remnants of blood magic? Maybe lingering vibes and pheromones from Mr Six Times ?
And now I’m wondering where you can buy such a shirt without special order. It got me a belly laugh.
I was looking for where to buy the shirt… surprised the comic doesn’t have a cafepress or Topatoco merch page!
At some point DaveB really should take some time out of his very busy schedule of making free entertainment for the world and design some merch. Patreon’s providing him at least a halfway decent income, but I imagine there are some people who would prefer to buy something physical!
Chibi Sydney Plushies.
Action Figure Deus with Kung Fu Grip.
Action Figure Dabbler with Kung Fu Grip….
I’m pretty sure that a Dabbler doll would not be an action figure. More of the blow-up kind.
Action figure Deus with air quote action.
https://www.cafepress.com/mf/13496134/-vneck_tshirt?productId=290825836
Here. Although this has the ‘Deposits accepted in rear’ is also on the front page.
All of Dabbler’s shirts must be special order. They don’t sell shirts with 4 arm holes in any store I’ve ever been to.
In one word:
Glamour
I have to wonder where Dabs gets her four armed t-shirts.
Why would you make a shirt like that, and not have it as an option to purchase? To e leaving money on the table here
The Tees only come in the four armed style.
1) She fabs them herself.
2) Ashley “Iron Cloth“, who supplies ARCHON with enhanced clothing.
3) She doesn’t need very many articles of clothing, because she can glamour it to look like whatever she wants. She frequently appears to be wearing sleeveless tops, and many of them probably are in actuality.
Come on DAVEB, if you’re going to make a shirt like that for the comic, you’ve GOT to have the Link ready to sell them to us when the page goes up.
The closest thing I found to it online was with both sentences on the front. DaveB definitely could make one with the second sentence on the back :)
Years ago in Madison, WI, there was a bar / lounge / drinking establishment called “The Town Pump”.
Its signage on the main drag boldly proclaimed “Entrance in the rear”.
(Said signage also had a very large high-heeled shoe – as in a pump.)
Passed by it annually on my way through Wisconsin and always giggled sophomorically every time.
Is it just me that’s fascinated with how four arm holes works on a tshirt??
I figure the true succubus version of that shirt has arrows pointing to more places than just the rear access…
I’m not sure how four arms works on a more or less human torso. The usual depiction (one arm on top of the other) doesn’t leave enough room for the shoulder socket on the lower arm to work, nor for the top attachment points for the muscles on the top arm.
I think the lower arm would probably be about halfway down the torso. Which means the ribcage would be completely different. No idea what the scapula for the lower arm would look like.
The forms of life with six limbs on Earth are exoskeletal (and a lot smaller than human), which makes for a completely different design; more like hydraulic pumps than pulleys.
Needless to say, pretty much all of Dabbler’s clothing would have to be custom-designed. So she’s either using illusions (possibly not a good idea in combat) or she’s taking designs ideas and running them through her own clothing fabricator. The second one would allow for all clothing to fit perfectly since it has her measurements, and it’s probably about as common with space people as a cellphone with Earthlings. I.e. you have one unless you’re a penniless student or a refugee.
Rather than doubling down on the entire shoulder structure I wonder if you could use a scapula with two shoulder sockets. Both arms would move if she shrugged her shoulder and you would still have to route the necessary muscles but it would get the arms to a location that resembles the illustration.
Depending on the flexibility of said receptacle, more then one entrance can be covered by that arrow. Experience has taught me that.
Isn’t a thing that’s two things binary, since two is binary?
:)
Not if it’s both things at the same time, but could also be those things independently, because that would be more than two states.
Sorry I was probably vague on this.
I was making a joke, since ‘binary’ is 0 and 1. Or ‘a system relating to, composed of, or involving two things.’
So just saying ‘binary’ could have meant binary as in a number system. Which means two states – 0 or 1, rather than ‘0 and 1.’ Or ‘2,’ which would not be in a binary number system (insert Fry comforting Bender joke from Futurama here).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5oM5AGnJfo
Any day that Dabbles gets to troll Maxi simply by being herself is a great day :)
Dabbler in sexy construction gal attire please. bonus points if you allude to benni bennasi’s “satisfaction” in the background
I seen a shirt like that one Dab’s has many years ago, but it was on a Chicago gal that was “walking the street” heh…
My wife seen it at the same time I did and we both busted out laughing, she was 3 months along with our first ;) Then I winked at her and said “I have made all the deposits I needed to at a better bank” I had to hold her up, she was laughing too hard to breathe lol!
Dabbler is definitely waifu material.
So as of now that domain is still available for purchase if anybody wants to grab it.
So much funnier that Max didn’t see what was sprinted on the back of the shirt: well done!
Last panel gives me Spying with Lanna vibes.
Ya know, that shirt makes for a SOLID vote incentive comic~
Drippy font make me nostalgic for the late 1970’s. A young lay coming into our sophomore English Composition class wearing a t-shirt with the word “Horny” spelled out in colorful drippy font. At the time my high school had a fairly lax dress code.
Bets on how many times a week Dabbler “volunteers” at local sperm banks.
“No really, you don’t have to pay me. I’m happy to help.”
fertility industry is BADLY under regulated i think Dabbler would be horrified by some of their practices (i sure as hell was when i fell down that rabbithole)
As I think on this…would feminist be for this? Seriously, wouldn’t the idea be, “They don’t need a man” so they wouldn’t need a sperm bank, as you need a man, for a sperm bank.