Grrl Power #262 – No two ways about it, that’s an impressive punch
Maxima’s nose is probably in pretty dire shape about now.
I know some people were thinking this fight was disappointingly one sided, some thought it was cool she was kicking butt, and others were waiting for it to turn around. This page is obviously going to please one of those groups more than others. I definitely could have gone the direction of establishing Maxima as the big bad to cap the fight, and originally I had a scene like that in my head, not necessarily in the comic, but way before I was turning all my daydreams about these characters into a coherent story, but I have something a little more robust planned now, I think you guys will enjoy it.
Seriously you guys drawing rubble is so tedious. This page should have had way more as the top of the pylon shattered… really watching Mythbusters has shown me how dusty non-Hollywood fireball explosions are, so really the last panel should just be a big dust cloud with Vehemence’s fist and Maxima in silhouette, so I’ll just claim artistic license for leaving it as clean as it is. :) I have new respect for any artist that’s had to draw lots of rubble though, especially those debris strewn mangas. Granted most mangas have dedicated background people, I imagine that guy gets to do most of the scritchy rubble detail. I’ll be glad when this fight is over, but as you can tell, we’re not quite there yet.
In other random superhero news, the latest Wearing the Cape book is out, which has always been one of my favorite superhero novel series. It’s called Small Town Heroes. I’m not reading it yet as I just started another book but it’s definitely next in my queue.
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome which I can’t live without anymore, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Grinding pepper….hmmm. Just how domesticated is our Max? Can we get a special shot of her in an apron at some point, please? Oh, don’t get me wrong, keep her other clothes on too if you must.
Nahhh, naked apron or nothin’ :P
naked apron huh?
Title “I lost a %$#%@@!#%(@ Bet Okay? At least they didn’t specify who I had to server dinner to in this -lack- of get up.”
The Girls are being served lunch and Math hiding somewhere obvious using sneak sneak ninjitsu.
Each girls expression is its own gag. OF course Sydney doesn’t bat an eye lash and points at her foor and just says more.
That would be one hell of an incentive wallpaper. Especially if someone (Math) made the bet and posted a “Non-optional Cosplay Dinner with Boss Lady” sign outside the private dining room. Suggest Heatwave is naive enough to “dress up” for dinner with the boss.
Have Anvil standing by door glaring out, daring anyone to try to get past her as a bouncer. (KE absorbtion is great that way as is her size.)
no, grinding Pepper is Tony’s job.
(ba dum, tsshhh. I’ll be here all week folks)
anyway.. I just want someone to make the suggestion.. just for the look on max’s face.
I also want to see Maxima in a dress, apron, and doing Suzy Homeaker (♥□♥)
I can see doing it for the look on Max’s face, but I can’t actually picture it. It feels wrong. Like putting a tutu on a piston.
Max vetoed the uniform dresses, although I can see her in jeans, a silk shirt, and one of the Dr. McNinja aprons with the caption “This Sh*t’s Gonna Be Delicious.” Someone gets her the apron as a Secret Santa gag gift sort of thing, only to find out that Max enjoys cooking.
Why not? Everyone’s gotta eat. I’m the one who knows how to cook here, and I teach our caregivers American dishes.
Well wearing nothing except the apron is pretty much the hole idea now isn’t it?
But yes, I agree.
I thought the apron was optional?
No, not an apron. Definitely the Marilyn Monroe on a grate with her
skirt flying up shot. Much better for Max.
Episode 5, “The pepper strikes back”.
A sequel to “Salt Wars”?
Return of the Jalapeño?
Attack of the Cloves?
Revenge of the Sage?
The Paprika Menace?
A New Hops
The Emmentaler Strikes Back
There, finished the set.
Alternate title considered for The Paprika Menace: The Ghost (Pepper) Menace
I don’t think Star Wars crossovers will ever get old. It just keeps happening Thyme & Thyme again…
Definitely bad thumb placement in that punch. Owch.
When you’re nigh invincible, you punch how you want, dagnabbit.
I wonder how someone like Maxima is able to receive medical attention. I guess she can choose where her powers are assigned, so she can reduce her armor so that her nose can be reset, and the doctor on staff with the magic powers can help her heal faster.
Holy crap, he dug through several dozen meters of pillar quickly enough for her not to notice (implying a single punch through the pillar or super-speed) and still had enough force behind it to actually damage her!
I took it as her grinding the pillar down into him. Smashing it in the process, and putting herself in his range. Seems most comments haven’t so maybe I’m wrong
No, I think you’re right.
Dave ended today’s comic too soon. He cut off the last panel where V bursts through the rubble with a Kool-Aid Man yell of “Oh Yeah!”.
*looks for the “like” button*
*doesn’t find it*
Oh; right…
+1 = like button
It’s better than like: you have to make the effort to post :D
Some peppers do fight back. Try grinding dried Bhut Jolokia. Just saying from personal experience….
Yeah, peppers DO fight back…Like they helped Sydney’s fight in panels 4 & 5 way back:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/241
It’s also the way onions fight back when you try to cut them…
Big surprise, in the end Maxima will find out there is noone able to stop her and turn to the dark side :-)
Hail Maxima, Baby!
The padawan shall surpass the master, and kick her @$$, if need be.
She tried her (Dabbler that is) Sleep Spell on him and no go. Not powerful enough.
But she didn’t try her “LUST” aura. He’s male enough (stomp avoidance proved that fact) …
I can imagine Vehemence standing there jaw hanging down and going “Buh…buh…buh…pants too tight.” and next frame in secure hospital math is in a bed next to him…
Shrugs with a han solo grin, “Looks like we’re gonna be here for a while, so…tell me what you saw…in great detail…take your time.”
He’s “pepper”? This sounds like a job for Sydney Scoville Jr. mild mannered super heroic Halo by day, Captain Capsaicin by night!
From Wikipedia: The spiciness of black pepper is due to the chemical piperine, not to be confused with the capsaicin that gives fleshy peppers theirs. And the stuff that gets ground up in a pepper grinder is black pepper
Its more of a theme guideline than an actual rule…
But it might be amusing to have a pepper powered super heroine who’s one weakness was Black Pepper. (My child, the green, the red, the yellow and even the white will be your strength but the Black will grant you no powers and no peace… )
Thought you said “Captain Capuchin” at first :P
Between the shield and her antics she will always be at risk for being called “Super Monkey Ball” and variants.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Unless you are Nyaa-Nyaa Man.
V’s unofficial superpower now includes ridiculously precise digging. As for why it did not fall apart yet, it’s simply V’s speed going faster than the beam can fall apart. So OUCH indeed, Maxima.
P.S.: When will characters refer to Vehemence as “V” as we do? That’d be like an ascended meme or something. That’d be cool!
They met him like a couple minutes ago. ;)
Vehemence living up to his name! I know you probably were enjoying letting Max curb-stomp the pretentious bastard, DaveB, but it’s always good to see the Big Bad has some fight left in him after all of that. Now I’ve no clue how this is going to go down. :D
Halo, power up the main cannon, raise the shields and prepare to take him out. Shield all friendlies in the area. And then let him have it full blast at point blank range.
Go Vehemence! I know he’s not likely to walk away from this fight at this point (taking what Max hits you with and continuing to stand is NEVER good for your health) but I’m glad he at least put Maxima on her heels.
Vehemence Punch. Brought to you by GameStop.
Seriously, if he lives through this, he needs to get an endorsement or something.
BY JOVE! I do believe that just might be his plan.
Quick flash to V holding up a brand name power drink. “For when you really need that extra boost!”
I am left wondering if Sydney’s unknown orb comes in here. If that’s the case then all our speculation will be off target. I kind of feel since she is the heroine that it will be her that deals with V.
She could do the strategy thing with the team again. A little team building would be nice this early in the comic. Its unfortunate that Maxi would be too busy to join in the discussion though as having Sydney keep coming up with group strategy this early might cause some drama between the “leader” and the one people start looking to for what to do in problem areas…
However it happens I would like to see some team action taking him out.
She’s not the heroine, she’s just the Narrator
I call that the luckiest punch in the universe…
You miss 100% of the punches through a steel-reinforced concrete pylon that you don’t take.
OR was it?
Wouldn’t it be easier to just make a palette of rock shapes, throw it into a Photoshop brush, and then just fill them in with colour?
You know, in case you ever need to draw flying rubble again in a superhero comic.
Yeah I do that a little bit, Manga Studio 5ex has brushes you can set up with X number of images and you can set it to rotate and random so it doesn’t look too mechanical, but even with that, too much of it is a little distracting I think.
Okay, that’s actually really, really impressive! Like, seriously, this is why I like superhero stuff: massive epic battles like this!
Have just one word for this page (not counting the preceeding words): YUSSSS!!!! :D
Maxi’s face in panel 4: she seems to realise something isn’t right, but isn’t sure just what it is yet
Panel 5: oh, that’s what it was
Panel 6: “Dammit! Nob agaim!”
Starting to feel like this fight is going to be about how far Max can be pushed before things are on a wartime footing.
You mean they aren’t already?
She still seems vaguely interested in taking him alive. Though perhaps that would make wartime sense if we see him as a rare asset to be subverted.
Trying to grind a guy like pepper is a strange way to try and take em in alive.
If it wasn’t for all the squishies and public property about I guess she could have opened up with her strongest powers and made a small volcano on the sight of the cracked earth with her real strong right arm punchy or sucked the whole area into an implodey explodey ting! XD
And there’s the counter punch we’ve been waiting for!
By the time this fight is over Max’s nose is gonna resemble Lord Voldimort’s.
Arrrgh! I just imagined Voldimort in a purple wig!
…Cannot unsee…an image that…originates from…the inside…
As a side note, I used your amazon affiliation link today. Nothing big, just bought an $80 part. However, every little bit helps :)
Count me as one of those who was pleased. We seen so little of what V can do beyond the tanking and strength that I was hoping for a second wind. So, thank you very much.
FALCON PUNCH!!!
Um, with the way that Max’s powers work, even if it’s the same strength punch, just because she could take the punch before, when she was going hard on shielding, doesn’t mean she can do it now, when she almost certainly isn’t.
And what of her being around in the prologue? So her chances of surviving this are 100% instead of…99%–yeah, quite the difference in dramatic tension. And the fact that she still looks like herself just means that they were able to fix whatever he does to her–and with Dabbler’s tech, I’m sure they can fix quite a lot.
I know her powers allow her to max out a power set. But it would be interesting to see just what her limitations are in that area. If she can only max out one power at a time, or not max out one of she is able to use another.
Also just because she was in the porlouge doesn’t mean she can’t be hurt at all. Maybe she recently recovered from a bad fight that lest her in traction until just recently. We don’t know.
Yeah, the ‘prologue’ was at least 3 months from this fight
What the fuck? That was supposed to be a reply to Oberon.
This has been happening lately. I think it has to do with what device and program/app you are commenting with. Some others have mentioned it may not work correctly if you have certain functions like scripts turned off. I am using a standard PC based browser and it seems to work OK for me.
Hopefully the page master of the hosting service can give a set of guidelines of what is known to work in a side note somewhere. I would suggest people could start a thread in the forum link describing their hardware/software setup at the time of the fault to see if there are any commonalities. But you do actually have to register there to do that.
I am hijacking this comment place for an announcement :P
Some people may remember last year I posted a certain kickstarters link at each page of grrlpowercomic as long as the kickstarter lasted well I will not do introduction this time and just put this link lazily in here
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1589345686/valiance-online
Let’s say that V’s fist moves so quickly, the dust from the explosion hasn’t ‘poofed’ yet…that way, you’re not a ‘lazy’ artist, you’re a ‘scientifically-accurate’ artist. :)
Also…SUPER excited about this turn of events. Vehemence may not be as properly invincible as Achilles, but he’s pretty damn tough…stoked to see what’s next.
One thing about the standard super hero fight format? Its stupid.
The standard format is either massive destruction for pages that really accomplishes nothing, that then ends because its gone on long enough, or the wrestling fight; the bad guy is winning, then the good guy rallies and wins.
Fights don’t tend to work that way. You can have an evenly matched fight that goes on for a long time, slowly grinding down, those do happen (which I guess could be the senseless destruction for pages thing). But typically in a fight (whether a military battle, boxing, or just a beat down) if you start to lose, you’ll probably continue to lose unless some outside force changes the equasion.
Unless appearing to loose or putting out a weak force at first was part of your strategy for the start of the battle.
And that’s how you start on the road to Dragonball Z.
I’m starting to suspect that Max has been influenced mentally in some
way by one of the league of villians. Look at how she’s acting – instead
of being the general on the field, using her assets intelligently, she’s
gone seriously over the edge of professional behavior. Hammering
her opponent with a concrete column even after he’s down? It doesn’t
really sound like her. Also, look at her face as she’s doing it – she’s
enjoying it. That’s not healthy behavior for a professional soldier,
much less a leader.
It’s time for Sydney to get more actively involved. If Max was thinking
clearly, she’d have had Sydney form a force bubble around Vehemence,
one larger than he could reach across. With nothing solid to brace
against, there’s no way that he could hit hard enough to hammer through
it. Just hang him up in the air and be done with the fight. Max is clearly
sharp enough to figure this out, yet she’s indulging herself in pointless
self gratification. The only things that would explain that are that either
she’s:
A) Stupid and Vain – unlikely. We’ve already seen that she’s not.
B) Been Mentally Influenced – probably, and not in a good way.
or
C) Taking out her suppressed rage at an ex boyfriend or spouse.
Any thoughts??
D) Maxima’s just kind of a bitch.
Yeah, because she’s powerful and self-confident.
oops, meant powerful, self-confident, and female.
Dabbler and Anvil are powerful, self-confident and female, yet nobody’s calling them bitches regularly. Maxima’s mean-spirited, arrogant and kind of a bully.
People need to stop trying to portray every negative aspect of Maxima as a failing on the part of the observer rather than the character.
What? People think I have failings?? :-P
She seems to have enough love of violence to resonate with Vehemence so much he noticed it even before she got serious. So if that’s “negative” I’ll give it to you. Arrogant? Maybe a little in the specific area of her powers. But she knows and has gone out of her way to mention that others are her equal. She even called Dabbler her equal or near equal in the press conference suggesting she is just as proud of her team. But yeah she has some power pride but she’s not really nasty to good folk about it. So I don’t really get the “mean-spirited” part of your comment?
Since she has specifically chosen to find work that channels her abilities and violence at accepted targets and doesn’t attack anyone, even in a practical joking way so far, without being seriously provoked I don’t really get the “bully” part of your comment either?
She has strong pride in her abilities, according to her she only bragged about it as a strategy, but some people do consider that a sin so… does carefully channeled predilection towards violence and being proud make you a bitch? (take into account that she had every reason to believe she was VERY high up there power wise before this and if she really cut loose without fear of surroundings/people she might well still be a decent chunk above V… )
I agree with you about Maxima. She’s actually been shown to be pretty supportive of her teammates. Most of the hostility she’s shown towards people have been when they’ve crossed the line and pushed her in some way. Please note she is the boss with a military background and she’s been very lenient. .
She’s also feeling her way into a new role which entails an exceptional level of restraint compared to her old job along with the pressure of establishing the first official “Super” team. In the course of a surprise attack, exceptionally faulty intel (# of supers), and green recruits she has maintained situational awareness, apprehended almost every attacker alive, and managed to have a relatively light array of casualties (injury) from her own forces. She’s done very well up to this point and only engaged towards the end when it appeared she was truly needed down in the fight.
Has all her decisions been good? No but for the most part they’ve been good enough and soundly based on her extensive field experience.
I don’t know how many times this can be said. Sydney can only center the force field on herself. When she makes the bubble, she’s at the center of it. That’s three.
Prediction from post on page one…
Page 2: Check
“Hands Cpt. Obvious the Obvious Award.”
He’s obviously deserved it.
Yeah sure, but being obvious is not always easy to live up to…
He’s been hammered into the ground before and knocked around a lot. He usually just gets right back up. The grinding and pounding after he’s down is an attempt to finally KEEP him down. Which didn’t even come close to working ONCE AGAIN.
She definitely has a feel for the work. Its a common failing amoungst many humans. Also very hard to ignore that instictive beserk side of yourself when you have to hands on physically beat your opponent. She tried to channel it with her choice of careers and probably thinks she has a “handle” on it. But you are right, she may need to have a wake up call in this area, that may be what DaveB is trying to highlight when Vehemence felt a kinship between their emotions. I don’t think she is totally out of control here however just perhaps being too heavily influence by that part of herself. Maybe.
Sydney can’t form bubbles without herself inside them so that would be a death sentence.
A) Not really no.
B) Doubt it. At least not from the outside. Maybe by her mutant physiology.
C) Heh, no. O.O’ But that was a fun movie. :D
D) She gets into the thrill of violence too much especially when going fist for fist with a near equal. Common human failing.
I feel like it’s a bit early too have one of earth’s supposedly most powerful supers fail this hard in the very first real battle they’re having. Like, that’s the sort of thing you have happen a little down the line, not right off the bat…
Actually no, at the start makes more sense
I love you so much right now for saying that you have no idea.
?
Slightly reminiscent of this scene in the Honk Kong film Holy Weapon.
https://youtu.be/7RDWA4G9nok?t=9m49s
So, did anyone else notice that Vehemence’s glowing marks turned from blue to green? I think he might be getting stronger…
Hello! What have we here?! Max have glittery blood? Is this like a twilight thing, is there gonna be disco vampires?
Not glittery, just purpley-blue
HOLY MOTHER&^£% S”t!
Ouch. Right in the soft spot.
If you’re looking for special effects wizards who know their crud, the father and son team of the webcomic
3 minute max have some stuff they’ve recorded that may be of interest. Comic’s one of the better ones out there too!
https://www.3mm-crisisstrike.com/3mmcomic/activation/
The nose knows you know. At least Max´ does now.
And is it just me hearing a few extra “booms”, starting of slow and picking up pace as V goes through the pillar?
3 booms then a nose smash.
What did the five fingers say to the face?
Errr…Smash? At least that’s the word Dave used.
‘Dust minimization’. One of the great superpowers that many have, but few bother to mention. Like ‘Witty One-liner’.