Yeah, Heatwave’s probably going to lose that toe, and she’s definitely out of the fight, so -1 to Arc-SWAT. Heatwave isn’t one of the big guns but super powered battles can shift quickly. I guess they’re kind of like Magic the Gathering in that regard. Someone can be all “Ooh gravity powers, no more flying or projectile attacks, combine that with “Make it Rain Man” to wet the ground and “Lightning Dancer” and all your grounded teammates are shockstunned. Booya.” And then the other guy is all “Oh, thanks for supercharging my Man of Iron card, +10 Repulsive blast!” Someone ought to make a game like Magic but with superheroes. As as I type that I realize that given the popularity of Magic back in the day (is it still mega popular?) there’s almost no chance that there isn’t a superhero CCG. Probably several actually.

So, Glowbug wasn’t quite taken down by Heatwave on page 219. If you recall, Glowbug is a cameo for one of the Patreon big ballaz, Shana Hills, though honestly it’s questionable how good a likeness it is. Amusingly I had this page almost totally penciled before I thought “Hey I should email Shana and make sure she’s ok with kind of her face in a one woman wet t-shirt contest.” Luckily no worries mate. Did I mention she’s Australian? She tells me that really only the older generation that says Streuth! but hey I’m an American which means that 90% of what I know about Australia is the word streuth, barbie, dungarees, funky mammals, opera house, sheilas, shitloads of poisonous stuff and “that’s not a knife…” Oh, also, when I was in high school, someone told me there’s way more women than men in Australia for some reason so when soldiers get leave they always go there and they get mobbed by horny sheilas. Apparently that’s the sort of stories high schoolers come up with when they hear there are 100,000 more women in Australia than men, ignoring the fact that the country (currently) has a population of 22.7 million people, making for a 0.4%  disparity.

Writing for comics can be weird. The last panel originally had Glowbug saying “of course” but with a long “of.” It’s one of those situations where there’s no great way to write it. If I write”offfffff” it looks like off, and if I write “oooooof” it looks like oof. Uuuuuv was the best way to make it read phonetically, but then suddenly switching to a phonetic spelling would throw some people. After I drew the panel I decided it was fine to leave out the text, so it worked out, but things like putting emphasis on words, and trying to write subtle accents can be really tricky.

Last week I had some bad link or something winding up a few people’s anti-virus software but I think it’s taken care of. If you get anything popping up, clear your cache and see if it still happens. If so let me know at grrlpowercomic[at]gmail.