Grrl Power #234 – Annihilation application
Yes Jiggawatt suddenly has gold hair to match her lipstick since a lot of people thought she looked too much like Storm, which is probably fair. I had planned on fixing all her previous appearances before putting this page up, but migrating the page to the new host took several hours out of several days this week so I’m a tiny bit behind. Like Maxima’s sudden and unexplained demotion, it will probably have to wait till I’m getting ready to do all the fixes at once for the book. Though I suppose I could just change Jiggawatts hair back to the beginning of the fight. I mean, she could have gotten her hair done before her family thing tonight.
I may need to revisit Jiggawatt’s 6 rank on the cast page. She’s turning out to be pretty powerful. I think I put her at 6 largely because she’s a one trick pony. She’d have a bad time against someone heavily resistant to lightning… but, with the “darkning” that really opens up her options. I actually asked about this on a Reddit science thread, and the consensus was that positrons would behave exactly like electrons. You could arc them, store or generate them in chemical batteries, transmit them down wires etc… assuming of course that the chemical batteries and wires were comprised of antimatter. It does make me wonder what would happen if matter was struck with positron lightning. The electrons in the matter would be annihilated, leaving behind a pile of highly charged and unstable gamma irradiated protons and neutrons (I’m guessing.) I’ll have to think about what impact that will have on the comic. I suspect my solution will either be “Holy shit Jiggawatt that’s dangerous! Never use that again!” or “Something about living matter destabilizes the positrons, limiting their effectiveness” which I don’t want to do because it’s such a trite comic booky excuse, but otherwise… jeeze, Jiggawatt may well be one of the most dangerous members of the team. Of course the hugely limiting factor here is the gamma radiation thing. Hulk jokes aside, gamma radiation is super bad m’kay? She wouldn’t realistically be able to use it often without significant risks to her own health. Dabbler’s going to have to have a talk with her.
On the other hand – half the stuff superheroes do should involve radioactive fallout, so I’m not sure why I’m picking on Jiggawatt. I mean… what the hell did Max shoot at that tank earlier? It wasn’t a shitload of C-4. And it wasn’t a thing that opened up a microsecond micro portal to the sun – that would be radioactive as balls. It’s that suspiciously clean energy that all superheroes use, from Cyclops and Havok to Starfire and anyone that shoots “energy.” Not lightning or fire or something identifiable. Just “energy.” Really Cyclops? You shoot kinetic blasts? What is it, red telekinesis? No, it’s “energy.”
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One possible explanation for the lack of massive boom is that the positrons in Jigg’s darkning react with the free electrons that accompany an electrical field… such as lightning, or the contained bio-electricity in muscles and nerves (including the brain). In which case the gamma ray photons are generated at the point of impact, and things get messy from there. I figure there’s going to be a handful left standing after this, and a lot of radiation burns.
As a side note, from my time trawling through Marvel comics and rpg systems, Cyclops’ optic blasts have always been a form of solar-charged KINETIC energy, or pure force, instead of the “laser vision” a lot of people keep calling it, and the red colour is due to the red-shift that the beams cause as they pass through the intervening space. What always got me was how the kinetic force was never able to blow his shades off… Yeah, ruby-quartz was able to stop the blasts, but it still should have required some form of anchoring (the visor, I could understand, the glasses, not so much).
Considering the glasses and specially visor are made of ruby-quartz, it may be possible that “solar-charged kinetic energy” is their natural state, read what the blast are he when DOESN’T focus them through the medium of the lens, that might explain the two different takes of his optic blasts, the “laser” and “force” aspects.
It HAS been shown in the past that the visor can adjust to Scott eye movement/reflex, a specially telling case ocurring in that fight with Nefaria that resulted in the first Thunderbird’s death. Also, in the 80s comics at least, he was frequently shown lifting the glasses when throwing an optic blast, what would be consistent with the idea of the visor allowing him to things in ways he would not be naturally able to.
I’m betting there are at least a few holes one could punch in that explanation with little comic book research, but it’s what i could come up with that sorta works.
most basic explanation I have is similar to supes red sun /red glasses stop the charging of his powers so almost no blast leaking out to take the glasses off or small enough that he can hold the charge back releasing it when it wouldn’t be noticed
I don’t know if this is canon, but I think I remember being told that the lens in is visor was in an almost liquid crystal state, so he could thin or thicken it out with the control. And that was what allowed him such fine control over the focus and intensity of the blasts. But even at the most open, there was still some filtering effect. Thats why when cyclops wants to go all out, he takes the mask off completely. See https://www.comicvine.com/cyclops/4005-1459/forums/cyclops-full-power-755106/ for an example.
I’m curious as to what would actually happen if you shot lightning at positrons, is it alright if I submit it as a question to xkcd’s What If?
No complaints here. I still wonder what would happen if the New Netherlands group on Mars decided to throw a buckets worth of sand at the Earth….. Really really fast.
With proper context, your question might be more interesting… Perhaps something with hit altitude lightning?
assuming they could HIT the Earth from that distance, i believe the most we’d get would be a very pretty meteor shower. unless you are talking about a RELATIVISTIC bucket o’ sand… then we’d have a bit bigger one, probably something like whatever it was that may have hit Tunguska, Siberia 30 June 1908 (ignoring the crashed alien ship theories) as the mass of a bucket of sand isn’t really that big in the scheme of things that go bang! in the universe…
NO! Red Cape has a skull mask?! UGH! why would you do that?! It looks so bad! You could have gone with just straight shadow under the cowl instead and it would have looked so much better.
Also “holy crap positrons” blah blah blah. Seriously though the skull face looks terrible. I disapprove of that design choice.
Red Cape’s mix ‘n match color scheme indicates not much sense of style anyway. A skull mask just ices the the cake. He better make with some impressive power display or he’s gonna get the Arc Light handle of Poseur.
Supper Powers do not equate to having a sense of fashion, let alone good taste.
As one of those people with no real sense of fashion or “style”, I’d likely be dressed in my sweat pants due to the comfort.
After all, if I can take a cruse missile to the chin, to I really care what you puny mortals think of my pants?
Gah,….Super Powers.
Not powers of super cooking….
Having supper powers would be awesome!
“This steak is really tough and stringy. Fortunately I have the solution! Go, go Supper Powers! Mmmmm… Yummy!”
Doctor Manhattan. Now THAT guy had a sense of style.
Isnt he the guy who casualy slapped Concertia away after Math sendt her flying? I think when you can swat away a big stonewoman you are allowed poor fashion sense. Who would want to tell him that he dress like a clown? XD
Ok maybe I should clarify: When I say “design choice” I mean character design. I am disagreeing with DaveB’s decision to make that character look like that. I think it looks totally unappealing and clashes terribly.
This would have been infinitely better: https://stoners.com/store/image/39m3c/Costume_Masks_Black_Hidden_Face_See-Thru_Mask.jpg
I like this guy design. The skullface is a classic super villain design and the red runic cape and cowl give him a “Red Wizard of Thay” feel. It may not be what you think is a good super villain design, but at least we all know by his look alone that he is bad.
I Dub him Dr. Voodoom.
I like as posted above – ‘Budget Skeletor’
That is a cool name
That’s what I was thinking–that he’s basically a retread of Skeletor. He appears disgruntled by events. If that’s because the supervillains aren’t working out as well as he’d hoped, that means the good guys are winning. Yay!
Umm, no, was liking the name “Dr. Voodoom”, not that bollocksy bogus ‘Budget X’ that is going around like a viral herpes
So? Dave drew a character with a gaudy sense of fashion. It fits Red Cape’s arrogant attitude perfectly. And has everyone laughing behind his back. Which fits the generally light mood of the story.
So, based on the last few comics Glowbug’s bolts shout out the names of eastern European cities and Jiggawatt’s bolts shout out the names of old-school adventure games.
As for the matter/antimatter reaction here, obviously we need to get her a set of Dilithium crystal bracelets in order channel the energy properly. (either that, or a flux capacitor).
If Dabbler has any of her web grenades left, She should shoot one at either of the combatants pronto.
SHOOT JIGGS!!!
Oh, you mean with the web-gun, well, shoot her anyway
Guesticus! off topic but you said something in the previous comic commentary about the other dude burned by heatwave coming back according to the author. I can’t find that satement anywhere can you link it to me?
Go back to that page, or the one after, DaveB mentioned it in his notes
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1361
that’s the page… it only mentions glowbug and the page after is about silent shadow/mach the knife.
Hmmm, thought he mentioned that they both weren’t out of the fight, unless someone can actually find that reference then it is simply a case of me being wrong
Positrons exist in the real world. They aren’t some exotic or theoretical particle. There aren’t massive quantities of them around, but there are some. For all intents and purposes they might as well be electrons. A lightning bolt composed of them would look identical to one composed of normal electrons.
Everyone knows that electrons and positrons that come into direct contact will annihilate each other, turning directly into energy. It happens now and then. Would that make a beam of positrons the ultimate destructive force? Nope. Not really any more destructive than a beam of electrons.
Keep in mind that when you’re looking at things at the sub-atomic scale, most of everything is made up of a whole lot of empty space. Remember that whole thing about Speedsters being able to vibrate their molecules and pass through solid objects? That’s because “solid” is sort of a whimsical term when you are dealing with normal matter at the pressures and temperatures found on Earth.
So a beam of positrons gets fired at something. What happens? Pretty much the same thing as would happen with a beam of electrons, except that positrons don’t tend to get involved in atomic chemistry, so there’s less disruption over all. That is balanced by the fact that there will be some electron/positron collisions. Yes, as oppositely charged particles, electrons and positrons will attract each other. The range of this effect is really short. Few will get close enough for it to happen.
Now, since Jiggawatt can create electrons, and positrons, and she can control them, she ought to be able to force them to collide as she sees fit. That means she can create quite a bit of Pure Energy™. That might be slightly more destructive than lightning. Still, her lightning power is only three dots. She might be able to make a blast that is the equivalent of a four dot power.
Yes, that sounds more realistic than “highly dangerous, all destroying anti-matter ray”.
As “user” calculated the released energy is equivalent to a 6kg TNT bomb but I think it’s a lot less because Glowbug and Jiggawatt aren’t throwing around massive amounts of lightning, the charge of theirs is probably just a fraction of a “real” lightning strike.
Jiggawatt isn’t going to become much more powerful because of her “darkening”. It’s a neat trick but unnecessary. She can do anything that falls into the lightning category, so she can manipulate electricity and probably direct the flow of it wherever she wants. In a way she’s her own greatest weakness, a lightning rod.
What I am trying to say is, Jiggawatt is showing off here. She’s fully immune to anything Glowbug can do and she can redirect GB’s lightning – there is no reason to use positrons. Even if she can’t aim anymore, she could ground any charges or redirect them straight up in the sky.
Jiggawatt should have informed Maxima about her injuries and asked for evac. Staying in the fight when you lost some control over your powers is unprofessional.
Jiggawatt has done a couple of things to suggest that her generation capacity is far in excess of a normal lightning bolt. Namely, cutting through concrete and destructively melting pieces of a tank in one bolt.
He redid his math it’s the equivalent of 12.2 lb of TNT. Still a world of hurt your bulletproofs might be the only survivors if someone doesn’t act fast.
I did the math based on the apparent volume of the beam, it came out to a lot more than 12 pounds of TNT.
I’m not a lightning expert, so I’ll assume I did something wrong, but what did I do that would account for a difference of multiple orders of magnitude?
12.2 lb are roughly 6kg. Well, actually 5.5kg. Metric units are the standard in the scientific field.
A beam of fast-moving electrons is beta radiation, and it actually is kind of harmful. They use it to kill cancer cells, for example. A beam of positrons would probably be at least as dangerous.
An electrical current is different from beta radiation. A lot of people seem to think that an electrical current is, “you put a bunch of electrons at one end, and those electrons flow to the other end”. It’s actually more like, “you put (and/or remove) a bunch of slow-moving electrons at one end, and those electrons push some *other* nearby electrons a little bit, which in turn push some more electrons further down, and so on”. The flow of electrons propagates very quickly, but the individual electrons don’t move nearly as much.
That’s why insulators work. A conductive material has loosely-bound electrons that can “hop” from atom to atom, or ions that can move in a fluid, or something like that, while insulators don’t have (many) mobile charged particles. If electrical current were based on electrons shooting through the space between atoms, then insulators wouldn’t be much of a barrier at all.
I admit it is always nice to be reminded Dabbler’s Really Smart. :)
Dave, I’mma save you a bunch of work – make JW’s hair white again. Sure, she “looks like Storm” (I never thought so) but more importantly, she looks much better with white hair than gold.
I agree, the white hair looked better
I’ll add my vote to this. Even though I did see the Storm link, I thought it was extremely apt for Jiggawatt, and the white hair looked a lot better with her dark skin, I thought.
Ditto, not to mention she uses dreads AND has actual pupils most of the time…
Combining hair and lipstick color is a little too silly, though superladies of funky hair colors actually do that at least part of the time.
Maybe her gold hair can be amended to mean she is using Darkning, sort of a Warning *Positrons at work*
That could work: when she activates her Darkening her hair gets Goldening
but if you go with that logic then black (or that glowy purple of a black light) would be a better color to show the switch from matter to antimatter.
White hair got my vote too. Ok, she look a little like Storm but she still look, sound and act diffrent then Storm.
Im sure Marvel will let it slide. :P
agreed. The gold is tacky. Also the Skull face on red cape is tacky… you still have time to retcon that as well
I like that for that guy, though. He’s all like “I don’t care what people think, I’m wearing this.” Ultimate self-confidence for a supervillain.
Or else he just grabbed whatever came first to hand.
Got dressed in a hurry in the dark, as my Mom always said about my costume choices. Remember the early Kitty Pride X-Men appearances where she kept trying to design a costume?
Oh yes! I remember that one with the lightning bolt headdress and the roller skates! She wanted to call herself Sprite. Nightcrawler was about to say something very disparaging about that when Storm zapped him in the buttocks. Tee hee.
She did call herself ‘Sprite’, it’s still one of her ‘official’ codenames (or what ever they call those names)
Thought it was Dazzler who had the roller skates
Actual lightning has a very high current (figures vary, but somewhere between 1kA and 200kA) for a very short time. Sustained electric arcs generally have a much lower current.
Passing through air, a positron beam’s effect will be limited by the number of molecules it interacts with – if you have a ten meter beam with a 1 square centimeter cross section, that contains a liter of air, with a mass of about 1 gram. If you treat the air as pure Nitrogen gas, and assume that every molecule in that litre gets ionised once, then you’ll annihiliate about 0.000 02 grams of electrons releasing roughly 4*10^11 Joules of energy or about 100 tons of TNT – 10 tons of TNT (or about 0.6% of a Hiroshima bomb) per meter. That would represent a lethal radiation dose out to about 500 meters
On the other hand, if Jiggawatt is generating the postirons, that means that she is producing half the annihilation energy from somewhere, which probably limits her output to rather less than the output necessary to ionise a liter of air… Also, whatever she’s using to power the beam is capable of handling power levels comparable with the annihilation radiation from the beam, so it’s plausible that the power comes with a built in safety effect.
For that matter, her lightning form pretty much has to break conservation of mass-energy – otherwise her lightning form would have the energy of roughly a hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. I don’t care how good the power grid is – her traveling by wire would melt the wires…
And, based on the dialogue, they are MAINTAINING the lightning/darkening reaction. So if they can keep the amp levels that high, this gets insane fast. According to Wikipedia, a lightning strike lasts on average for 30 milliseconds. So multiply your number (which looks reasonable given your math) by 33 to get the wattage. Or, given your apt use of TNT, we have 33*6.1=201 tons of TNT/second. While this is mostly radiation, it will still superheat the atmosphere and ground nearby, so there still should be a pretty powerful explosion as stuff converts to gas then plasma. The entire group of heros/villans/civilians (except Sydney) have, I’m fairly sure, absorbed a lethal dose of radiation while being blown away. And that’s just the first second. It gets worse as they talk. If anyone besides Achilles/Sydney is going to survive, Jiggs or someone else needs to have secondary powers that make Maxima’s primary abilities seem almost wimpy by comparison.
Also, given my posting name, I should mention that I only have a bachelors in Physics, not a doctorate.
Giggawatt should really try thematic copper hair, if that’s still up for grabs. Or get some fashion sense of not coloring what she ties her hair with like her hair is, it’s tacky. (but then, maybe that is her personality … we will see)
*goes to get some gamma exposition*
And I hope I get a cool mutation!
P.S.: wondering if the hearing loss, partially or not, will stick around at least a few chapters. I kinda yawn at supers who keeps dying every 2 books only to return to 100% full health without even their hair messed up or PTSD… usually within 20 pages. A little sense of persistent damage as a possibilit makes EVERY fight a little more dramatic.
It seems like her sense of balance is also affected, so she took a severe hit from the sonic attack. It’ll take a while for her cochlear cilia to grow again, I’d say.
Actually, gamma radiation is pretty much harmless in most cases. If radiation were cookies, you would put the beta cookie in your pocket (betas are shielded by cloth), the alpha in your hand (shielded by skin), eat the gamma cookie (cause you’re gonna get it anyway and it’s not really shielded by anything), and throw the neutron cookie as far from you as possible…toward your enemies. That one will mess you up. As far as particle pair annihilation goes, I can only say how that works in reactors…not superpowers (much less experience with super powers.).
Sorry, but Gamma radiation is an “ionizing radiation” (like Alpha and Beta particles).
However, while Alpha will be stopped by your skin, if you will still get burns. Anything from a sun burn to burning your skin off, depending on the strength of the radiation source.
Beta is a bit worse, but more like getting a sun burn (or more serious burns, depending on the strength of the source) but this time you get burned through your cloths, unless they are foil lined.
Keep in mind that this is assuming surface exposure for both Alpha and Beta particles, you can still breath that crap into your lungs and effectively cook your lungs.
The average human being can’t take in oxygen through cooked meat.
What sucks about Gamma radiation is that it takes a LOT of material to effectively shield a person from the radiation. So you don’t have to worry about not breathing it into your body, it simply punches on through and cooks anything in it’s way.
The damage is a more diffuse, the same with Neutron exposure, as it kills off cells due to DNA damage. So it can be thought of as “less damaging” as it’s spread all over the body.
Sure there may be no obvious wounds, per say, but if 50% of the cells in your body are dying, they’ll take you along with them.
Poor Jiggawatt, she reminds me of this SMBC comic:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2305
& this scene from the Venture Brothers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLSNZWilLAU
The fact that Jiggawatt can create positrons has made her a target for every energy producer in the world. F*uck discovering fussion. If I was a mad scientist I would just strap a brainwashed Jiggawatt to my generator, then find a way to clone her to power my robot army.
Yep, Vegas odds are on Jiggawatt dying alone in a stupor in some power generator. And when she burns out she will likely be thrown on a heap of clones like a burnt out light bulb. Kind of a sad way to go.
Problem is that someone who can control and create antimatter would need to be VERY well conditioned, or she’d blow up your facility (also she can turn to lightning, so good luck strapping her down)
I imagine it would be hard to brainwash her, but an endless supply of clean, free energy is awefully tempting
What defense does Jiggawatt have against people with good intentions? As they point out in SMBC, the most valuable use for Superman would be to turn a crank. By providing clean, free energy, Jiggawatt would probably provide the power for half the USA. And then she could travel from 3rd world nation to 3rd world nation providing free energy. The lives saved and poverty eradicated by her actions would would be many, many more magnitudes greater than the lives and property saved by crime fighting.
I was a villian, I would send a few good guy dupes asking Jiggawatt to come power the powerplant on her free time. She would power a powerplant for a few hours and we would donate the savings to a charity of her choice. From their my dupes would slowly guilt her into giving more and more hours. Then next would come the studies to examine how her powers work (which is a cover for the cloning program.
The problem here being that most nations don’t have facilitys to harvest lightning being fired directly at them for a long time.
Let alone facilitys to safely harvest the energy released by matter-antimatter annahilations. That would need to be custom made, which would probably be more expencive than the result would bring in.
The best thing she could probably do is help scientists study antimatter. There is still alot we don’t know, and many of those things can only be studied if we’d have acces to more than a few particles at a time (which Jiggawatt can make)
Only problem I’ve had so far with the new site is I have to right click the image link and “reload image”. Otherwise pages load quicker than Speedy Gonzales after three cups of joe.
OK I’m using Chrome OS, and I can’t see the Who’s Who either. Doing a quick glance at the page code (I love that tool) shows only the box and the text graphic for the title, so I think Dave forgot to annotate it.
It’s there now
ONE GRAM of antimatter could create an explosion comparable to the Hiroshima bomb. I think Dabbler’s opponent in the last panel is realizing that, whether there’s a titanic explosion or a gradual release of radiation, running away is futile. And if that beam hits Glowbug…Holy Shit!
That would make Jiggawatt a ‘bug’ zapper.
Hahaha, good one!
First post ever, so congrats to DaveB for an excellent comic!!
Actual cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning is funnelled from the clouds to the ground through a branching plasma channel with very low resistance (this is the pattern that we see). Free charged particles travel through this channel (both downstream and upstream), but unless you are near one of its legs, you’re safe.
So, concerning the question “shouldn’t the positrons generated by Jiggs annihilate her and everything in sight”, we could easily hypothesize that her powers allow her to control the formation and shape of such highly conducting plasma channels, effectively insulating herself (and her surroundings) in the process. In particular, since there is a common plasma arc connecting Glowbitch and Jiggs, all free charged particles (electrons, positrons, charged ions, etc.) will travel through that arc and possibly annihilate each other, without turning Jiggs into an antimatter-bomb.
The energy of an average lightning bolt is in the order of a gigajoule (1 billion joules) but, as has already been pointed out, it also lasts only a few milliseconds. Even if the lightning battle consists of short, rapid-fire arcs, Dabbs’ concern is more than justified: a sustained annihilation flow like that could cause very many problems, very quickly. I guess supers have less to fear than ordinary humans, but even Sydney’s shield might not suffice – since, as a certain rules lawyer pointed out at the beginning of the comic, “[a photon beam], made of light by the way, would go right through it” ;)
So change her hair to look like Frostbite?
Maybe keep her hair the way originally envisioned :) After all, there’s lots of blue skinned heroes. Wetworks had a full team of gold skinned heroes before Max came around.
Another comic update and the Villain Tally continues in V1.5!
Reminders:
+ My original post of this list and its subsequent commentary can be found HERE
+ Things that I specifically want verified will be marked with this symbol: *(?)*
+ This list is still a work in progress, please feel free to make corrections to where I am missing info.
+ I am not trying to make a villain bios and powers wiki, but I do want suggestions on NAMES! Community suggestions in replies to these villain tally posts will be considered for future iterations of the list!
Changelog for V1.5:
+ Active/Defeated status and “last seen” page # updated as usual
+ Other minor formatting edits
+ Fixed the broken links
And now the tally…
Active (In rough order of 1st appearance)
1) Male in blue suit and fedora with white eye makeup/tattoos [1st appearance: #186]
——Last seen standing under the tree in #231
2) “Hex” [1st appearance: #202]
——Last seen escaping through the bushes in #229
3) Blond Female in orange top&headband and teal jeans [1st appearance: #202]
——I want to name her “The Blond Bombshell” because of that headband logo
——Last seen “denied” by Halo in #232 (hair color mistake)
4) Green haired male [1st appearance: #204]
——Last seen Giving orders to the villains in #230
5) Blond female with gray visor and blue eye makeup/tattoos [1st appearance: #204]
——Last seen in #230
6) “Red Cape” [1st appearance: #209]
——Last seen missed by lightning (and having terrible fashion sense) in #234
7) “Jabberwokky” [1st appearance: #213]
——Last seen fighting Math in #220
8) “Glowbug” [1st appearance: #219]
——Last seen squaring off with Jiggawatt in #233
9) Shirtless Caucasian Male with zebra mohawk [1st appearance: #229]
——I want to name him “Zebra Hawk” for obvious reasons
——Last seen standing next to Dabbler in #234
10) Caucasian Male in bluejeans and black shirt [1st appearance: #229]
——Last seen dodging Jiggawatt’s lightning in #229
———————————————————————————
Defeated (In rough order of presumed defeat)
1) Blue-haired Meat-head [1st appearance: #200]
——Beaten by Anvil in #202
2) Crystal-handed (Apparently naked) Meat-head [1st appearance: #202]
——Backhanded by Maxima in #203
3) “Shadow Boxer” [st appearance: #205]
——Beaten by Halo in #206
4) Caucasian male wearing black shirt [1st appearance: #206]
——Choked out by Anvil in #206
——may be Defeated Villain 19 below pictured face down in #224 *(?)*
5) Spiky hair with yellow tuft Male [1st appearance: #207]
——Bean-bagged in the face by Shawn in #207
6) “Concretia” [1st appearance: #204]
——Beaten by Math in #209
——Headshot by Peggy in #216
7) Female in red costume with gymnastics ribbon [1st appearance: #204]
——Beaten by Achilles (launched by Maxima) in #209
8) Caucasian Male in white tank top [1st appearance: #210]
——Beaten by Math in #210
9) Black Male with fire knuckles [1st appearance: #210]
——Beaten by Math induced friendly fire in #210
10) Laser beam eyes [1st appearance: #204]
——Ameteur dentistry by Math in #211
11) “Lee Press-on Claws” [1st appearance: #204]
——Beaten by Halo in #212
12) Anvil’s 3rd bad guy [1st appearance: #212]
——Only torso with a light blue shirt, and belt in Anvil’s grip shown
——Beaten by Anvil sometime between #206 and #212
13) Male in navy blue shirt with Mohawk [1st appearance: #214]
——Pictured defeated on the restaurant floor in #214
14) Shirtless sweaty Black Male with braided hair [1st appearance: #219]
——Beaten by Heatwave in #219
15) Male in Blue vest [1st appearance: #219]
——Head-gripped by stalwart in #219
16) “Heavenly Sword” [1st appearance: #203]
——Defeated by Dabbler in #223
17) “Silent Shadow/Mach the Knife” [1st appearance: #219]
——Incapacitated by Dabbler in #220
——Defeated by Harem in #224
18) Partial shirtless torso and arm wearing black pants [1st appearance: #224] *(?)*
——Pictured defeated face down in the grass in the very bottom corner of #224
19) Caucasian Male wearing black shirt and camo pants[1st appearance: #224] *(?)*
——Pictured defeated face down in the grass in #224
——May be Defeated Villain 4 listed above *(?)*
20) Blond Male in red pants, yellow shirt, with hat [1st appearance: #226]
——Beaten by Mr. Amorphous in #226
21) Laser-burnt male in green Camo skinny jeans [1st appearance: #227]
——Hit by Friendly fire from Hex in #227
22) “Gauntlette” [1st appearance: #204]
——Beaten by Jiggawatt in #228
23) Caucasian Male with dark pony tail and green cloud legs [1st appearance: #228]
——Beaten by Jiggawatt in #228
24) Blond Male in overalls with orange energy lines [1st appearance: #228]
——Beaten by Jiggawatt in #228
25) Pair of legs wearing red pants with black greeves [1st appearance: #228]
——Thrown into the asphalt by Maxima in #228
26) Caucasian male with yellow shirt, green pants and fire hair [1st appearance: #204]
——Beaten by Halo in #229
27) “Boilerplate” [1st appearance: #226]
——Beaten by Maxima in #230
28) “Breakpoint” [1st appearance: #204]
——Beaten by Hiro in #231
29) Giant wearing Orange shorts and glasses [1st appearance: #204]
——I would like to suggest the name “Budget Hulk”
——Beaten by Hiro in #231
30) Blue crystal swordsman [1st appearance: #231]
——Awesome name suggestion of ”Blue Ice” drawn from O.B. Juan’s comment
——Beaten by Hiro in #231
———————————————————————————
Foreshadowed (In rough order of 1st appearance)
1) Deus [1st appearance: #130]
2) Vale [1st appearance: #130]
3) Demon Lord (“Screwball”) [1st appearance: #176]
4) Panel 2 [1st appearance: #186]
5) Panel 4 [1st appearance: #186]
6) Panel 5 Foreground [1st appearance: #186]
7) Panel 5 Background [1st appearance: #186]
8) Panel 6 [1st appearance: #186]
——————————————————————————–
Honorable Mentions (In rough order of 1st appearance)
1) That Flying rescue guy! [1st appearance: #7]
——Not a villain, but not on the team either
2) ”The Filmer” [1st appearance: #8]
——Technically a figment of Halo’s imagination, but I desperately want him to be real!
3) Lightning fist bar fight guy [1st appearance: #185]
——Decided not to hit that guy
4) Black construction worker [1st appearance: #185]
——Gave up his life of crime
5) “Nyah Nyah Can’t Hit Me Man.” [1st appearance: #193]
——”He doesn’t actually commit any crimes though, he just shows up during battles and annoys everyone. And I’m this (–] [–) close to making him canon.” –DaveB
Posative lightning does happen and is five times more powerful albeit at least twenty times less common.
Can anyone clarify if this is basically the same?
Could be false info, only repeating what I have not confirmed.
Different kind of thing, the lightning that you’re thinking of isn’t made up of positrons. Positive lightning has the potential charges distributed differently than normal cloud to ground – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Cloud_to_ground_.28CG.29
Haha Jiggawat went super sayan ( I think I spelled that right). Is her kameyamaha atack going to xetonate the whole parking lot. Also skull face needs to get his smug face into the fight. Unless he’s learning about the powers at play.
OK – here is a bit of chemistry review. Positrons are essentially positively charged versions of electrons. That means that, surrounded by antimatter, they would act in ways identical to electrons.
HOWEVER, things with opposite charges attract, meaning that positrons would be attracted to electrons, and thus annihilate despite the empty space in an atom. Furthermore, as positrons annihilate the electrons in an atom, what remains is a positively charged nucleus. This positively charged nucleus would not be able to form chemical bonds until they regain their electrons. Thus, firing a beam of positrons would split up air molecules into positively charged oxygen and nitrogen nuclei which would then spread their positive charge to the surrounding air that HAS NOT YET BEEN HIT by simply stealing electrons away from regular air molecules.
While the beam of electrons fired by Glowbug could easily counteract this effect by providing additional electrons into the system, ensuring that atoms regain electrons as quickly as they lose them, there would be a large amount of Gama-radiation left over. That Gama-radiation would, in addition to creating radiation burns on characters, ionize the air surrounding the point of contact between the beam of positrons and the beam of electrons. The end result would likely be a semi-stable polarized ball of plasma, held in place by attraction to the positron beam on one end and the electron beam on the other.
Since atoms negatively charged by the electron beam would try to migrate to the area with the positron beam, and atoms missing electrons would try to migrate over to the electron beam, they would often neutralize each other about the meeting point of the two beams, becoming regular hot (very hot) air. That very hot air would rise, and give off energy in the form of light, creating a flame-like effect surrounding the ball of plasma.
The way it was explained to me, while particles with opposite charges do attract each other, the range at which this effect occurs is measured in angstroms. It is actually somewhat difficult to get a free electron and a free positron to collide. This has been one of the problems in studying matter/anti-matter annihilation.
Stable molecules have no net charge. Positrons won’t strip electrons away from most molecules unless they actually collide with them. Given that “solid” matter is almost entirely empty space, the odds are pretty long against this. It will happen, but not on as large a scale as you might think.
1) Jiggawat’s Hair – make that a minor power of hers. Let it change with her mood and energy levels. Right after a teleport or major power use, it goes white until she recharges. Same when she’s intentionally suppressing her power.
Gold could be when she’s actively seeking to gather in environmental excess energy (in an area with supers fighting around her there’s plenty of energy filling the air in one state or another.) Or when she’s using a sub/power of hers.
Suggest her hair move up and down scale of spectrum with her mood, energy state, and control level. i.e. if she’s really hurt (or really really drunk) her hair could start to glow near ultraviolet/purple range and this is when she can toss disintegrating bolts or disrupt organic electron flow in cells/bodies or brains…even rewrite them. Her hair might be a warning. Neon Blue and she’s got her own personal electro-force field up and she glows like a blue neon light… don’t touch her. PINK and she’s tuned her discharge bolts and touch fields to affect certain neural chains only. (something Dabbler would love to test over and over and over…) It’s funny and would be a damn good stun ability…though naturally women would be more resilient to its lasting effects and repeated use…men, not so much.
This would let you change her hair as you felt like and just marry color and brightness to to the power’s visible effects. Thus her using Darkening was presaged by her hair being gold (harmed and in danger (yellow stop light level/ or amber warning light) and when she fires the Darkening bolt her hair should be changing to purple… also suggest the angrier she gets the more sparks and mini bolts and pops she discharges from her hair/body at random. Thus you can make her powers have an inherent weakness if the villains are clever enough to notice and figure out how it changes with her state and power levels and mood etc…which might take more than one combat to do. “She’s gold! Shield up your electronics, she’s pulling in power!” // “Oh Crap she’s gone Ultraviolet! It’s gonna get Ultraviolent” (or ultrafunky…She could just discharge the energy as Blacklight/UV field then. Neh?) If she has an area blast (AOE Electrical discharge) a nice Neon Green or Angry Red might presage it. Also this just could be the reaction to the hair relaxer and conditioners she uses (I mean she discharges electricity, surprising that her hair doesn’t look like Einstein’s after every shot. or when she’s powering up.)
2) Matter/anti-matter – depends on actual flow density (amps and anti-amps/ electron flow/sec^2) and percent neutralized (ie paired up) if she can contain the field to project it in a beam/shot/bolt along the opposite’s path. She can surely spread the neutralization aspect along path. (basically an energy beam is gonna become a force beam that’s highly charged with gamma and anti-gamma rays too.) there will be some reversal of energy to matter. So to minimize danger you could just create some exotic matter w/in the beam that will fall to the ground. (this stuff though when packed up together in a high density matrix would be unstable and one helluva power source rivaling uranium for energy density conversion…. It’s minor hand-wavium, but if she can control actual anti-particles (ie anti-electrons) the resulting photon pairing being forced together can create matter from wave particles (see forced photon matter pairing in google.) )
3) The solution to radiation density contamination is always dilution. Gamma’s are nasty, hard to stop and generally will affect the densest material most. Organics will be harmed at DNA levels and at higher energy fluxes basically cooked from shared energy transfer. Will there be Alpha and Beta rads too? Some. But if she can control anti-electrons (or create positrons) she should have some control of the event horizon (or she’d cook her own hands/body) – The annihilations won’t be additive or even culmulative as they happen along the beam’s path spread out. Lotsa minor pops releasing as heat/light and gamma rays. IF this is still hard to grasp, just make her send out electrons that have Anti-spin, but are still electrons (basically she’s changing charge to positive) then you’ll get electron pairing and slowing, but very little annihilation and rads.
4) Glowbug’s burns…like a really really bad sunburn, yes? To take her out all you’re really going to have to do is slap her on her back/bare skin where it’s red and the pain should do the rest. Just a regular backslap. Come on, who hasn’t had that happen to them when sunburned (second degree) and their one asshole friend or just the former part thinks it’d be funny. Or maybe you were the a-hole who slapped their burned buddy’s back/arm/chest?
(btw Navy Nuke here and Nuke Electrician and degree in Physic Engineering too- I could do the math and science-splain the power and results, but the writer in me says (BORING!) Just have her control extend to an event horizon that lets her control path/direction/density and effects w/in that area. If she can refocus the energy released (and use it to make up energy cancelled by the counter beam too) – she basically is changing her energy blasts to a force beam w/secondary rad effects. Though she probably needs to have her full mental faculties available (Not in her current state obviously) to create and control her bolt/beams at such fine levels.
This could also come under the TV-Trope (REVERSE THE POLARITY!) but actually be reversing spin state of matter so it counters it’s opposite. Effects can then be adjusted to best fit the story and as a writer that’s a better solution instead of being trapped in science and having to deal with secondary effects too. E=MC^2 if she can reverse that w/in her beam there will be interesting fallout from the pairings… and that takes A LOT of energy – like most of what folks sci-splained w/maths ( :P ) so dust (energetic dust, glowy dust, and unstable dust at that) falls to ground under the beam… (what happens to it after, clean up and uses…well that’s fun for you to use later in the story.)
But who is going to volunteer to slap Glowbooty on the backside? It’s not like there are any actual perverts on the team, right?
Math.
That would be Math. He’s busy.
And he would be too entranced to fight if Glowbug was wet……
Compared to what we’ve seen of Glowbug, Jiggawatt is more versatile. Even without her offensive capabilities her scouting via lightning is useful tactically. Plus we’ve already seen that Glowbug doesn’t have the best sense in the field what with the whole shooting lightning while in water thing. That would make her detrimental to a team effort that isn’t in the middle of the desert. These observations are somewhat important for the thoughts i had a bit ago, that being that even if Glowbug heard Dabs AND understood her meaning, there’s no guarantee that she can shut off her own lightning now that the reaction has started. if that happens then the soundest advice I have for the situation is to have Peggy take out glowbug. The bad side to that is that they’ll be using lethal force in their first team engagement and they’ll be using it against someone who isn’t presently using it against them. Bad PR with the civvies and really bad rep with the “villians” whom right now appear to mostly just be playing at being bad guys. So the “villians” of the world are likely to ramp things up against the government sponsored phychos.
If she did shut off her lightning, she would get fried by Jiggs’ Darkening
Okay, going to come back when the scientist convention ends (too many posts about stuff not terribly interested in :P)
Will say this though: STOP WITH THE “BUDGET X” CRAP, YOU ARE THE FURTHEST FROM BEING CLEVER AS IT COULD POSSIBLY BE!!!!! (that is aimed at the commentators, not DaveB)
Spoilsport. I was so looking forward to being named “Budget Guesticus”? =OP
Except, ‘Guesticus’ isn’t real
If Guesticus isn’t real, then to whom am I replying?
(Also, last time I checked, most of the people in this comic aren’t technically real either.)
It is a fake name used for me to comment online
So, IOW, it’s about as real a name as “Hulk”, “Skeletor”, etc.?
Less, both of those are actual names, ‘Guesticus’ is just fancy way of saying ‘Guest’ (couldn’t think of good enough throw-awy name at the time, and may have been watching something Grecian/Roman at the time, thus ‘Guest-icus’)
Panel 4: I think you meant “impugn” (which is pronounced the same but makes more sense in this context.)
if she uses the “darkening” what will happen will be basicly what tesla did in Sibera when one of is experiments failed big boom killing several people. and flattening the area in a half mile circle. lucky us this is a comic and my fav foul moth super hero is safe from that
if you’re thinking of the Tunguska event back in 1908, I’d like to know where you found that info, as that goes against anything “I’ve” ever seen concerning both Tunguska, and/or any Tesla conspiracy theories…
Actually, I’ve heard that before. Tesla was reputed to have built a “death ray” or something like that. After a huge explosion or some other similar disaster, he was found dismantling some equipment he claimed was a death ray, citing it to be too dangerous to ever be released among humanity. After his death, reconstruction attempts were supposedly made, but (luckily) never succeeded.
I don’t know how much of this is true, or if it is a complete urban legend, but yes, I too have heard this story about Tesla.
it wasn’t the “death ray” experiment it was the “free electricity for all” experiment
Okay… I’m not going to spend much time reading today’s comic because I don’t want to get radiation poisoning.
if you are reading this on an old-tech CRT monitor rather than a newer LCD or Plasma screen (ie the old tube type, heavy glass tv) yeah, then reading ANY comic is giving you a radiation dose…
So, is the problem that Jiggawatt’s about to blow them all up, or that she’s irradiating everything within several-mile radius? Or… yes?
I’ll answer you after I stop running.
So basically she can be a living Slaver digging tool?
Because the applications of just removing the electrons is messy enough, actually doing that through annihilation is even worse. She should basically be able to just make matter explode into clouds of unstable ions and irradiate anything left standing.
would you be referencing Niven’s “Tales of The Known Universe” race called the Slavers? if so what story did you read the in, as I’ve been trying to recreate my library of those stories and get a copy of all the ones he’s written and i don’t recognize that reference…
I just read the Ringworld books.
I’m sure I’m not the only one, but quick opionion here:
I liked Jigg’s hair WAY better as white! I don’t care if she ‘looked like storm’, storm doesn’t have the monopoly on darker skin with white hair. She looked good, and if yer gonna change it from white, yellow was NOT the color to go to. She looks like a dreadlockws Dennis Rodman now.
Best of all, antimatter lightning is SCIENCE!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110111-thunderstorms-antimatter-beams-fermi-radiation-science-space/
Now that sure is interesting
I wonder how it works
I see no negative outcomes from this for two reasons.
1) In comics, Gamma rays are always good for you. They give you nifty new powers.
2) In sci-fi (I’m talking to you TNG) radiation is never harmful until it reaches a full 100 % dosage. Having the ship’s computer say ‘exposure at 90% lethal dosage” and then shutting down the cause of
the radiation enables everyone to walk away totally unscathed.
However, we are currently in the D.B. universe. Your results may vary. See a doctor if symptoms such as green skin, sudden weight gain, or an inability to talk in complete sentences occur.
Alternate Panel 1 Dialouge :P
Shao Kahn: Hmmph, I left Outworld for this?
I think the outfit is more Dr Strange with a little Taskmaster thrown in.
Sorry to say Dave, but you may have another character design comparison to deal with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dr_Strange_by_Steve_Ditko.jpg
Pet scans stand for positron emission tomography, fyi.
Also I don’t think the surface of the sun would be particularly radioactive. Sure lots of radiation but it’s not the same thing
That should be “IMPUGNES my lightninging”, not “impunes”.
Art goof in panel 3 – just like last page, the holes in Glowbug’s costume aren’t visible from the side.
As for Jiggawatt’s hair, I’d say keep it white – it looks better.
As for the positrons… well, everything I’d want to say has already been said.
I would love to see what’s under that mask being pure soul-absorbing darkness or something.
“Maxima’s sudden and unexplained demotion”
Wait, what? No one in the comments is being surprised by this, so am I the only one who didn’t notice it? When was she demoted? WHAT HAPPENED?
Not the only one, so I just want to add: And When Did It Happen?
I think she went from listed as full Colonel to Lt. Colonel. And that was BEFORE she nuked the test grounds in front of the press.
Indeed, I just saw that in the comments of another page. So she wasn’t demoted in-universe, it was just a retcon. That’s fine.
Positron beam?!? Whoooo boy, that’s going to be problematic…
1) Your regular lightning blaster fires off electrons, which are easily pulled from the environment. They only need to create a strong enough electric field to start pulling electrons from atoms in the air and accelerate them towards their foe. A positron beam would require the creation of the positrons first, which is going to require pulling a LOT of energy from somewhere to create them. And you can’t just create positrons from nothing: you need to conserve charge and lepton number, meaning for every positron she creates, she has to create an electron, so at best only half of the energy she uses is going to create positrons.
2) A regular lightning blast is somewhat self-focussing: as the electrons accelerate and strike atoms in the air, they will ionize the air and create a plasma of electrons (which will be accelerated and become part of the blast) and positively charged heavy ions. These positive ions will tend to attract the electrons somewhat, keeping the beam focussed. However, a positron beam will anihilate the electrons in the air, reducing the number of positrons in the beam while still leaving a positively charged heavy ion plasma. The positive ions will tend to disperse the positrons, making the beam less focussed as it travels. Net effect, the beam will initially be weakened by matter/anti-matter reactions, then will become stronger but more difficult to aim due to electrostatic repulsion.
3) The annihilation of the electrons in the air will, as others have mentioned, create pairs of gamma rays which, thanks to the conservation of momentum, will travel mostly in the direction the beam was going, but will scatter every which way. The gamma beams created from the electron beam/positron beam interaction will scatter in all directions roughly evenly, assuming they are traveling at roughly the same speed. If you could see gamma rays, it would look like a flashlight beam for a fraction of a second, followed by a camping lantern glow where the electron & positron beams cancel. A gamma source that strong will probably cause enough ionization of the air that you’d start to smell ozone in the vicinity. Also, although the human eye cannot normally see gamma radiation, people exposed to very high levels of radiation have reported seeing sparkles of light: some of the gamma rays can cause ionization in the eye, which creates little bursts of light as the ions recombine. Of course if you see that, you’re probably in trouble…
4) Any molecule struck by the positron beam would rapidly be blasted to atoms. Molecules are held together by the sharing of electrons. Destroy the electrons, and suddenly you have a lot of positive ions with nothing to hold them together. The electrostatic repulsion of the various nuclei would start to tear the molecules apart rather quickly. Whereas an electron beam is going to do most of its damage in the form of heating, a positron beam will start disintegrating matter on contact.
Let’s hope JW doesn’t quite understand the nature of her powers and rather than generating a positron beam she is actually generating electron ‘holes’: i.e. she is actually drawing all of the electrons out of the air in front of her and channeling them harmlessly into the environment around her. The lightning blast can still be countered this way as the incoming electrons get sucked up by the positive ions, giving off nothing more harmful than a bright light and instead of giving people radiation burns, they’ll just have a really bad case of static cling…
Speaking of powers… will we get to see Anvil’s secondary in this fight? (Preferably after she–and her clothes–have absorbed a lot of hits?) ;-)
If you mean her kinetic absorbtion, we already saw that
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1271
As for her clothes: I’m afraid this is a PG13 comic. So no
Not even as a vote incentive? Awwww….
It’s possible. DaveB made a Playboy image of topless Harems, so Anvil might be on the cards as well. Just not accessible by conventional comic, I suppose.
That was a valentines day special though
I didn’t mean *all* her clothes… tatters are could be sexier than full nudity anyway.
Probably already been said but: maybe the use of her power changes her hair color due to what spectrum of light she is using. Since her powers are photonic-ly linked, light/dark, this could affect the receptors of her body- after all, where does she receive this photonic particle energy? Maybe she absorbs ambient energy? Does that include sunlight? In which case having hair that stores energy could be a relator to her power reserve, the lighter her hair the more she has stored, in the same way normal hair denotes health. Her hair darkening could mean her energy level is running low, and thus, reflects a darker range of the color spectrum because of light absorption levels. But that’s just me…
Gamma Ray Bursts or GRB’s can destroy planetary life. Might have been the reason for the Ordovician Extinction. Lovecraftian abominations I have use such GBRs to annihilate their enemies made-to-order. How about that for Doomsday Machine? The Kutun or Kutullu are very good at aiming over thousands of parsecs…then generating the planet killing pulse.
Ordovician–Silurian extinction event
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ordovician–Silurian extinction event, the Ordovician extinction, was the second-largest of the five major extinction events in Earth’s history in terms of percentage of genera that went extinct and second largest overall in the overall loss of life.[1] Between about 450 Ma to 440 Ma (million years ago), two pulses of extinction, separated by one million years, appear to have happened.[2] This was the second biggest extinction of marine life, ranking below only the Permian–Triassic extinction event. At the time, all known life was confined to the seas and oceans.[3] More than 60% of marine invertebrates died[4][5] including two-thirds of all brachiopod and bryozoan families.[3]
[…]
Gamma ray burst hypothesis
A small minority of scientists have suggested that the initial extinctions could have been caused by a gamma ray burst originating from a hypernova within 6,000 light years of Earth (in a nearby arm of the Milky Way Galaxy). A ten-second burst would have stripped the Earth’s atmosphere of half of its ozone almost immediately, exposing surface-dwelling organisms, including those responsible for planetary photosynthesis, to high levels of ultraviolet radiation.[13][14][15][16] Although the hypothesis is consistent with patterns at the onset of extinction, there is no unambiguous evidence that such a nearby gamma ray burst ever happened.