Grrl Power #216 – .50 caliber headache
I’m starting to interleave the fights a little to give them a bit more weight. Don’t worry we’ll get back to Dabbler and Heavenly on the next page. I just wanted to show Peggy being useful for a bit. She watches for ways she can contribute in a non-lethal way, which is easier than you might think when the right super powers are involved, takes a few shots, then relocates. Harem makes for an excellent spotter for a number of reasons, though I suspect that spotter scope she’s holding is entirely too powerful for the range they’re at. See the strip mall in the background of the first panel? They’re probably on the roof of the next big store down the way, figure only about 100-200 yards if a quick spot check on google maps of a similarly laid out shopping center is to be believed. I’m sure those scopes are adjustable, for what they cost they ought to be useful at a number of ranges, but ~150 yards is not exactly a challenging distance for a professional sniper.
Concretia’s powers raise all sorts of questions. If she formed her latest body out of asphalt, how is it that she has white teeth? How do her clothes transfer from body to body? They seem to be her actual clothes, but when she abandons a body, they become stone then follow her to the new body. I’ll tell you how. Super powers. They’re like magic but without all the gesticulating and pseudo latin intonations.
As always I will be at A-kon this year (June 6-8 in Dallas) and, I’ll be doing a panel on Friday. Humor-Based Webcomics 1: Humor in Story. Be sure to stop by!
My fifth Gynostar Guest strip is up! The current arc starts here.
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So lemme get this straight:
She knows which supers are going to be annoyed by bullets rather than damaged or otherwise harmed by them.
She wants those to be her primary targets, because she can make them mad and distract them (drawing attention to her) without killing them, whilst using the full range of her available weaponry.
QED, she wants to attract the attention of every pissed-off super that she can’t actually defend herself against effectively using what weapons she has?
This can’t POSSIBLY go wrong.
They can only hurt her if they can find her. She is the very best of snipers that a super power can provide, or she would not be on that team. The more villains she can get mad at her and running around looking for a ghost, the less there are for her super-powered colleagues to have to worry about. The quicker they can mop up the other enemies and turn to dealing with the ones she is holding aggro on.
Who says blasters can’t tank?
Believe the term you are meaning is ‘kite’ rather than ‘tank’ (the days of running around in a circle with a tail of mobs, or chasing after a group of mobs, nostalgia gets me every time :D)
Actually, once I perfected my mixed crowd-control and damage dealer concepts, my blasters were entirely capable of tanking. By means of incapacitating enemies. With less effectiveness than my genuine crowd controllers, of course, but sufficient for their specific needs. Such as slowing down, or immobilising, groups of minions.* And holding or stunning the bosses or lieutenants.
Combined it reduced the threat level enough that my blasters minimal defences were up to the task of tanking.** Because they retained strong offensive power and could take down their enemies faster than they could penetrate my defences. I never sacrificed effectiveness of core powers, in the process of developing my characters’ secondary abilities.
I knew some good kiters. But that was never my style.
* Which is enough on its own against mobs with either no or weak ranged attacks. Or taking cover from return fire of strong missile capable enemies. And timing return salvoes after their attacks. Which is somewhere in a grey area between tanking (using terrain as cover) and kiting. But with less running around, so I stick with the tank terminology.
It would also be the closest to what Peggy would be doing here. Albeit that it is only an approximation, due to the artificial nature of game mechanics.
** If solo, or with a partner or small team, they were capable of acting as the primary tank/crowd controller. Which some folks could not believe, until they saw it in action. If a large team was unfortunate enough not to have a dedicated specialist for the job, then my blasters would simply avoid aggoiing more of the mobs than they could handle themselves. They could either pull smaller groups for controlled tanking, or take more than their fair share of the aggro from a larger, uncontrolled, mob in a free-for-all.
Had a gnecro who ended up off-tanking 2 or 3 Griffons when a group she was in was going after a named griffon for a quest, she (and her boney friend) managed to take one (or 2) down and weaken the other long enough for the others to take out the named and get the last just after she fell (not bad for a ‘squishy’)
Its a terminology thing. What most gamers call “tanking” refers to melee characters acting more like armored bulldozers or wrecking balls rather than mobile heavy artillery batteries like, you know, actual tanks.
The Secret World makes it possible to build a ranged tank, it is one of the common things you see people broadcasting:
LFG Rifle/Chaos ranged tank
that’s not a specific one…I tried to remember a specific one and failed….too much soloing, I think
To me, you have ‘meatshields’ and ‘tanks’, most games simply have ‘meatshields’ (they take a lot of damage but don’t deal very much in return), WAR had both (definitely had ‘tanks’ that not only could take the hits but could return a fair bit as well)
Personally, I use tanking by taking the Hover power, as most enemies have largely crap ranged options, one or two moves at best, compared to how much damage their melee moves do, by having them focus on throwing butterfly farts at me, the scrappers that they COULD instagib with their fists are now free to do damage and not die.
Yea. My favourite, who did that, was a Corruptor, by the name of “Along Came B”. The companion of an Arachnos Spider called “Along Came A”. Mind you it was purely for style, and fighting mobs that were highly resistant to controller-type powers. She took advantage of the very fact that melee powers were much stronger, so, apart from one obligatory ranged ‘sting’ attack, all her single-target damage was focussed in very hard-hitting melee.
I had it set up so that, at the click of a button, she would transform from her regular form (a cute honey bee), into a flying version (activating the hover power) wearing boxing gloves, shorts and champion’s belt. Accompanied by the catch phrase “I float like a butterfly, but I sting like a bee”. That would allow her to evade those dangerous melee attacks. Long enough for her controlling attacks to break through the enemies defences and incapacitate them. Albeit temporarily, for resistant mobs.
Then she could hover at their head height (she was, as you might expect, very small) and punch them, like a south-bound freight train.* Always being ready to dodge any that broke free from her control, and swung back. That was a seriously fun character to play. Time things wrong and she would be in dead trouble. Get it right, and she was phenomenally powerful.
* I had neglected just how powerful some of the melee options were, even within ranged attacker sets, up until designing her. For good reason mind. Putting a squishie in close proximity to deadly melee types is a recipie for disaster. Unless they have overwhelming crowd control. And contingency tactics, for when they do not work.
Prior to that I had only ever taken the one blaster take a melee damage attack, on a character called Sir Merlin. And that purely because his knightly order required both armour and a sword. No admittance to the super-group without it. Even when they disbanded, he kept the faith. But rarely used his ice sword for anything other than a finishing move.
What you are describing is called debuff tanking (at least, that’s the term I’ve always heard used for it), and is actually a very old and respectable method for squishies to act as tank for a group. It’s not quite as agro-intensive as a regular tank can be, it was the heart of several groups I have played in.
Basically, the premise is that you weaken the enemies enough that, even if they ARE bigger, stronger, and tougher than you, it doesn’t matter, because they can’t actually hurt you. In my time playing EverQuest, I encountered two distinct variants of this, one based around slowing an enemy’s attacks down, and the other based around weakening the individual attacks, or, in my case, adding a debuff that made each individual attack return a percentage of the damage it inflicted.
What you are DESCRIBING, however, is kiting. Very, very FAST kiting, but still, kiting.
On top of what everyone else has said, she has a teleporter with her. There’s very little chance that she’s going to get caught.
Even with one body, not sure that Daphne could *vorp* with an adult
Except for the minor detail that Harem can’t teleport living things.
I don’t think “living things” was ever specified, but her weight limit is less than an average adult, so “Harem can’t Teleport Peggy” still stands. Peggy could drop her gear and run, and Harem could VORP it to wherever peggy stops though.
Technically she just knows something has put a hole through her head. The report (“bang”) of the rifle is going to be a few seconds behind, and Concretia doesn’t seem smart enough to guess the direction with all the cover noise of the battle, look in that direction without any eye ware and still spot the flash, then head in that direction. It’s far enough away Harem needs a spotter’s rig to see Peggy make the shot. Sad Dave missed the opportunity for Pepe le Pew to accost her, what with that parking stripe down the middle of her back
Love the shifting focus in the first three panels. Clever way to adapt cinematic techniques to the comic medium. Drawing attention first to the action, then to the mysterious ghostly resurrection. Purdy too.
Very good detail with Pegs trigger finger outside of the trigger guard
Yeah I caught some flak for that last time. :)
Haha, I hate to say it, but now that “something finally happened”, I’m really looking forward to the aftermath. I wanna know who sent all these guys, for one thing.
Maxima sent the villains there I believe.
As Math’s three opponents after Concretia found out, there’s really not much of an aftermath afterMath is done…
Concretia? So does that mean that she can conjure a body only out of concrete?
Because suck to be her in a jungle or North Pole… =)
Or in Russia, since concrete there doesn’t last long.
Btw imagine if some 5year old draw some naked lady on said concrete XD
“Concretia” was just a name that our friendly neighborhood Geek+Nerd (Gnerd? Neek?) gave her in his database. So far, she’s only used Concrete (Her first body) and Asphalt (Her second one), but she can presumably do other materials.
Presumably if any of her bodies last long enough for someone to say her name, it will be updated like Heavenly Sword’s name was.
I would think that she chose those materials because they’re fairly durable and easily available. In a jungle, she’d probably animate parts of trees, and at the North Pole (where there is no stone because, unlike Antarctica, all the ice is floating on the ocean) she would have no choice but ice.
In which case, would she be renamed “Icya”? Did ya c what I did?
*ducks down behind Icya*
Can ya c me?
I Tawt I Taw a Punny Tat!
The communist penguins can.
And they have guns.
I forgot to mention this when I first read this one, but am I the only one who suddenly thought of The Flinstones movie when reading that her name was Concretia?
That was mentioned a few times when she was first introduced :D
“Concretia’s powers raise all sorts of questions. If she formed her latest body out of asphalt, how is it that she has white teeth? How do her clothes transfer from body to body? They seem to be her actual clothes, but when she abandons a body, they become stone then follow her to the new body. I’ll tell you how. Super powers. They’re like magic but without all the gesticulating and pseudo latin intonations.”
I realize that there does come a time when you just have to give up on trying to explain things logically or reasonably and just go with “It’s Super Powers”. That’s the nature of fiction. You have suspend a -lot- of disbelief for stories in the Comic Book Superheroes genre, and people who read that genre expect it.
However, we were told right up front that some of the tropes were going to be avoided and or mocked in order to have Grrl Power be a little more “realistic” than other comics, or for the humor of it. One of the tropes that has been given a turn in the barrel is the one about how Supers Get Magical Costumes. None of that “unstable molecules” flimflam here. That’s why Achilles gets his clothing destroyed regularly, and why Anvil’s dress gets ruined in the Supervillain Blitz.
So it’s fine if most of the questions about Anima/Concretia get answered with “Because Super Powers, that’s why”, but that isn’t good enough when it comes to her costume.
On a meta level, Dave wants to keep the comic PG-13, so Concretia needs to either have Barbie doll physiology or transferable clothing.
As we do not know the full nature of her powers, her having clothes could still make sense. Given that they have a honeycomb pattern (with Unmoving Plaid effect, for shame), they could as well be the source of her powers, or tied in with them.
Cool detail that the road markings remain on her body, though by the way she emerges they shouldn’t be visible on her face.
I always look for a simple way that explains the apparent anomalies, rather than to state that they are wrong. In this case we observe both that the head appears to be hollow and, as you correctly say, that the yellow line would only be on the back. But that is only true if Concretia were creating a solid body out of a deep block of the terrain.
So the solution would be that she gathers up a sheet of material, and wraps it around, to form the shell. Hence the yellow could appear on her face, using that option.
The head does not appear to be hollow. It appears to be solid, but with a crater blown out of it, and a translucent yellow head superimposed inside it.
Take a bite out of an apple, then set some gelatin in the hole. That’s what your looking at.
Actually, I agree with you. I had just been running with the apparent consensus of opinion. I am glad that I was not alone in viewing it differently. But, other than one person mentioning the fact that the fingers were solid, it did seem to be a minority opinion. And can be taken either way, depending on how you interpret that one shot of her head (so to speak). Otherwise I would not have used the argument that I just did.
Dave. Does Anima need to focus to stay phased? Or does it just kinda happen?
You mean Concretia? She does seem to need to focus to fully emerge from her body, but there’s a definite reflexive element to it, because else Peggy’s attack wouldn’t have been as non-lethal as she had wanted. After all, you see her ghostly form emerge from the part of her head Peggy blasted away.
I think her spirit disconnects automatically once the rock is too damaged to hold it….witness how she tried to stand up from the first body until it started falling apart…
Concretia* has two distinct powers. Her ability to phase being one. The other being to animate material. How she controls both of those powers is the interesting part. I can envisage the phasing easily. It is a simple matter to turn it on or off.
On the other paw animating an object into the form of a human body, and getting it to behave like one, rather than being an immobile statue, is a lot harder. The way I figure she can do it is to use her accumulated experiences with life. Getting her subconsciousness to mine all of her memories about bodies, how they move and react, and translate that into controlling the power.
Just like we do not need to think of all the steps involved in standing up, walking to a the kitchen, getting a glass out, and filling it with water. We are so used to all of the little bits of knowledge and experience involved, that we just do it without thinking.
So Concretia gets all of the benefits of an animated body, by the simple expedient of replicating features of a real body. The drawback being that part and parcel of real bodies is that they ‘die’ if badly beaten up and/or shot. She expects that, so her mind replicates it, as a part of the process.
It is also useful for explaining how her clothing manifests. She is used to wearing clothing, and most people would be embarrassed, appearing to be naked in public. So she, consciously or unconsciously, uses her ability to replicate clothing. Although it appears to be cloth, it is just asphalt modified to look like it. Matching the appearance of the, currently phased, material she is really wearing.
Perhaps she found that she could not pull that off with many common items of clothing. Like her body, it was too hard to duplicate the appearance of flesh from stony material. So she picked clothing that is within the range of textures and/or colours that she can emulate.
Like mimicking a body, this is actually a lot harder than it sounds. But, again, she is simply copying real-life things that she is very familiar with. So making the process easier than it appears.
* Anima is her own chosen alias, per DaveB, but until it is officially introduced, in-comic, I will stick to the one that the heroes know her by.
Some friends of mine were starting to get annoyed with the vibe they were getting that a military method is the only write method for handling things. They brought up that the military weren’t very good at policing things historically.
Personally I don’t see this group as doing much in the way of policing. Rather more like SWAT, just get called in for exceptional situations.
My friends also harped on the use of a sniper. To which I responded…”Police use snipers all the time.” and apparently that’s just an American thing.
They are not called “Arc-SWAT” for nothing
Police are used to maintain peace and order, Military is used to obtain peace and order (regard that as you will)
Police using snipers isn’t just “an American thing”
I think your friend has a valid point, if you keep the emphasis on the “all the time” part. Compared to the UK, anyhow. There are police marksmen. Who will be available at major incidents. But you very very rarely have any incidents where they actually need to shoot somebody.
The difference is accountable by the prevalence of gun crime, when comparing the US to the UK. As opposed to the implication that US cops have itchier trigger fingers. *
* They probably do, but I would not be able to substantiate that suspicion with any hard facts. But, joking aside, UK cops do not carry firearms. So criminals do not nee to either. Therefore it is rare that situations get out of hand enough that armed response units need to be called.
Also, UK cops do not carry guns. (I’m fairly certain this is just for the standard uniform loadout, but I live in Aus so I don’t know details.)
(I’m also too lazy to google that right now.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_firearms_in_the_United_Kingdom
So sayeth Wikipedia that in fact some small percentage of UK police, and all police officers in Northern Ireland, carry guns. There are also Armed Response Vehicles, patrol cruisers with gun safes in the back that hold pistols and assault rifles.
I think my “always” was predicated on the assumption of “situations for which SWAT is called in”
Understood. The distinctions being between how frequently that is required, per capita, per annum. And how often, in the situations, where they are called, that they need to be used.
Sadly there is a self-perpetuating spiral. The more gun crime there is, the more frequently SWAT has to be called in. The more that the criminals feel they need to tool up with anti-SWAT weaponry. The UK is working hard to prevent that cycle from starting. Because, once it is up and running, it is very hard to break the momentum. As shown by the rapid increase in the number of SWAT teams required in the US, since their introduction.
You raise a very interesting point about what SWAT officers get up to in their day to day lives. Something that may well influence DaveB‘s writing. Apparently they mostly do normal policing, if you check out the first paragraph of this link.
Last I knew, Canada had snipers on their police force as well.
I stopped reading this partway through the live fire demonstration, and came back a few days ago.
Let me just say this: When this comic gets rolling it’s good. But it takes so long to get to that point, and so much of the intervening activities seemed unnecessary or repetitive. Syndey explained what her powers did no less than 3 separate times, when we only really needed once or twice. We have some good character moments here and there (I really like Sydney’s whole thing about the star and worrying about her power, for instance, and Math’s ‘three moves ahead/just human’ stuff) but the comic seems much more concerned with how it’s supposed to be a realistic take on superpowers (as realistic as superpowers can be, anyway) than the actual superheroing.
Advice for future installments: if scenes can be condensed in some manner, do so. For example, Sydney needed to explain her powers in the ballroom scene, and needed to give a brief rundown at the press conference, but the scene with her explaining her powers to her teammates could have been cut and left implied, coming in at the end with Maxima saying ‘-to keep most of her powers classified, especially the commball’s truesight’. Much like how we only saw Sydney tell peggy two of her powers, but we can assume she brought up the rest.
“the comic seems much more concerned with how it’s supposed to be a realistic take on superpowers (as realistic as superpowers can be, anyway) than the actual superheroing.”
And this is exactly why it is good reading. I enjoy that. Quite a lot. Not just a “realistic” take on superpowers, but superpower/superhero deconstructions. Tales of the drawbacks of superpowers, such as you see in works like Common Ground. And a spotlight on the private lives of superheros outside of the all too typical hero vs. villain slugfest, which Hero Alliance did so well.
Anyone can write a comic where the arrogant good guys fight each other every month before figuring out that they are on the same side, and then they join forces to fight the new or returning villain. Remember the fight between Thor and Iron Man in the movie The Avengers? That was an homage to the comic book “fight between arrogant good guys.” And it is both so easy to write and also so stupid in that it makes the supposed good guys plastic and one dimensional. Remember how Thor had to learn humility in the movie Thor before he could get his powers back? It was the central theme of the movie, after all. Thor spent more time without his powers than he did with them, because he was an arrogant jackass and had his power stripped from him by Odin. You might remember that, but The Avengers movie sure didn’t, not with the constant “Loki is OF ASGARD, and he is MY brother. We GODS will handle the problem” arrogance that he tossed around at the beginning of that movie. And then, after it was pointed out that Loki was a mass murderer, the plastic and one dimensional Thor just let all his arrogance go with a comic relief “Um, he’s adopted.” Utter crap, even if it drew a cheap laugh.
Show me the side of superheroes which hasn’t been covered before. That is new ground, and interesting reading.
“Not just a “realistic” take on superpowers… Alliance did so well.”
Most of the comic so far has been taken up by a press conference. >.> Just because it’s ‘new ground’ does not mean that your story is interesting, you still need to do something interesting WITH that idea. A press conference is not interesting (good try, though, Dave) and while I can understand it being done in this universe and seeing a bit of it in the comic, there’s too bloody much of both it and the build-up to it which could have easily been shrunk down.
“Utter crap, even if it drew a cheap laugh.”
Don’t even try that with me, please. Epic Movie was a ‘crap’ movie. Eragon was a ‘crap’ movie. A Kid in King Arthur’s Court was a ‘crap’ movie. XMen Origins: Wolverine was a ‘crap’ movie. Avengers was not ‘crap’.
Cheap laughs are cheap, but they’re used because they work and quite frankly I’d rather have a cheap laugh about a mass murderer than the constant ‘everything sucks’ miseryfest that we keep getting from, say, DC.
I agree, on the face of it, that three introductions and explanations of the powers, seemed to be over the top. And it felt that way to me too, I must admit. But when you examine it, you find that there are layers of other things going on during those scenes. Far too many to detail here, without creating a wall of text. But go back and look at each, and you will see there is a lot of depth, character development, social interactions, implications of evasiveness, and so on. Plus comedy.
Not to mention that each of the three scenes has a fundamentally different underpinning. One is Sydney coming out as a super. Her transition from being a paranoid individual, hiding her powers out of fear. But then being coaxed into revealing them to the authorities.
The next one is her becoming a super cop, and meeting her new colleges. Although it all took place on one day, this is another transformative step. One that need not have followed on from the first. How she handled it, including challenging Math to a fight, is profoundly important in establishing her relationship with the unit.
Just like a prisoner’s first squaring up to a bully in any prison movie, it is fundamental in establishing the pecking order and her future status in the team.
Finally, she gets to strut her stuff to the press. This is not just important for how she is viewed by the rest of society, it is also the rest of the world getting to see somebody who, just this morning appeared to be a normal member of society (very loosely speaking), but who has now been elevated to being a super hero.
How she handled that could alter the entire tone of the debate on super heroes that will follow. Her disarming humanity, may just offset the fearsome demonstration that Maxima gave. Her job there was to show she had the power to protect. In that case, every member of the press corps, from a near-nuclear level explosion.
Which was also necessary for the unveiling of her skill tree. A totally unique hook.
May I also point out that you forgot the fourth explanation of her powers? When she tried to tell Peggy, despite her not being interested. Just like film stars have to keep doing press interviews and talk shows, super heroes have to keep explaining their powers. If you get to see their day to day lives. Which is central to this comic. Dave just found interesting ways to show this happening, in realistic yet entertaining ways.
Finally, central to every super hero story, is the fundamental question. What is it like to have a super power? Thanks to DaveB, we now know.
I liked the fight with Math, and I get that doing so there helps to establish a pecking order. I just feel explaining her powers again at that point (and showing us, for that matter) was completely unnecessary, since all she did was summarize her powers. As I said, it could easily have just been implied and have something else put there, like a brief bit of character development or even that scene where Harem relays that info to Scarface. It would have condensed the info and the story wouldn’t have felt like it was dragging.
I feel the need to add that this is my personal opinion and I do enjoy the comic when it gets rolling (bank scene, here, and Maxima’s speech)
been wondering something about concretia
if she can do on rocks or road to fuse herself and get a body. does that mean she can pretty much use minerals of a kind to do it? could she, IF she had the smartness, fuse herself with sand to make it even more of a pain to take her down?
I would say “probably”, with a good bit of scepticism.
The sand is a much more granular substance, than gravel or road pavement. Would probably be a… headache to keep it together. Would be literally shedding sand :)
Of course if she can break into one of De Beer’s vaults, or a synthetic diamond (or ruby etc) manufacturing facility, she could make a very tough body. Always depending on her limitations of course. And that may not be just minerals. But, in general principle, sand, mercury, gems, titanium, uranium or even kryptonite are all plausible.
A body of diamonds huh? Especially with someone of her size, that would be… let’s say worth a few bucks and leave it at that. Don’t know if you’d find any vault that holds enough diamonds at one point.
SOP for a sniper. Get a site, preferably hidden; fire a few rounds; move to the hide; repeat. But the Barrett in a non-lethal fight? She is right; some super powers make bullets a annoyance.
Curious. This concrete ghost lady doesn’t look nearly as muscular in her spectral form.
Neat, so shes actually incorporeal and can animate all forms of Ston…ish matter?