Grrl Power #29 – Spice Grrl
I’m sure no one is surprised that Sydney isn’t traumatized by how hot the Asian “5” is. Like Lister, she’s apparently murdered all of her tastebuds over the years and needs to load up else complain about how flavorless something is.
I have to say I’m fairly pleased with the art in this one – full backgrounds and all. Of course it took me like 12 hours to draw. That watercolor mural in the background alone took about 2 hours by itself. I googled “Chinese Watercolor” and pulled a few samples for reference, then sat there experimenting with a few techniques while I watched NOVA on youtube. Working on a full comic like this makes me really appreciate even the most meager attempts at art, at least when the artist is doing backgrounds and getting perspective correct. Just about any comic book has a tremendous amount of man hours in it. You can’t really appreciate it until you plant yourself down and do it yourself.
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.
Maybe THIS is her superpower.
(The devil girl didn’t need a strapon.)
Well the joke being, as with the Ring of Fire one, that it hurts just as much at the other end.
Clever jokes, and true for some of the hot stuff, the strap on is a bit NSFW, but the drawing on the bottle is rather small so people should be fine.
Yeah I’d definitely mark it as such if it was more prominent.
I didn’t even notice the strap-on until it was pointed out.. I love the joke.
AAAARGH! MAH EYES!!
I was about to say the same thing. It is a little on the… unnecessary side. And creepy.
Which is why I love it so much.
Like that Stephen King story about the milkman who delivered poison spiders along with the milk.
Yes, yes she did.
LOL, loved this one, especially the little bit with the fly. XD
keep it up.
The art is some of the best featured “in” comic. However, you know that in a years time, you’re gonna hate it. lol
I hope that’s the case. :)
Hum…Maybe she should try this?
https://www.hotsauceworld.com/bl6amrepeexe.html
Hu Mu, thanks for the link… I love my hot sauces, but 10-16 MILLION Scoville Units?? Someone is gonna die.
16 million scoville units is not hot sauce…it’s capsacin
Which would be this:
https://www.insanechicken.com/blairs-16-million-worlds-hottest-hot-sauce.html
I like my hot sauce to have some other ingredients, King Jolokia is a good one made with ghost chilis and tomato and um other ingredients. Pure capsacin is like asking for your food with a side of chemical burns.
Which is why Blair & Co. wear hazmat suits while making the stuff:
https://www.hotsauce101.com/extreme-world-article.html
Huh, she might actually give the relative I was talking about earlier a run for their money, maybe.
She IS frighting though.
Hrmm I thought I had a question yesterday, but now I cannot remember, oh well!
Saw your ad on my webcomic, enjoyed the funnee. Sent traffic your way, enjoy!
Even if her tastes buds are dead that has got to hurt going through her system. Knowing how painful it is for onions to go through my system I can not even imagine how painful that hot sauce has got to be.
Oh and did you know there is a cartoon by the name Grrl Power?
Yeah there’s some anime which I’ve never seen called that. At least that’s the English title. I didn’t know about it until I had the comic online and started googling the term to see where I was on the results. (I’m #1! Ooh-rah! #2 on Bing though, showing that it’s clearly the inferior search engine. :))
You are number 4 on swagbucks.
That reminds me, I need to see if I can find cock sauce anywhere near me!
You know, half the population can supply you with… oh, you meant the Sriracha Hot Sauce. Hee hee. You know you can get that off amazon of none of your local stores carry it. I’d stay away from the “Used & new” section though. Especially the used.
Lol. Reminds me of my expirience with a ghost pepper just this weekend. Fine going in and out though it kicked everything else on the way through. And why is Sydney jerking off the air while looking at the sauces?
It’s an air wank, to demonstrate extreme unimpressedeness with something. Yeah, I’m making that a word.
Came from Twisted Kaiju Theater. Enjoyed everything so far. Now making this one of my regular webcomics.
Great! Glad you’re enjoying it.
Lol Oh how i love you Syd job welldown Dave i am throughly entertained
I eat Saracha on a daily basis. Spices have to be pretty flavorful to affect me anymore!
“I’ll Make You Cry”…LOVE It.XD
This looks like the Thai place down the street, literally. Is this based on a real restaurant?
There’s a standard Thai restaurant template that they get off the Internet.
No I totally made that up. Most of the Asian places around here are real hole in the wall affairs. There are a few that are dressed up but they’re comprised of much darker colors. Lots of stained wood and low lights.
The use of the darker lighting, colouring, etc is to be able to get away with a bit of grunge or food that may not be up to standard. If the pattern on the rug changes every time you look LEAVE.
I’m lucky in that there is a very “rabid” heal inspection system in place, no thanks to a few incidents years back. There is still some places where quality is questionable but you know the place is at least clean.
Oh I forgot to ask why is she moving her hand up and down?
Where is her back pack thingy?
Hanging on the back of the chair. She can get 12-15 feet away from them.
Kind of makes me wonder. What would happen if she was compelled to get further away somehow? Would they drag on the ground behind her? If you think about it, it would almost have to be that way or she would not be able to move them at all, tube or no tube. I am presuming the body of the car prevented her from reaching the door earlier, as she cannot pull the car. So in this situation, the tube would probably knock her chair over and slide on the floor, as there is no real resistance. What would happen though, for example, if she left them on a city bus? Or an elevator? Another question is: do they put up a wall on the outside of her from them, or do they have a grip on some part of her body? The way they are attached could be both an asset and a liability, depending on the situation.
Got I hope I did that spoiler tag correctly!
Got the spoiler tag right. All that is definitely stuff I’ve put some thought in to. We’ll see how it all plays out.
I think you forgot to drew it in Panel one then.
That would be funny to see.
Actually, I’ve seen the gesture around for years. I think I noticed it first in a Michael Keaton movie, “Dream Team” (1989), where the cops or someone is trying to get his character to come back to the sanitarium. He’s talking to them on a pay phone and as they’re feeding him platitudes he’s doing the air-wank, meaning ‘yeah, this is supposed to feel good, but it’s meaningless’.
Perhaps it’s the physical expression of “yanking my chain”?
https://www.google.com/search?q=yank+my+chain+origin
I don’t really understand loving spiciness. Don’t you lose the ability to taste all other flavors if you can handle insane spiciness?
I assume so but I can only go up to about a 3 so I wouldn’t know.
It depends on what is making it insanely spicy, if it is thai peppers, the hotter you order it, the more flavorful, some of the crazy hot sauces they bottle up with demon girls or put on the kill-you wings are made hot with chemicals. That stuff is just hot and not very flavorful. Basically if the key hotness ingredient grows in the ground, it will probably taste good, if it is made in a lab by combining capsacin with lava, it will probably taste like shit
Spiciness isn’t actually a flavor that your taste buds detect, it’s actually triggered by the pain receptors in your mouth.
It’s simple, really. When a person eats something spicy, and grows accustomed to it, he or she begins to feel a ‘pleasing heat’. Despite what you may think, this does not have to do with breeding. As far as I have been able to prove so far. Still trying, though.
Anyway, the body releases endorphins to counteract the spicy flavor. People for whom the mild endorphin euphoria is strongest tend to get hooked.They often need their fix, and their preference is for ever increasing levels of burn.
Yeah, there are actual scientific research to back up the endorphin thing. And I’m totally comparing hot sauce to crack. After all, just once won’t hook you, right?
am i the only one who noticed the red dwarf ref. this comic is smeggin brutal.
nope, I saw that too and was wondering! XD I think I have GOT to be the only person my age who knows that show, especially since I’m not English. d: lol
Red Dwarf is one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
Along with Blackadder, QI, Mock the Week, Mitchell and Webb, and a dozen other Britcoms and panel shows.
Blackadder was a little too, enh, I dunno….slow, I guess, or trying to hit too many comedy points for me :/ can’t remember the guy’s name, but I had only seen him as Mr. Bean and even then I was kinda meh… *Shrugs* but yes, love Red Dwarf :D a friend didn’t normally like TV shows unless they were Josh Whieden (sp?) and I showed her RD and she practically DEMANDED I show her more XD was smegging hilarious! (yes, I use smeg a lot irl and am not just using it because it was mentioned d: lol)
…Syd’s love of spicy food is going to become a running joke down the road, isn’t it? I barely know anything about any of the other characters aside from what you described in the cast section, and I can already visualize an incident where Dabbler tries a bit of Sydney’s “Asian 5” meal and instantly regrets it.
…I must have dabbled in TVTropes for too long; I’m starting to call things before they are even set up!
that happens when you write a lot of stories too
Or stay in a good RP for long enough. >.>
Too true, too true s: I get stuck wanting to move characters around, as well as start other plots with ’em all XD *is trying to work on a few stories at the moment* like when I get a whole buncha rhymes stuck in my head and they just don’t stooooooooooooop D:
Well you can bet this isn’t the last spicy food joke that’ll be in the comic.
Thought so. It’s already a somewhat infamous trope, but not so much that it’s a cliche. In any case, you did a wonderful job in implementing it.
Yeah I think I have a few ideas on how to subvert the trope a little. Bottom line is, Sydney likes her some hot food, but hopefully all the jokes won’t be totally predictable.
Hmm, a small nitpick with the artwork. In panel 5, the large Chinese-style painting on the wall has one VERY messed up frame. The bottom edge matches the perspective lines and vanishing point of the booths below it, which is good. But the top edge is parallel to the top of the comic panel! It’s like they mounted some weird trapezoid on the wall.
A simple fix would be to extend the painting out of the top of the panel, like in the background of panel 4.
The painting is perspective correct, that is, it’s in line with the vanishing point I established when drawing the rest of the panel, I think the problem is that I’m still not very good at perspective, and I put the horizon line way too high, so basically Sydney looks way too tall. It’s tricky since she’s not towering over the counter she’s standing in front of, just because I drew it at about the right height relative to her, but if you cover that up with your hand, it looks like she’s 12 feet tall compared to the tables in the background. If I had lowered the horizon line, the back of the picture would look more tapered like you mentioned, and I think that would have fixed the issue with her phantom height.
Perspective seems simple enough. Just create a vanishing point and everything recedes to that spot but there’s really more to it that that. I’m learnin’. I’ll get it eventually.
One thing with perspective, you rarely ever see a line that’s perfectly horizontal unless it’s directly in front of your viewpoint, or level with the height of the camera. If you raise or lower the position of the camera, the line will seem to tilt, relative to the distances moved.
For an interior scene, you also might want to try placing the vanishing point used to draw your perspective lines MUCH further outside the frame boundary.
Heh, and now I’m recalling art classes I took in junior high, experiments with perspective drawing using one, two, and then three vanishing points. Those, however, were exterior scenes of buildings on a street. Still, good practice.
You could also experiment with having the horizon line be level with the eyes of a character in the frame. See it from their perspective, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Well the horizon line is always “eye level” but that doesn’t tell you who’s eyes you’re looking through. Sydney is only 5′ so in most panels, assuming a viewer of average height, the horizon line should be about at the top of her head, but artistic license allows me to put it anywhere since this isn’t a straight on 3 panel newspaper comic style affair. I still have a lot of learning to do I think, or at least a lot of practicing what I’ve learned.
Hah. I recognise the top-left spice in the 6th panel, as I have a bottle myself. Wonderful, tasty stuff. Goes great on pizza.
All the ones in the 4 panels surrounding her that she’s dissing are real, the 3 in the bottom left panel I made up, but as Mardi Gras Time mentions below, there are a lot of real ones that basically brag about how destroyed your ass will be once it passes through you.
You know what the sad thing is… I think I’ve seen one or two of those hot sauses down here in New Orleans, granted some of them are just there to scare the tourists… who wants to go and use something called AssReaper after all… and yes, that does exist. Be afraid…
Sounds alot like a beer I used to drink called “Arrogant Ba***rd”
That the ale, right?
I think it was classified as an ‘ale’ I just knew it tasted better then the watered down horse-piss companies like Anheiser-Busch market as “beer”.
HAha! Oh god the poor fly! Well let’s just hope here sleeve doesn’t catch fire….or wait… maybe we should hope for that?
Used to be a curry house here in the Atlanta area that had “don’t blame us in the morning” on the menu.
When i went to Fairport Convention’s Cropredy Festival the first time, the tour company (run by Richard Thompson’s wife) had our flights booked on Air India.
One night in London that night’s planned activities were running a little late, and several of us tour members, with itme to kill, went looking for sustenance. And i spotted a sign a ways down the block that said “Tandoori”. So we went there.
The menu listed three spice grades. Being unfamiliar with the place, i ordered the middle grade. The waiter, seeing we were not only white, but Americans, said “Oh, sir, that is rather hot.” I said that was okay, trot it out. So he did, and afterward, i regretted not choosing the top grade.
Okay. So, on the flight home, the in-flight menu offered two grades of spice in the food. The people sitting next to me, who were coming home to Kansas or Nebraska or something like that, mentioned as we looked at the menus, that they had only ever had Indian food the first time in London, the night before.
They ordered the milder, i went with the spicy.
I was just considering calling the cabin attendant over when they honeymooners called her over first. Quietly, in an embarrassed tone, they asked her to take their almost-untouched trays away because it was too hot.
She pointed out that there were little tubs of yoghurt included for sissies to stir in to make the food less painful. (She didn’t phrase it quite that way.) They allowed as how they had tried that and it was still too spicy.
I decided to not add to their chagrin by asking, as i had been thinking of, for hot sauce to add to my vindaloo.
Hi. I was just hopping around new comics and stumbled on this one. Awesome job, I’m putting it on my list (the good one). See you around!
This comic is three panels short of recommend-it-to-everyone awesome. The sex jokes mean I can’t recommend it to everyone.
Yeah I was struggling with how much I want to sanitize the comic. My personal humor among my friends can be described as “going too far”, you know that joke that makes everyone groan and move on to another topic, so it’s pretty cleaned up as it is right now, but this probably won’t be a strip that you can forward to your mom, and that’s definitely not the last sex toy joke that will be in the comic. I haven’t even introduced my succubus character yet. I will mark the more prominently inappropriate strips as such though.
Sanitized as it is, it’s still too heavy for my taste (let alone my mother’s). And given that you haven’t yet marked anything as inappropriate yet, I’m left wondering whether the comic will be brilliant or unreadable once you’ve moved out of the learning phase and get the plot going.
It won’t turn into all dick jokes and nudity or anything, but it will be adult humor here and there. I plan to mark stuff NSFW basically if it’s something you don’t want to get caught at looking, and the strapon is like 20 pixels big. If that character was the whole panel, I’d have marked it. And really, the joke there is, if you go to a site like hotsauceworld.com and look in the “hottest” section, half the sauces are named thing implying serious pain to your rear iris, so I thought it was appropriate in the context. If that joke makes you uncomfortable then… I guess for the most part you can keep reading as most of the comic will continue to be light hearted slapstick, but plan on skiping the ones labeled NSFW, once I get to that point. They’ll probably just be gag pages and not serious story development, though I haven’t written all the jokes yet so who knows.
New reader to your comic, and I love this page. I want a bottle of hot sauce called Ring of Fire (even if it’s just colored water) just because. I say don’t worry about sanitizing too much, although I may be a bad person to listen to. While my friends are mostly used to my humor, my co-workers usually end up telling me I’ve gone too far (They can start talking nasty, but I’m going to finish it) :)
I really look forward to seeing how this all plays out, I just have to remember not to stay up all night until I catch up.
Welcome!
Well coincidentally, The Oatmeal has a comic about sriracha sauce today.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/sriracha
I LOVE the character design! It gives off so much personality just in the young lady’s appearance. I think you do some very attractive work here!
I also dig the hot sauce theme of this comic. I’ve got a YouTube video where one of my friends is eating a Ghost pepper. It is… something.
Anyway, I enjoy the comic and I’m adding it to my Reader.
I come from the lands of NMI! Awesome comic, going right into my ‘Read Regularly’ list.
Ha ha. Drink a bottle of tabasco for breakfast, why don’t you.
There’s an Indo in the house and he really does put some^WLOTS OF black goo sambal on bloody everything. Gave me a taster of some soup once with a gleeful “see if you survive”; could stand it, even if just, which surprised him. To me, being able to stand /some/ Scoville units helps with the international cuisine gourmet snobbery thing, but why overdo it? I like my taste buds just fine. Would be interested in no-vetsin “us” cookery though. Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, or whatever else. Indonesian if you can find’em.
Oh, that fly. We were camping out and dad had cooked something with a nice spicy sauce. A wasp flew into the (large enough to dine in) tent, flew around a bit, and casually landed smack dab in the middle of the sauce on my plate. Immediately flew out of the tent in a straight line. Very very quickly. I suppose that’s one reason why spicing it up helps preserve food.
Easy enough: too sour.
Grmpf. Got my tags wrong; I was referring to the tabasco…
I would have to say Ring of Fire scares me the most.
Thanks a lot now I’m in love with this comic >:I
Oh god this is awesome
Not all hot sauces are unholy–there’s Monk Sauce. Somewhat hotter than Tobasco, but hard to say by how much.
Awright. I’m ordering some volcano blood for my next pad thai…
Hi, I found this comic from TMI and really like it.I love the characters and sto0ry so far. I wish you could grind out 3 a week but I know that is hard. As a new fan, I just want to say quality goes a lot farther than quantity.
I started rpg gaming in 1974 with the original expert set plus the 5×7 expansions like greyhawk, I actually remember when the thief class was introduced and fighters got their strength bonus added to their damage.
I am really enjoying your comic. If you really like off the wall super hero books, IN HERO YEARS… I’M DEAD is an amazing look.
I am a veteran, US Cavalry, and looking at your rank structure it is definitely not a ground combat structure, not even special forces. What it really reminds me of is US WWII Air Force structure. A bomber could have enlisted gunners with lieutenant officers, while the pilot could be anything from a captain to a senior colonel. Maybe even a Brigadier General. The pilot might only command his own plane, or command a squadron, wing or battlegroup.
If this were the idea, then Col Maxima might be senior officer over several teams, say Texas or several smaller states with only one major city each. If that is where you are heading I could actually write up a TO&E for you to play around with.
Thanks, glad you’re liking it.
The ranks that show up on the Cast page at the moment probably won’t stick. I need to sit down one night and really hash that stuff out. I’ve been researching foreign military police organizations and various special forces and branches of military… I’m sort of coming to the conclusion that as long as I have the ranks in the right order, it kind of doesn’t matter what the actual org chart looks like, as so many forces have different structures. Basically I need to create my org chart, figure out what responsibilities lie at each level and sort out the cast based on that. If you want to take a crack at something, I’d welcome the input. The basic trouble I’m having is that they’re cops, and also military. Where as cops have low ranking officers like constables and meter maids (are they even cops?) I don’t think anyone in SWAT or the SEALs is a private. l’m also not entirely sure what the difference is between Commissioned and NCO as far as duties go. I assume that NCOs are the real strength of any armed force and the Commissioned Officers are more likely to doing less fighting and more administrating?
That assumption is basically what went wrong in WWI: There, the generals didn’t see the front, not for years. Compare with, oh, Rommel’s antics in the desert. But that’s in war, whereas in peace everybody gets to enjoy the paperwork, though the officers moreso, of course. Even the boring bits of rainbox six (as in the books) are full of paperwork.
Officers, apart from legal requirements (intl. laws of war), are general management, whereas NCOs are more like foremen. Officers come up with the plans, NCOs see that they’re carried out, leaving the officers room to think ahead for the next round, so to speak.
See also Auftragstaktik (wikipedia) and the related Mission Command concept. The former is highly formalised and abstracted essence of ideal command, meaning that it’s a stone bitch to get right and so everybody else settles for trying on the latter.
Though useful to know, that’s all highly theoretical. Someone with practical experience to show how to put together an outfit would be useful. So I’d take up that TO&E offer, or better yet, get with esoclectica and poke group dynamics around two or three approaches to see what best fits how you’d like to tell your story.
Something to consider when looking at ranks would be the egos of your heroes.
I never watched “The Right Stuff” straight through, but I remember a scene where the prospective astronauts were demanding a window and flight controls. In the same vein, I recall the two that go up are the captain and the commander because the egos of those early astronauts were at least assumed to not accept a lesser rank.
You might need to pretty much trim all the, er, lower ranks off to keep the rare resource of heroes from just dropping out and going into private service.
Of course, with at least one actual veteran in your hero group, and at the top, perhaps that’s less of an issue. She might actually say S___ them, if they don’t want to serve, we don’t need them showboating.
Additionally, you might want to look at Warrant Officers.
Hey if you ever think about pulling in some extra cash from this comic thing, an apparel line would be a great way to get it, plus its free advertising. I would definitely buy some of the shirts I’ve seen thus far.
Yeah at some point I’ll actually try and monetize this thing, but it’s probably not worth doing until I have quite a larger audience. Listening to other webcomicers, it sounds like about .5% ever buy stuff or donate, which, as conversion rates go, probably isn’t too bad. I’ve seen high dollar marketing campaigns do worse. I have an idea or two for shirts right now, hopefully there’s a feminist or two out there that wouldn’t mind having the logo splashed across their
boobsracksweater puppiesshirt.I would buy a shirt featuring Sydney with her wrath face from the penultimate panel of #25 shouting “You’re on my list!!”
Hah hah ok, I’ll keep that in mind.
I certainly would enjoy that shirt. I sadly might be in a minority, but the minority exists!
yes! XD I would DEFINITELY buy that shirt too, if/when I have the money for extra stuff lmao
one think i dont get about hot sauce.
HOW THE F**** PEOPLE CAN LIKE SUFFERING?
Mainly it’s about the level of pain getting lower…
Answer for Chaos. Would you believe people are mentally addicted to hot sauce? The pain from the food causes an endorphin release similar to a “runner’s high” or over tanning. The endorphin release is highly addictive. People who are exposed to hot sauce early develop a tolerance for the pain and enjoy the high from the pain. On the other hand,I can tell you that enough hot sauce can make anything the army serves you to eat edible. Military MREs can come with tiny tobasco bottles.
actualy its a chemical agent designed to shut down higher reason and individuality to promote unity and ultimately triger reenlistment but newbees wouldnt use it if adverted as such so the reenlistment sause is put in tabbasco bottles.