Grrl Power #1475 – Megascorpion
Super Hiro is about 80% as strong as Maxima, but his flight speed is just shy of supersonic. Anvil can theoretically out-strength anyone on the team by absorbing enough kinetic energy (being punched all-out by Hiro doesn’t make her as strong as Hiro, there’s conversion entropy, and a lot of the energy goes to reinforcing her body) and no one is sure what her upper limit is and if she would instantly explode if she exceeds it or develop a full-body hernia or what.
Basically, no one else was quite right to take Babezilla down quickly and nonlethally. Dabbler did some back of the cyber-abacus math and gave Max an idea of how hard and fast Max would need to hit her without exploding her head. I’ve posted about it before, but I’m positive super fights would wind up being extremely lethal. If some guy is robbing a bank wearing, let’s say a tank themed costume, you really have no idea how much punishment he can take. So you give him a tap that would lay out a normal human, or try to, because if your regular punch is measured in megatons, scaling it back down to a 300 lb boxer punch might not be a level of control that’s easy to achieve. Maybe to you, exhaling differently during the punch means the difference between 300 lbs and 3,000. Maybe you lay the guy out, maybe he doesn’t realize he’s being punched, maybe you break his neck. So if he’s still upright and giving you flack about how his grandmother hits harder, you go back in and punch again a little harder, trying to work your way up till you’re hitting him as his level, or just slightly above, but somewhere between 30,000 lbs and 180,000, his skull pulps. And that’s a hero trying to control his strength. A supervillain with eye lasers could walk into a stadium and kill 5,000 people before a hero shows up and decides there’s no time to work his way up to just the right amount of takedown force.
There was a start of a good discussion on the previous page about whether or not Babezilla’s phone would still work when enlarged. I think it comes down to how she grows. If she just summons more molecules to fill in the spaces, then I think the battery would still work, but I don’t know the antenna. I also don’t know if the CPU or the screen would still work, because suddenly regular sized electrons are flying around circuits that are 55x wider and thicker, and data transmitted to the screen (like the LEDs themselves) is traveling through wires that used to be hair-thick but are now finger-thick. I think there’d be some lag at any rate.
If she grows by making her molecules larger, well, then how does she breathe? The phone itself should still work perfectly, but again, not sure about the antenna. I think that would fail, unless the EM waves returned to regular size once they leave her super-domain, then yeah, I guess it’d work.
And if it’s some sort of weird reverse-TARDIS-she’s-bigger-on-the-outside nonsense, then of course it’d work, because she’s just closer than you think she is.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Anyone else feel ‘Railgun her in the brain stem.” Could just as easily be a euphemism in Dabbler’s world?
euphemism? Somewhere in the vast cosmos of supertough aliens and hyperadvanced medicine and redundant brains, that’s gotta be someone’s fetish.
Probably not Dabbler’s though, so I guess it’s a euphemism.
Dabbler is a Succubus, they have ALL the fetishes
Only one brain stem though.
At *some* point she’s gotta reach the “mind is willing, flesh is weak”-stage
And of course she could railgun other parts of her.
Or have someone fast plant some regular demolition explosives on her.
Or aim one of those infrasonic crowd control torture devices at her and see if that helps.
Or Dabbler kisses her and then tells her to be a good girl.
Euphemism? That’s a cocktail!
…you mean its not!?
so it’s a bit of a stretch, but:
the original name of Godzilla is Gojira, made up of the Japanese words for Gorilla and Whale.
This got then…badly transliterated? translated? into Godzilla, and I guess there’s the God in there, but zilla doesn’t even mean anything monster related.
I forget where I was going with this…
Right, I hereby argue that the Gorilla part of Godzilla is the God-, and by calling herself the zilliest of Zillas that woman is calling herself the whaliest of whales.
Wouldn’t Heatwave be able to take her? She can do her heatwave passing out thing, or something, while dodging big arms
I submit the portmanteau “mutiliterated” for that sort of transliteration. :D
that’s perfect, motion sustained!
Regarding Heatwave, I believe the issue is that heat disperses relative to the object it’s being applied to. This is way glowing hot sparks from a welding torch even if they touch skin are only a minor issue. Because while the sparks are very hot, they are also very, very tiny. The amount of energy needed to heat something up needs to be increase proportional to the size of what you are heating up. And just directly doubling the size of something increases its mass eight-fold (twice as tall, as wide, and as thick because we reside in a three-dimensional plane, 2 times 2 times 2 is 8), so something 55 times as tall as it’s original size has a mass over 150,000 times greater.
In short, Heatwave would try to overheat her to the point of passing out, but she would probably to push her ability over 100,000 times harder than normal. Even if her overheating someone’s body temperature only pushed her body to about 0.01% of what she can normally push her body to do, she might pass out before she got halfway to the heat she needed on someone this massive.
Max, do you really have spare seconds to be giving quips?
talking is a free action unless is a speech or such that would call for a roll check
this is the only way monologues work at all
Probably still within 10 seconds.
Thank God for NSFW imagination.
There’s probably end up a NSFW version show up soon enough for the paying patrons.
I didn’t get into that discussion, but no, her phone would not work for many good reasons, #1 among them the fact that resonant circuits and UHF antennae are extremely dependent on the actual physical size and spacing of the components. Expand those circuit elements and you changed the frequency of the circuit. Given most of those are Phase Locked Loops, it’d just stop. Any EM radiation would be utterly wrong wavelengths to connect to any cell system – presuming such a thrown together mess would work at all. I really can’t imagine any battery working with an enormously larger separator either, it’d turn into an insulator. In that case, thin matters.
Well now, there are three ways around that with superheroes: 1) She has a custom-built phone that ONLY works while grown, 2) Unstable Molecules(TM), or 3) The phone is somehow the SOURCE of her powers, and thus grows with her.
Or there’s the fourth option where the working parts of the phone just don’t grow, and the case has some tech that does, partly, grow that handles presenting the data on the screen, etc.
There’s also the option that the phone doesn’t actually work and she just thinks it does because she’s dumb enough to think a frozen screen is the camera recording correctly.
Or she has a phone that contains size-invariant phone circuitry and some more flexible size-variable bits that work as presentation managers/magnifiers.
Y’all are actually missing a MUCH bigger problem: She herself is a PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY due to the Cube Square Law. Her body SHOULD be collapsing in on her own weight. Which is a MUCH bigger issue than a Phone being built with some Future Alien Tech that works in ways we don’t understand and can’t do with our current Tech & Understanding of Physics.
Thus do to the way that Super Powers are able to Bend/Break the Rules of Physics, along with the recent influx of Alien Tech from Deus, I don’t see why her phone should be all that crazy. It’s at least THEORETICALLY possible some new Tech COULD do something like this. Unlike the Laws of Biology & Physics that say her body would grow FASTER than the strength of her Bones & Muscles can support.
One way of solving a lot of “it grows with me” issues is that she and her stuff are still all the same number of atoms and normal-sized within their own frame of reference, but she’s inside an envelope/boundary that can be scaled up – essentially a person-shaped void with a person in the middle doing normal person things. That boundary handles a lot of the interfacing questions and apparent bigness/mass, but she’s still only taking in a tiny volume of air with each breath, and her phone is operating normally and emitting only its normal signal strength beyond the boundary. It makes it a dimensional warping power rather than any kind of biological weirdness. It also is a lot less awkward to change size that way – she doesn’t have to tuck 8500 tons of cutie-flesh into hammer space to go incognito.
answer to the phone issue, our resident super genius turned world leader has started selling phones and other devices and objects that may or may not have alien tech in them that are designed to work under super conditions. sure giant robots that are a billion dollars each are great but you make sales so rarely, so a line of sneakers that can deal with super speed/ strength and sell for 1000 are selling like crazy to vampires and other weirdos. the indestructible phone that works everywhere is about 10k but its really popular with supers.
Dave, great job on the art, the upskirt seems quite realistic to me. Did you do much research on this scene? haha
It would have been kind of funny if Max had just dragged BabeZilla back to the unlimited match at fracture station (or wherever). She could have been signed up at superspeed as a late entry. Though Babezilla doesn’t seem to be very tough or experienced.
I would have enjoyed if Babezilla wasn’t so aggressively antagonizing the superteams and flouting laws. She is super cute and has a bit of innocence about her, she could have been a fun neutral character in the story. Not that we don’t have plenty of characters and sidestories already! Babezilla spinoff!
Just wanted to point out that the art in panel 2 is incredible. Dave has some moments where the anatomy is not perfect (because human being haha) but this one is spot-on for a very difficult pose. Color me impressed.
Perhaps she should have watched Godzilla: Final Wars before calling herself a “Zilla”. Now nerds all over are going to compare her to that sad performance.
To everyone that is questioning the physics of her faceplant:
Max hit her in the back of the head. The angle of her body implies, with that specific hit, that she’s falling forward.
The ‘motion lines’ on her feet in the next panel indicate that she faceplanted & her feet are continuing their momentum over her back. According to Ridiculousness, this is called a ‘scorpion’, where you faceplant so hard that your body folds backwards, looking like you’re trying to kick yourself in the back of your head.
Which explains Dave’s title for the page, “Megascorpion”….
What *IS* that doodad in the foreground of the last panel anyways? That’s gonna have me drove nuts.
Upon closer look it seems to be a streetlamp, but it has a powerline or something attached to it.
Oh yeah! Now I see it, thanx.
I just assumed her IUD fell out from the hit…
I watched an interesting video the other day where the poster explained that’s why Spider-Man is possibly the single most dangerous character in the Marvel Universe. He’s constantly calculating just how hard and fast he can hit the bad guys without permanently crippling or killing them. And unlike, oh say, Iron Man, he doesn’t have computerized armor to help out. He’s constantly figuring it out in his head, often while fighting multiple opponents at once and moving at super speed. Knowing when NOT to hold back also explains why he regularly defeats characters much stronger than he is, relying on speed and precision to overcome sheer power. The poster further explained that some of the smarter Marvel characters understand this and are terrified of what would happen if Spidey ever stopped holding back.
Easy debunk of that theory is SpiderMan does have a version of Iron Man’s computerized armor. His Spidey Sense. It doesn’t just work on physical dangers but emotional ones too. We can safely assume it’s implied he would feel a tingle if he winded up his punch or kick too strongly that it would break his code and be able to adjust accordingly on the fly.
That is not consistent with how Spider sense usually works at all.
Peter being a holds-back-man is dumb, but not because of the even dumber reason of writers trying to power creep him.
Actually, no, Petey holding back makes all the sense
Remember what his Uncle told? And what happened to Gwen (the original Gwen)?
Do agree about the spidey-sense not working that
Also, Spider-Man in the comics typically uses extreme kids gloves when dealing with somebody who doesn’t have superhuman durability or endurance.
When he attacks somebody with Human-level durability? He finger-flicks them in the chin. Because he’s strong enough that even pulling his punches to the extreme risks severe injury to his opponent. A finger-flick for Spidey, apparently, is equivalent to a heavyweight boxer’s punch.
Otherwise, he simply uses his webs to immobilize & incapacitate his squishy foes.
On a related note, the Marvel Wikia has stated that if he tenses his jaw muscles, Spidey can actually cause a human to break their hand on his jaw.
They also know, when Spidey stops joking mid-fight, things are about to go seriously bad as he is no longer playing around
There was one scene where a bunch of villains surrendered when Spider-Man didn’t respond to any of their quips. The punchline was that Spidey had laryngitis.
Considering it is canon that Peter can indeed stomp a dried up mudhole in Logan in a no holds barred and I am past caring what happens after, during or ever fight. Unlike some supes of any and all ethical/moral leanings. Peter thinks it through, not overthinking (usually). Just don’t bring up the whole clone thing, still in therapy over that crud.
Specially when you know that Scarlet Spider (the ‘clone’ who walked away) is the original and Spiderman (the one who staid) was the clone
Spider-Man “holding back” is often just used as a crutch that swings between trying to make him look cool and making him look incompetent.
Because this same logic applies to every superhero with super strength in Marvel.
The Hulk, Thor, Luke Cage, and various others also (presumably) aren’t accidentally decapitating people every time they land a right hook.
Easy answer is Babezilla can generator a size-change field that enlarges everything she wants to enlarge. So, phone still works, strength/weight naturally scaled up like Ant-Man, and durability is a separate or built-in sub-power. Otherwise, while was the bikini she kept handy still small? Omitted intentionally, of course.
About the enlarged cell phone working: I’d bet a personally inadvisable amount of money it wouldn’t.
Timing in a CPU is the single most critical aspect of moving around the electrons. It is also going to be the aspect of the electronics most impacted by enlarging. Example: Capacitors consists of (simplifying…) two conductive plates separated by a (mostly) non-conductive dielectric. They’re stacked like two plates in your kitchen cabinet with a paper towel between them.
The capacitance produced is a function of the surface area of the plates (increasing X*Y) and the overall resistance of the dielectric (X*Y*thickness). Note the two equations are not the same. To get the same exact behavior out of the capacitor requires that changes in 2 dimensions (the plates) be scaled one way, while the dielectric is scaled up differently, taking the thickness into account. THere’s also a time factor involved – it takes time for the field growing between the two plates to expand to the discharge point. THat’s a fourth dimension to consider.
Getting those dimensions to increase in a manner that results in the same timing is not going to be a simple size change. Capacitors are used at least as often as transistors in any integrated chip, so my bet is that simple size changing would result in the phone not working.
To say it simply: The signals inside the components have a wave frequency that must be exactly unchanging if the digital part is to work right, just as the radios do.
Come on Math, we all you want to peel back the panties, and climb in
we all *know* you want to peel back the panties, and climb in
So, is she or is she not wearing a full bra?
The only proper way to deal with annoying ‘influencers’.
Just a heads-up (if this works), still getting 403’d
I was wondering why people were talking about Max decapitating or crippling her when a knockout punch wasn’t off the table at all.
Because people like to believe Maxi is a contract killer affiliated with the military (and that’s being polite)
As the blurb mentions, knockout punches in superpowered fights are very hard to do because it requires a very precise amount of force, and you usually don’t know how much until you try.
Which means it’s very easy to hit way too lightly or way too hard – hitting way too hard on these scales means less “brain injury” and more “go through their body like it was water”.
Speaking of the lethality of Superheroic combat. If you ever played GURPS and specifically the superhero rules you very quickly realize that it is VERY hard to balance power levels when Supers become involved. You tend to either have slap fights where no one actually suffers damage or end up with lethal hits.
My friend had a character he called Grindstone who was basically a tank similar to The Thing from Fan4. Rocky skin and the strength to manage that body. Most fights he took no damage and then in one fight he finally took damage… but it instantly killed him.
After that we had a player make a character that refused to take a human life but also had a blast power that had a disadvantage of only being useable at FULL FORCE which would be lethal to most people even most supers. So he was always finding creative ways of calling a shot for the foe’s weapon, or terrain he could cause to drop on them, or such. He also made him moderately stronger than most humans and gave him some good close combat skills. He was a fan of cyclops so the character really made sense for him to play.
The math I would be thinking of, would be the damage done, not by the level of strength used, but by the damage done even with normal strength, with such a small point of impact. A punch by a little kid, using those giant inflatable punching gloves, will hardly hurt an adult, but take that same kid’s strength, but narrow it down to a push pin sized impact, we have that same laughable hit, now breaking the skin, even potentially chipping bone. Maxima, no matter how much she scales her strength, hitting anything that large, if the target does not have an incredibly strong armored surface, will punch right through the jaw, like a high velocity bullet. Hitting Boobzilla, with enough strength to knock her on her ass, means that she could essentially ignore most attacks short of a nuke, especially with how her jaw was not jacked out of shape by Maxima. That brings up her body density, meaning if she was that solid, ground would be like mud or quicksand, even with her size feet, so she would be sinking up to her waist, not standing on the surface, unless she was standing on stone. High density enough to resist that kind of punch by Maxima, without tearing her jaw off, with her size, no matter what material she is made of, means she has a lot of mass. So her resistance to attacks, must have been though a super power absorbing or deflecting the attacks, up to her limit, that Maxima did not exceed, but Maxima did hit her hard enough to upset her balance, violently.
One of my favorite Spider-Man comics of all time is the second time he fights Kraven the Hunter. They punch each other a bunch for the entire issue, then Kraven, bragging, says how much stronger and tougher he’s gotten since their first fight and Spider-Man goes “Oh, I can hit you harder?” and lays him out.
I feel like Maxima should have punched through Babezilla’s phone on the way to kick her, just to drive the point home that this is a bad, bad way to rack up views.
Apparently, most supers have a sense that warns them how hard they can hit a particular foe without killing it, or perhaps some sort of automatic force governor that lets them shake hands and diaper babies without worry.
Meanwhile, Eat Chikken is chewing a living mountain. Kaihu-sized hijinks may ensure.
Dabbler could just have capped her knees
There’s a couple of other ways giantism could work.
1) the Giant form is a construct, with the real form tucked away inside (or extra dimensionally)
2) there is a localized , and (and kinda weird) bending of space Bothe the Giant form, and the external universe are normal sized – it’s only because of the way you’re looking at things that Babezilla looks gigantic.
Both of these have the advantage that physics works normally.
Let’s not forget that Supers and Super Tech can BREAK/BEND the Rules of Physics. I mean if you think the PHONE is bad, wait until you realize with the Cube Square Law, her size is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. She would collapse under her own weight. Hence I am sure that there’s some Shenanigans with Cell Phones that would allow her to have a Working Cell Phone. Doubly so when it comes to the New Influx of Alien Tech, thanks to Deus.
Let’s not forget that Supers and Super Tech can BREAK/BEND the Rules of Physics. I mean if you think the PHONE is bad, wait until you realize with the Cube Square Law, her size is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. She would collapse under her own weight. Hence I am sure that there’s some Shenanigans with Cell Phones that would allow her to have a Working Cell Phone. Doubly so when it comes to the New Influx of Alien Tech, thanks to Deus.
Should have finished your tickle laser, Dabbler.
One alien golden dragon cook is going to want to meat her.
The irony of this villain, is that she has an amazing body, and could just do modelling jobs, and probably make more money that way … she really is very stupid !
Between Stalwart and Hiro it’s difficult to see how neither could handle Babezilla, but Leon could definitely make har cry, if not outright stop. This must be Ariana scheming for a press-op.
“Thank God she was wearing panties.”
Jabberwocky, helpfully, fully checked on that last page.
She doesn’t seem like she would have enough sense to put on panties while wearing a skirt even when planning to go Godzilla mode. Besides, they would probably chafe her tail.
I could fix her.
Or die trying, but I’d have fun the whole time.