Grrl Power #366 – Successfully unwarranted
Back in the day before DNA tests and mass spectrometers, it’s plausible that a vigilante could maintain a secret identity, especially if you have an environment where the bad guys have some weird unspoken rule about not unmasking them the instant they get knocked out, because otherwise why wouldn’t they? But with modern forensic science, it would basically be impossible. The first time a vigilante gets their lip split in a fight, the authorities would have their DNA. Swab it off someone’s knuckle, from under a fingernail, or a little spatter on a jacket or wall. Spit, skin cells, heck, just capturing them walking down a hall could be enough for gait analysis which could enormously narrow down a list of suspects.
Edit: I just wanted to add this since a few people are pointing it out; I know getting someone’s DNA doesn’t let you immediately identify them if you don’t already have a match on file, but it’s a slam dunk once you do get that match. And if they have a brother or uncle that’s a felon, then you’re suddenly a lot closer to knowing who you’re after. Plus, if you find the same DNA at 20 different scenes, then you have evidence that the same person was involved. Otherwise when you catch the guy, he could say “Oh I only was at the one scene you have evidence for, in fact I’m not even “Vigilante Mask” just a fan of his.”
In the case of someone like Batman, it can be argued that the cops kind of rely on him unofficially and don’t work too hard to unmask him. Also Bruce Wayne probably has the resources and contacts to have his DNA and fingerprints purged from any databases, but someone like Spider-Man? Unmasking him would probably be trivial if the authorities really wanted to.
The only way to avoid being identified would be to fight crime in one of those level 5 hazmat suits, or police the whole battle area in a super OCD manner for hairs and blood and bits of dirt you tracked in from your garden, recover all your Weasel-a-rangs, even the one that slid under the newpaper press or was deflected out the window by the ninja the bad guys hired to beat you in their desperation. Also you’d have to fight quietly and hope no one calls the cops on you for the noise so you have time to clean up. No stopping daylight robberies for you! Just brawls in abandoned warehouses.
Of course I can’t mention superheroes with OCD without linking OCD-Girl! Unfortunately it’s posted with some blogging front end and I can’t figure out how to view the comics at a legible resolution. If anyone does, post in the comments and I’ll put it up here, cause the comic is pretty funny.
Panel three obviously contains some other cameos. Usually if they’re from regular “big” media sources, I like to leave it up to you guys to root them out, cause it’s fun being the person who recognized the obscure thing, but these cameos are small or single team web projects, so I’ll link them here.
The two guys on the top row are just randos I made up for that panel, but many of you should recognize Spinnerette there in the middle. If you haven’t ever checked it out it’s a well drawn and funny webcomic.
On the bottom row is the “Ask a Ninja” guy which was a very funny but unfortunately short lived youtube series… though checking the channel just now I see he’s still slowly updating, or at least remastering his old videos, so… I guess I know what I’m catching up on during lunch.
Next to him is not Carmen San Diego believe it or not, it’s Ronni Kane from another webcomic called Giant Girl Adventures. Guess what her power is?
Weird having only one person in the Who’s Who after a possibly record breaking one on the previous page.
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, 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.
I am ninja, he is ninja, she is ninja too.
The memories!
ALWAYS EXPECT NINJAS!
…Even in TV commercials!
https://acidsquirrel.com/post/85301
You know, I immediatly recognized him, and wanted to write exactly what you did in the comments, then I read that DaveB had already mentioned him and you were faster then me… now I’m sad… I’m gonna watch the ninja omnibusses to cheer me up again.
“What’s the deadliest move you know?” “The deadliest move I know is… New York to Flordia. NO-ONE comes back from THAT one!”
Actually, I thought he was Doctor McNinja – https://drmcninja.com/
To be fair, traditional ninja do tend to look alike in mugshots.
I knew that he wasn’t Dr. McNinja right away. For one thing, the Dr.’s eyebrows are blond-ish whereas this ninja’s eyebrows are black; For another, the ninja shown here isn’t wearing the doctor’s usual white labcoat…
Ah, Spinnerette. I remember when that used to be a fun parody comic before it started taking itself so seriously. Good times.
That tonal shift was really jarring! I’m still reeling. Yet, I read on! It remains a fairly good superhero story, with exceptional art for a webcomic.
Which tonal shift are you talking about?
There’s a good chance there’s an ad for spinerrette visible to you on this very page right now. It perfectly encapsulates the tonal shift. It went from a funny superhero parody series similar to grrl power, and then suddenly started becoming dead serious to the point of cringe.
Have been reading from the start (supported three KickStarters), just wondering which tonal shift in particular you are talking about
The shift from parody series to dead-serious series.
Dead-serious issues like the parody of the silver/golden and 90’s eras of comic books? Dead-serious like the slapstick ‘villains’ such as Dr. Universe and Greta Gravity? Dead-serious like the came to life Mr. Webby? Dead-serious like the Canadian superhero team?
If any of those those things (and I could go on and on, but I think the point has been made) were/are deadly serious to you, I’d hate to see what passes in your world for an actual crisis.
Is that unwarranted snark I see? Cute.
Like I’ve already commented elsewhere, having a series whiplash between (attempts at) dead-serious and then straight up goofy stuff while remaining consistently good is a high-level art, one that that comic failed at. And when you fail at that, even the new goofy stuff gets a bad taste to it afterwards.
I think they mean Shattered and it’s still occurring aftermath. Although you cannot say that the ‘Crisis of Many Ohios wasn’t just plain goofy!
Having a series be able to switch between goofy and dead serious and still remain consistently good is some high-level writing skill. Some series pull it off brilliantly, like Gintama, but this one does not.
Favourite examples of mine are usually from television: M*A*S*H*, Soap and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Although various British sitcoms pull it off too. A few honorary mentions: Black Adder,* Fawlty Towers and One foot in the grave.
* Thinking in particular of the WWI series, set in the trenches, and the pathos of the troops going over the top.
The last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth is one of the finest pieces of television ever created. It takes a very serious subject and manages to be very funny, yet also respectful, thought provoking, emotional, and the last scene is a masterpiece.
Private Baldrick: I have a plan, sir.
Captain Blackadder: Really, Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
Captain Blackadder: As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
Private Baldrick: Yes, sir.
Captain Blackadder: Well, I’m afraid it’ll have to wait. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?
Captain Blackadder: [whistle blows] Good luck, everyone.
Eh, I never liked the original shift in art style. So when it suddenly started taking itself so seriously, I noped out. Too much cringe, not written well enough.
You do realise that, while the artists have changed (like most comics), the writer is still God-Emperor Krow, don’t you?
Yes? And I’m saying Krow is not a good writer when it comes to serious stuff.
Opinions differ
While I still read the comic for moments of funny, I agree with you. The comic shifted tone, takes itself to serious, and has some of the worst writing I’ve seen. When I commented on the messed up writing in one particular story, it kept getting erased too :p
Yea, I had a comment erased once too. Nothing particularly critical either, for that matter. And wholly constructive in nature, phrased in a tactful and respective manner. Not to mention that the rest of it was complimentary. Enough that it really surprised me to see it deleted!
I stopped commenting at that point. If constructive criticism is censored, then there is no point in speaking. Might as well hang up a sign like this:
Odd. Nearly all of my comments have stuck around both positive and negative. The only ones that didn’t make it either had links or the word “boobs” in them.
I had exactly the same thing happen as well. It was a comment similar to what you described as well. After that and the fact the writing has gone more into the bad side, I finally stopped reading towards the end of the Col Glass “Saga” from what I saw just now back on there, its got even worse.
Yes, I have been a longtime Spinnerette reader as well, but I rarely look into it nowadays. The art shift from manga-esqe to the current west-east blend was really jarring and coencided with a tonal shift that I have a hard time outting my finger on, but was an unwelcome change for me. Around the same time, the comments began polarizing into a regular inner-circle around one moderator who seems incapable of accepting a negative word against the comic, and one-and-done accounts spewing mysoginistic and/or homophobic hate against the comic. It was also around that time that the website became less about the comic and more about Krow’s convention schedule. I think it was during the Dr. universe and Gretta Gravity backstory arc that the number of pages dedicated to convention announcements outnumbered the number of comic pages.
TLDR: Spinnerette used to make me laugh, now the best it can manage in a raised eyebrow and a smirk.
Yeah, that kind of “praise me or gtfo” would bother me also. Why bother having a place to comment if you’re really just soliciting for a written blowjob?
That said, Spinnerette is on my list of webcomics which I follow. It has ups and downs but is generally worth reading.
I’d say only about as good as the vast majority of syndicated comic writers. Better than some, worse than some, jumps about ideas like a sparrow on meth, but meh.
I can’t say I’ve ever replied much on Spinnerette, but none of my comments have ever been deleted either.
If you don’t like it, that’s fine. Webcomics, like most everything else, are a subjective art form.
But there’s really no call to trash talk it. Other people DO like it, tonal shifts and all.
Personally, I found Shattered to be a well done arc in part because of the shift. It allowed some character growth in and amongst all the goofyness, whereas now we’re at some really weird nonsense with Universe and Greta.
Having DNA doesn’t mean a whole lot. You’d have to be sure it’s the target’s and not some random hair. You’d also need to have something to compare it with. Half the homicides in the US go unsolved, even with modern technology and even when there are witnesses and video evidence, so it is still very easy to remain incognito.
Came here for this.
Though it can be argued that a vigilante with superpowers would be somewhat easier to track down, because that’s harder to hide, also if they aren’t exactly hiding their activities – only their identity.
But yeah, a DNA is worthless without suspects – or without a naitonal DNA databank, but that is such an intrusion to privacy that it wouldn’t pass in the USA ever.
Don’t count on that, the TSA got passed with nothing more than grumbles and complaints and jokes
That was passed (initially) because of 9/11 and its uselessness has started to make that idea be questioned.
And we’ve still got the “Patriot” Act (Hi You NSA A$$WIPES!)
What’s really funny to me is that anybody who thinks the NSA is watching them is nowhere near important enough for the NSA to be paying any attention to them. The only reason they have any data about you at all is because they scoop with a big spoon to make sure they get the stuff they actually care about. You’re not important enough for them to actually LOOK at any information about you.
Exactly. DHS and it’s parts is basically using a quarry excavator to find a blue pebble in a white desert. The entire idea was a knee-jerk and should’ve been scrapped a decade ago, but the Politicans found it too useful to get whatever they wanted by screaming “The Terrorists are Coming to get us!!!!”
if you’ve ever been in the military they already have your DNA on file, it’s one of the things that get done at in-processing/recruit training.
another way to get your DNA is possible, but since I’ve never had a kid or been too involved with the couples that do, so i may be wrong, but, i seem to remember my Nurse roommate talking about the doctors saving a few vials of blood from the ?umbilical cord? as insurance against some kinds of health issues where they would have to give a transfusion, or something like that when she had her two boys… it’s been at LEAST 12 years since i hear that, since one of the two kids is now that old and his brother two years older…
Military DNA database is fairly recent, and what they’re allowed to use it for is fairly narrow, no matter what NCIS (or any TV show) says. “Enhance!”
The VA keeps want me to join some million vet thing, they want me to give blood for some sort of long term study (yeah sure) and they would be keeping my blood for some sort of database (uh no).
The only way you’d have your DNA in a Federal database is if you were arrested for something else in the past. Without a prior, DNA is useless without a suspect in custody.
Incorrect.
• There will be such information even if you were a suspect, but neither charged nor arrested.
• Likewise if you were found ‘not guilty’ or even it being deemed that you had ‘no case to answer’.
Unlike under European law, where all such data should (respectively) not be recorded in the first place or destroyed once innocence or guilt is established. Similarly, in the USA there is no respect given to statutes of limitations, spent convictions or not retaining unnecessary information for trivial crimes.
Further, as the database is not policed rigorously,* I would not have confidence that there are numerous other breaches. For instance that a lot of other data has been incorporated for ambiguous situations or under flimsy pretexts.
* I use European data protection regulations as my guidelines, which include sanctions up to and including prison sentences for breaching them, along with strong regulatory oversight, to enforce them. And we do see reports of police, and others, being imprisoned for breaches.
Oops, a bit got snipped from my comment, in editing. Namely: “If you were a suspect who agreed to have a DNA test to eliminate yourself from the enquiry”.
European regulations give strict rules for how long such can be retained. The USA has no laws governing this. So, even if there are any regulations, they are self imposed and not given external judicial oversight.
There are other reasons for having such things as your fingerprints on State or even Federal file.
For instance, if you get a job within the government structure (either local or Federal), you must be able to confirm your identity. It’s required to at least have your fingerprints on file, just to have the job! When I was in the military, they had my fingerprints on Federal file.
Even in the Private Sector, some jobs require at least your fingerprints on file, such as for any kind of Security Service (security guards) & at least some States require fingerprinting for Insurance Salesmen to obtain their license to sell policies!
Yeah, there’s LOTS of reasons to have your ID on government file, without involving anything criminal.
Not DNA but it is identification.
Another reason: Applying for a conceal/carry permit. There’s a lot of rules about when/how you’re allowed to use a firearm, but in all actuality the permit itself is fairly easy to obtain. All you need to do is get fingerprinted and supply a recent picture.
Kinda makes sense – if you’re going to a) break a person’s fundamental aversion to killing human beings, and then b) train him to be passably good at it, you’re going to want to keep an eye out for him when he enters normal society.
The US Military DNA database was not established for that reason, and by laws forbidden to be used for that.
The US Military DNA database can be used for one reason and one reason only, Identification of dead soldiers.
officially……
exactly what i was going to say… “Officially” that is what they do… but you know dang well that that hasn’t stopped “The Government” from doing whatever it thought it needed to do at any given time for any given reason… Watergate?, 9/11?etc. just to name a few things that happened, under suspicious circumstances … and whose to say that relatively recently in the news, that the Chinese really DIDN’T do those hacks into various government officials computers, but it was US doing it to ourselves, so that whatever info that was compromised was now out of the control of those oversight personnel, thus, when that data will be/is being/was used to do whatever nefarious purpose, and possibly getting traced back to that data that was “stolen”… to put the blame on “those Eeviill Hackers”… and shift blame away from, and to NOT blame our upstanding and virtuous Alphabet Agencies who illegally misused that info. Info that they NEVER had access to in the first place (wink, wink. nudge nudge…) so how COULD they EVER have misused it in the first place…(wink, wink. nudge nudge…)
Personally I place zero credibility in 9/11 conspiracy theories. They do not bear up under critical scrutiny. I give more credibility to Nessie and Bigfoot, than that.
But if you want to see a far more plausible claim, fully in keeping with the scepticism you are showing, check out this talk. A brief summary: Tell the security services that their jobs are on the line unless they find terrorists. This then leads to a change of strategy where they ‘find terrorists’.
The technique described: Locate a bellow average IQ loner, venting on the internet. Goad them into doing something more about it. Helping them out, if they are not competent enough to enable a plan, on their own. Then set things up so they can be caught red handed with something incriminating.
Following news reporting on ‘terrorist’ arrests, FBI stings do feature in many of them. The FBI have even extended to conducting them in Europe now. Albeit the ratio of reports involving them dropped after IS(ISIL) rose to prominence.
Most older readers are probably aware of the toxic history of sting operations in the police. So we should be very wary of placing too much trust in such activities. I think all juries in such cases should be shown that video, in order to ensure that they examine the evidence with a healthy degree of scepticism!
So, supervillains should A) give blood B) hit the blood-bank, steal lots of blood inc. their own C) Splash stolen blood around violent crime scenes.
Good suggestions. Villains who do that will be easier to catch.
What you are describing is a crime signature. One which would be distinctive (even amongst others doing similar things). Signatures help profiling. Elaborate ones take time, improving the chances of being caught at the scene. Or, if apprehended elsewhere, being in possession of samples of stolen blood, used at distinctive crime scenes, will very much help secure convictions.
The stolen blood would have preservatives in it (to give it a shelf life of days instead of hours), which would be easily detected during a chemical analysis that would be done before the DNA analysis. Because the DNA evidence is not expected to still be viable to be put in another person, the blood would not be put in a preservative when collected as evidence, so it had to come from somewhere else.
Also when you run out you need another supply which would have a completely different group of DNA samples EXCEPT ONE, YOURS. So you basically would be giving them which DNA is yours.
Actually, the larger your database, the more likely you are to get false hits. Our current databases are already large enough that this happens from time to time. (DNA matching has to do with markers and probability, not exact, full-comparison match.) Get the DNA of everyone in the country, and any sample will gets dozens to hundreds of hits.
Still potentially useful (if amazingly creepy and open to ridiculous abuse), but not nearly as much as people seem to think.
you refer to checking geological location at time of the crime to edit out someone states away deceased or on record as well outside the hight/weight of the person looking for?
I know, but it’s a lot better than nothing, and if they have a brother or uncle that’s a felon, then you’re suddenly a lot closer to knowing who you’re after. Plus, if you find the same DNA at 20 different scenes, then you have evidence that the same person was involved. Otherwise when you catch the guy, he could say “Oh I only was at the one scene you have evidence for, all the other incidents involving “Vigilante Mask” were fans and copycats.”
Actually, if you are careful in what you do and how you do it, you can pretty much say, “Yes, and I am Vigilante Mask. Now, what actual laws have I broken? Oh, NONE? Well, goodbye then!”
Yes, there are some breaking-and-entering things that many vigilantes do (Batman, for instance, makes a ridiculous habit of it), but if you only intervene to stop violent crime, you are shielded from criminal charges by several different laws, including “self” defense (defending someone else can actually fall under that – it’s a bit of a misnomer).
Sure, the police in some areas don’t like someone actually protecting people and making them look bad, and they can make your life miserable in several illegal-but-hard-to-prove-or-actually-punish-them-for ways, but, if you’re careful, you could do a lot without breaking any laws at all.
I don’t think the Arc program wishing to rein in vigilantes and/or get them to work for them is unrealistic (far from it – government and bureaucracies always have that tendency), only that there’s nothing inherently illegal (in the US) about SOME sorts of things “vigilantes” do.
Google “citizen’s arrest” for one example.
even “self defence” when it includes superpowers can cross the line into assault. “Your honor I admit the first blow was in defence of others, but the 5th when he dislocated his jaw, and the 6th when he knocked his cornea loose causing blindness in one eye, those were excessive force.”
If you kill someone while protecting another person it is termed “justifiable homicide” I do believe .
Only if the force used was proportionate to the threat and reasonable to use, given the circumstances.
If the someone being threatened was getting a slap, killing the offender is not reasonable. If the offender was a child, and an adult punched them in the head, the force was not proportionate.
A person with super strength punching a normal is akin to the latter. In both circumstances death is both likely and not justifiable. There would be a harsher charge levied in such circumstances.
Part of it is what you can REASONABLY believed to be the threat level at that time.
Indeed.
If you find the same DNA at 20 different scenes, you might be a victim of “The Woman Without a Face” aka “The Phantom of Heilbronn”
just google it and be amused about it ;)
Or wrap yourself in plastic or as most super heros conclude latex. I confess this doesn’t completly work against bacterial traces, but that’s a technology in development and otherwise you use more layers.
Still it’s not strange that Maxima says this, since she is part of the government and her way of keeping everyone in check is the: you can’t run, you can’t hide, you can’t fight, so add to our might.
Nice to see Spinny (and Bottom Lefty behaving herself :P), but… she is not a ‘vigilante;, she is part of an official team sanctioned by Ben Franklin himself
You should be going after the Captain Alberta, that Canuck Tosser!!!
Or, did you mean Evil Spinnerette? o_O
It’s not a government-sanctioned super team, which is why they need to have secret identities and can’t be full-time superheroes. They went over this pretty extensively in-comic. >:T
The Spinnyverse doesn’t HAVE a “Federal” team in the US. The closest they have is the ASA.
Yep, it’s the Canadian team that are government-sanctioned! They’re actually police officers, if I recall.
Actually the US was the only country that DOESN’T have their Supers be “deputized” (The Canadian Team are Mounties BTW)
Mounties are police! It is short for Royal Canadian Mounted Police!
But Benjamin Franklin created the Government! How can they get more sanctioned than that!?
I just wanted some fun cameos, the team won’t actually be going after them in canon.
Actually a couple-page crossover might be funny.
Dabbler: [Looking down] Are you okay?
Halo: [ Being assisted to stand again ] Just me and my natural clutz shining through. [ Fully standing and brushing herself off] Wait a minute. Where are we? I don’t recognize these buildings.
Dabbler: The sign over there says Cleveland. Isn’t that in the northern part of the country?
Halo: Well, there is a Cleveland, Texas just north of Houston, but it is nowhere close to that big. [ A small animal runs in front of the women ] What the … that was a marsupial! How the fuck did we get to Cleveland, Australia? Oh, I know what to do. [ Pulls up her right arm to her face. ] Um, Dabbler, how do I use the GPS on this thing again?
Dabbler: Let me see. Oh, like this.
Halo: Okay, we are really in Ohio. How the fuck did we get up here? [ Spinnerette and Mecha Maid come running down the path, following the quokka. ]
Spinnerette: Did you just see a small invasive animal just run by here?
Dabbler: [ points one of two right arms to her right ] Um, that way.
Halo: Do you need help?
Mecha Maid: Yes please.
—–
[ After nabbing the little guy ]
Halo: So do you ever go by MM?
Mecha Maid: Sometimes. How do those work?
Halo: Quite well, actually. Really, I don’t know that much about them; I just know they give me super-powers.
Dabbler and Spinnerette walk into the frame to rejoin the conversation.
Dabbler: Sydney, I am a little jealous of her arms, especially the lower left one.
Halo: Because she has more arms?
Actually, with the last major arc, Spinnerette is connected to a multi-verse
They’d need to have your DNA recorded somewhere, or to catch you and test if yours matches it. In spidey’s case he’s also got that handy precog going for him
I-is the Marble Maiden our f-first futanari character ..?
Because .. I have nothing against that … so long as it doesn’t turn out that Dabbler was the first & just as-yet unrevealed. I have too much fantasy life invested in Dabbler for it to turn out that way.
Superpower: I will turn you both gay and lesbian simultaneously. And, it doesn’t matter what gender you begin as. I’ll try to be gentle ….
The image does suggest she might be either Transsexual or Intersex, but it’s also likely she’s trolling everyone or wears a cricket box as a tribute to the film “clockwork orange”.
In any case, she’s made of marble so the question is pretty much irrelevant from a practical viewpoint (not to mention being nobody else’s business anyway :-) ).
Mound of Venus?
Yeah that works (though admittedly my mind did not immediately go there for reasons involving how I viewed the artwork, and other reasons not relevant at this time :-) )
I think that’s just the cut of the outfit, it’s not much of a bulge.
Pretty much. It’d be a very TINY bulge. Though I guess thematically that could fit with some older statues…
Tucking is a thing, you know.
But, looking at her waist-to-hip ratio, I’d be tempted to rule out her being a trans-woman.
Intersex is still on the table, though.
But enough about her crotch, do you think MARBLE-Maiden is threatened by acids?
“Tucking is a thing, you know.”
There’s a limit to how much you can tuck in a skintight outfit.
The Justice Tuck!
How Poison hides herself away in those denim hotpants, especially without anything awkwardly falling out or getting painfully pinched during her fights, I’ll never know.
Because Poison being a drag-queen was spontaneously announced to(confusingly) dodge controversy about sexualized violence against women due to Poison’s hit-animation that included underboob.
Poison was conceived and designed as a (physical) woman. So he/she’s either had surgery, or you just freely ignore the official claims of him/her being physically a man in the first place.
Well, there was this one time back with a gallon of LSD in college…a literal gallon. I don’t even know how she got it.
You haven’t seen many women, have you? She is a normal female, go watch gymnastics or swimming or even athletics
No, why do you think that? Did I draw her crotch that wrong?
It looks a bit prominent.
It’s not wrong; we’re just used to characters being drawn like Barbie Dolls.
She could be wearing a cup/athletic protector. Just because she’s made of stone doesn’t mean she might not want a little more protection for her delicate bits.
Marble’s a relatively soft stone (even though she looks more like she’s made out of green granite than marble- marble doesn’t tend to get that bright), so I could see her wearing, like, a titanium protector or something, to protect against potential splits onto stuff that’s harder than she is.
For female supers.. Maximapads, made out of titanium!
*groan*
Titanium is not all that absorbent, so might not be useful in that situation. It toughens steel incredibly so a much thinner piece will have the same strength.
No, no, the padding i s the normal material, it’s just in a Ti framework.
No, she’s fine – you did her right.
No, you didn’t. The mons veneris is more prominent than average, but not outside the normal range.
Either way Dave, you could either go with the “alternate universe” method, or you could maybe get some cooperative corroboration going with the original authors/creators to get a few minor bits as canon between the different comics.
No, some of us (myself included) merely have the super power of leaping to unwarranted conclusions in a single bound without the need for shred of real evidence. :-)
nothing wrong with how you drew her crotch, other than so far in the comic there’s not been ENOUGH bulges, male, female or other. everyone so far has had black pants and/or nonexistent bulges. plenty of anatomically correct butt shots, but so far the Arc Swat and all the bad guys must be wearing dancer’s belts. i, for one, would like to encourage you do draw many more bulges in the future.
Dave — NO.
There was enough of a suggestion that I took at it and ran with a joke. Also … part of the joke was a bit of a prank to get everyone to look.
Lordy, the last thing I want to do is give you a complex or something about your artistic abilities! The intention was purely to troll out some smiles and ribald r34 commentary … I honestly didn’t imagine it would be taken (too) seriously. She looks very well she within all acceptable parameters. In fact a very tasty addition to your pantheon.
:-D Smile, everybody! :mrgreen: You’ve been had. I’ll try to be more careful about unintended consequences in the future. My personal nightmare was Dabbler turning out to be futa. Not a trauma I want to consider …. :lol:
We run with such things here, tongue-in-cheek or serious. It is all interesting stuff. And it served the useful purpose of reassuring Dave that he did good.
I don’t know whether to chide or thank you, datora, for making us stare intently at Marble Maidens crotch..
Speaking only for myself, of course, I would extend thanks…
:D
I doubt it. She just had a very pronounced mons pubis. Our maybe she’s just menstruating and wearing a pad?
Could just as easily be that she doesn’t shave or trim, so the hair gets compressed into an even mound.
Except that supers in this universe don’t have pubic hair.
Ooh, knockout blow.
*uses paw to raise Ignoble‘s arm high*
We have a winner in the pubic topiary debate. You may proceed to round two of the public pubic examination.
It is at times like these that I cross my claws, and hope that DaveB very prominently mentions any Patreon cameos!
o.O Say what now?!
I was summarising the activity of this thread to date, by that turn of phrase. Just in case your bulging eyes were indicative of envisaging a whisking off of garments. This is not that sort of comic! :-O
Correction:
“Unfortunately, this is not that sort of comic!”
Cameos! :o
*cracks knuckles*
I got work to do I see…
Hey, Spinnerette is a part of a government-sanctioned team!
Alternate universe Spinny I bet ^^ I mean, Arc-SWAT Is the first official team in Grrlpower, so.
Also I mean, she’s not. If she was, she wouldn’t need to keep her identity secret or have a non-super job. The organization she’s part of is more like… the Actors Alliance or a labor union. It’s a super support network, not a government job.
I’m pretty sure it is government related; the government knows, but regular people don’t. and they specifically mention that various characters are full time government.
They are government-sanctioned, meaning the Government knows about them and allows them to do their work, plus, are you going to tell me that Ben Franklin (yes, the Ben Franklin) is not part of the Government? he is one of the Founding Fathers for Franklin’s sake!!!)
This is actually something I was thinking of a while ago, but didn’t think it would come up.
So ARC-LIGHT is going to keep a database on all supers, which is kind of big brother-ish border-lining on treating every super like a criminal unless they work for ARC- (This is also a major plot line in the Marvel Universe that causes the upcoming movie Captain America: Civil War. (go ahead, link your favorite image meme for that below)
However, while Marvel had SHIELD as their over arcing (oh hey, pun) government organization to document, classify, contain, and control all super activity, they didn’t have to pay all of them salaries, nor did they have all the good ones working under one specific name.
ARC however, is saying that they are going to take any super, invite them to work for them (thus getting all the same benefits and pay), or they are going to say tell them “Don’t use your special abilities under penalty of incarceration.” (I.E. We’ll sick Max on you and she’ll take you directly to jail.)
So my question is….where is all this money going to come from if MOST of the supers our there decide to work for ARC? I’m willing to accept that a government organization has a butt-load of money to pay for a team, but if that team is ever expanding to the point of insanity, you’re talking about an economy destroying business plan. Imagine, say, including all the people who just do paper-work and field phone calls and such (y’know, the stuff you or I would just apply for to pay our bills because we need to work) along with all the supers and management, ARC has 2000 employees directly under it’s name.
Now, say their payroll is 120 million across those people (which, if every person was getting paid the same, that’s only 60k a year, which isn’t a whole lot). If that number were to double or even triple, plus adding in the inflation of pay raises, insurance for all of them, overhead of equipment, property damage reimbursement, etc etc etc. this could very quickly become a multi-BILLION dollar government agency, and that’s yearly. Even if ARC is a multi-national funded agency (which it doesn’t really look like it is), that’s a hefty budget to try and keep up with, and giving out more money than you have causes debt, and that debt can be called upon at any time, and if they had even a quarter of that happen, it would cripple the economy.
…oh wait, that’s a totally real scenario. America has been doing that since the 1940s.
“So my question is….where is all this money going to come from if MOST of the supers our there decide to work for ARC? I’m willing to accept that a government organization has a butt-load of money to pay for a team, but if that team is ever expanding to the point of insanity, you’re talking about an economy destroying business plan.”
Keep in mind we’re talking on the order of double, *maybe* low triple digit supers in the whole country.
And… having supers can itself be quite profitable. You have them in the first place because they’re worthwhile investments. Having more won’t change that, if they have useful powers, because while they cost, they often cost less than what they’d be replacing. One firefighter super undoes however many millions in fire damage each year, and so on.
I could see, if they got a lot of applicants, making lower-pay-grade secondary teams of heroes with lesser powers.
Multi-billion sounds big, but ultimately in a country with a multi trillion GDP doesn’t mean much (I mean, in those years since the ’40s you mention, debt as percentage of GDP often dropped even with all the money we spend, except when tax rates were cut low, because we produce just that much money), and if they’re used to lower the cost of disasters, crime, and similar things significantly, then they can even be a significant cost reducer.
If you got to the point where you had, say, a thousand supers? That just means you spread them out and have incredible anti-disaster and supervillain coverage, and can likely cut military budget at the same time too.
Keep in mind, there are a lot of other things the government has to keep up with that costs money, plus as you expand one type of personnel, you have to expand other types of personnel. Say one desk-jockey can handle the paperwork for 20 supers for the field he works in at most (that’s him pulling 12 hour days with the usual 6 hour Saturday, comfortable would be doing 8 which gives him the normal 40hr/week with time for lunch and breaks) If you get to that point, you need to hire another guy. If you keep bringing in more supers, now you have more guys pushing more paperwork. If you have 100 supers, you’ll need at least 5 (which would have people dropping from stress all the time) and would be better to have 12-13, 15 if you really wanted to make sure you’re people could take the time off they deserve (which ARC looks like it would want to keep up the positive reviews)
That’s just one field (say, the title is Personnel Insurance Claims, Supers Division). You also have a supervisor heading that area once you get over a certain number of people (Director of Personnel Insurance Claims, Supers Division), who reports to another supervisor (Director of Personnel Insurance Claims), who reports to another supervisor (Director of Insurance) who reports to ANOTHER supervisor (Director of Personnel) who reports to ANOTHER SUPERVISOR who would probably at that point be the head of ARC.
Business gets out of hand REALLY quickly when you are trying to make things have a proper chain of command. And this is ran like the military…so I guarantee that there are supervisors on payroll who are just there so the guy above him doesn’t have to interact with 5 people. He just created a position to oversee 5 people, so that that person can tell those people what the head guy said.
Sure, and that’s not remotely a problem. Mailcarriers need support staff too, yet we manage enough of them for the entire country’s problem. Planes, way more people. A single super more than justifies the support staff.
Adding more of a profitable thing often results in more profit- and while there’s diminishing returns, there’s *also* efficiency of scale. Some jobs are on a per-super basis, while others aren’t. Right now Arc has a lot of people who’s jobs service a dozen people, who could probably handle more.
As long as they’re only adding supers they have enough tasks for to get return on investment- which should frankly be really easy- it’s worthwhile.
Like I said, odds are good supers can be a net money saver, but even if not, to a country of the US’s size, it’d be possible to pay for a hundreds of billions of dollar budget without hurting the bank- and supers shouldn’t cost near that much. Heck, one of their big advantages over airplanes is little maintenance to speak of, no fuel cost, and no cost to construct. Consider spending a few million for a plane or helicoptor, vs *finding* Syndey. Her salary is less than the combined maintenance + fuel + pilot training and salary of a simple scout helicopter, I’m sure, and just as she has some bosses to look after her higher on the chain, so do all those elements of keeping an aircraft working, often more.
Believe it or not, the organizations that employ literally millions of people, are pretty good at managing people in a cost affordable manner.
Arianna’s merchandising will probably go a ways toward funding.
They could also try corporate sponsorships. Halo would get paid for comic and video game adds on her uniform. Unfortunately, she would be required to shout ‘Excelsior!’ every time she flies away.
…Or maybe “Heads up, True Believers!”
When it’s time to wrap up an interview or something, she’d have to say, “‘Nuff said.”
;)
Except, there are points of pay you’re not considering. Daisy fresh rookies in ARC make serious 6 figure salaries, making more than an admiral in the navy. So the baseline of the one team they have is millions JUST to pay them. Then you have all doctors and such you’ll need (By necessity, this’ll include docs with xenobilogy degrees, and pretty much everything else under the sun), so you’ll need to pay those doctorates 6 figure as well, or else why bother. Then you have the bureaucratic structure itself, and then there’s the fact of random damage supers tend to do (Maxima sneezed, took out the next three rooms), specialized equipment for medical testing (needing needles that can pierce max’s skin).
This place is, honestly, getting to the lack of believability point.
You have listed things that would add up to a few millions.. Clearly your disbelief is most fragile.
One major cost you did not list is their HQ. One stealth aircraft costs more than the base cost of building the Archon skyscraper. Although I imagine the final bill to be more, once factoring in anti-super reinforcing and defences.
In fact, I would expect to see their budget in the billions. Yet that will still be a drop in the ocean of defence and police spending in the USA. A country which does not presently face risks comparable to super level ones.
In a world where they did, would they be unwilling to divert significant funds to protect themselves from that? Really?
One other point to consider is the gains from the investment. Rather like the Moon program, which saw a seven-fold return for every dollar spent on that. Yet the return from supers will be way more than that. When you factor in those in the private sector too. But they will need protecting and nurturing. Which cannot be done in an anarchic state unable to defend itself from domestic super villains and foreign powers backed by supers.
National budgets factor in such long-term returns on their current investments. If wise.
And if that doesn’t quite cover it, there’s always side contract work. Verizon might pay millions just to have someone that can go up and fix a problem with a satellite. You get a flier that goes over to the Golden Gate Bridge and repairs places on it that non-fliers might find risky to repair safely. That may be government, but it would still pay.
The millions to start is probably including danger pay. For the supers in Swat and Sparq and like that that run direct risk management. For the remaining supers, however few there are, there’s probably a whole division of them that get paid less because they aren’t on the battle lines or dealing with matters that put a big bullseye on their back.
For those guys, they’re probably the true moneymakers of the organization. Besides, look at comic book movies today. The Avengers, the upcoming Justice League and Suicide Squad. People would be throwing money at them just so they could say they have a team of super heroes protecting them.
There’s also an option that GURPS Supers uses, in conjunction with their International Super Teams: Super Temps!
It’s funded by the Private Sector (mostly) donations from wealthy individuals & corporations. What they do is they take applications from super-people & keep a database for emergency temp-jobs, correlating a listed super to an emergency…Then call them in. Positive public relations & good PR is what keeps Super Temps in the public attention, which helps generate more donations/grants/specific trust funds to keep it running.
The type of emergencies they answer aren’t crime-fighting related, because there are some super-people already working jobs like police force, fire-fighting, etc. Super Temps handles situations like cleanup/rebuilding after natural disasters, rescue & recovery, and the like. The super that answers a call gets paid for the job.
One problem with running hazardous operations with private sector personnel is that it opens those persons up to the possibility of lawsuits based on their actions. You save a guy from a burning building and you get sued for breaking his arm when you pulled him out of the rubble. While climbing a telephone pole to save a kitty you accidentally break a power line and cause an outage. You then get sued by a restaurant owner for lost business and spoiled food due to lack of refrigeration.
And don’t even get me started about those class action lawsuits brought by people who claim their cancer was caused by exposure to your x-ray vision.
Yeah, in GURPS, Super Temps have lawyers & other support personnel to cover all of those “legal liability” issues. Just as was mentioned above by a few other commentators, everyone who works on the “front lines” has a support structure to back them up.
Hire them as on-call consultants, not full-time employees. Like for Sydney’s offer process, they figure out if they want you onboard permanently, or just in a ‘hey if we page you come sit on this dude for us’ way.
You can still tell them “No vigilanteeism!” without having to PAY them not to be vigilantes. Just stock up on Doritos in case they don’t get the message.
That seems like a much more reasonable idea. At least then you don’t have them on payroll, you just have a set pay for what they do when you call them.
And it works out well for the media-hungry supers who can then turn around and have cards printed up:
“ImmoBoyl, Consulting Hero
(Have Inertia, Won’t Travel)”.
I think mine would read:
Waldo, Consulting Hero
(I’m everywhere and never seen
Bringing info to your team.)
“Waldo’s a part-timer? How does he get PAID, though?”
“We’ve never been able to find his address, either. He comes by and picks up his checks.”
“We also never actually see him pick up his check. We just cut it and put it in the box with all the others and it just disappears a little while later and later that day a different bank is cashing it. The last one was in a fictional universe. We are still trying to figure that one out.”
“How do you get the information from him.”
“Post-it notes usually, they appear in various places we aren’t immediately looking.”
“We tried putting up a cork board for them, but he just posted one post-it that said ‘Why would I put them here when I can put them on the back of your heads?’ and sure enough, everyone in the office had a Post-It on their head that said ‘LOLROFLMAO UBERL33TNINJA’. We now just pay him based on a variable scale of how important the information is crossed with the location the note is found.”
“Has anyone ever seen him?”
“Joe in accounting swears he actually talked to him by the water cooler. Said he was a tall, average build guy in normal clothes. Apparently the red and white stripe thing was something he wore the last time he was seen, and it was laundry day. He kind of hates that all the drawn pictures depict him that way.”
plus, it was an outfit given to him at Christmas by a favorite Aunt…
OH, COME ON!! DAVEB!!
THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN!! WE NEED A WALDO HERO!!
DAVE?!?! ARE YOU LISTENING???
You heard it DaveB, the people want me in your comic. I mean, you used my wife in this one, so its time to add me.
The super power is the ability to blend into anything, but not like a chameleon. More like those creatures from Doctor Who. The ones that you can never stare directly at. You know they are there, but for some reason they are just on the edges of your peripheral vision. The only difference is, I can turn it off.
The Silence? Does that mean you must fall?
Not really the Silence, since they just make you forget you saw them. It’s more like I live in the peripheral vision. You can never stare directly at me, even if you wanted to. The more you try to focus on me, the less you can see me. It’s when you let things go hazy that you might just catch a glimpse of me out of the corner of your eye.
It means you will know I’m there, but you can’t see me. Unless I want you to see me, and by then it’s too late.
Who says Waldo isn’t already on the payroll? Have you ever seen Waldo and X in the room at the same time? Have you ever seen Waldo or X in the room, period?
I looked. But I did not find. :-(
Not even Sydney’s True Sight could find Waldo there, ya’ know…
True. But Sydney can’t use that to see through walls.
You might want to look again. But, this time, check behind all the walls.
*winks knowingly*
That’s why I invented area effect weaponry.
[thinks for a moment or two]
*eyes widen suddenly, glances around frantically*
*stops playing dead and steps through emergency exit wormhole, stage left*
I put a tracker on him last time I ran into him but the sensors need to keep realigning after each spacial jump he pulls (or it could be stop time and move event) and I can’t call it an effective way to follow him.
Is that what that pin on my backpack is? Good job disguising it as a Firefly pin. I’ve been wondering where I got that from.
no it’s in the brony tat on your left heel (please people don’t ask)
They never said that all supers would be treated as criminals. They said vigilantes would be treated as criminals–which they are, with or without powers. There are no laws banning supers and the use of their powers in the private sector.
I was getting a bit tin-foil-hat guy, but basically because they have a database on all the supers, what’s to stop them from just putting supers in jail for the fact that they are deemed a threat? “Oh, you have super strength, super speed, laser vision, and invulnerability and a back story involving a tragic explosion due to a businessman’s negligence? You have been deemed a class 5 threat and you are under arrest because you may become a super villain.”
I’m not saying they WILL do that, I’m just saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and ARC is kind of putting in place a method to be able to turn evil and take over the world pretty quickly.
Granted, I think like a super villain all the time because I want to recognize when one is coming early so I can create a few plans for either avoiding or defeating them. (BTW, current most likely candidate is Trump…just saying.)
What’s to stop the government from arresting anyone for any reason? Answer: Because there’s rules against it *and* it’d be a bad idea.
The government *wants* law-abiding non-threat supers. Reduces fear of supers and it means they aren’t doing super attacks.
Arresting everyone just provokes trouble- and ARCHON is plenty smart enough to know it.
Heck, if they *did* want to lean on someone, they’d just have Maxima show up for a ‘friendly’ visit, act nice, bring up what she did against Vehemence, Boilerplate, and similar, and go home to leave the target to ponder.
Or the other way of turning someone into not-a-threat: Cut them a check.
And then Arc and Max end up in civil and criminal court for harassment.
But not for the check.
Unless it from Amorphus.
Umm, for the same reason Sydney isn’t in mandatory trauma counselling after the big fight? It doesn’t fit the mood of the story and would be hard to make jokes about. In our world though? Yeah, mandatory registration, segregation and monitoring of supers would be just the start. Fortunately the grrlpower universe is refreshingly open minded compared to ours (and also runs on measured amounts of rule of funny)
THAT is an excuse I’ll accept.
Hey, I found Waldo.
Hi. I uses to know a guy named Dogma. Any relation?
was his first name sector? I may know him.
Nope…First name was Central.
ok, that IS a bit much, Mr. Tin-Foil Hat man… so… what’s to stop the current IRL government from doing that to YOU RIGHT NOW? i mean they have all your birth info already, they’ve sucked in truly MASSIVE amounts of info from your cell phone, land-line phone calls, tax records, medical records, they know where you work, where you spend your money, every time you get on the internet in any fashion as they are either actively tracking you, or if they decide they WANT to track you closer than they are right now, they just need to “ask” the various ISP’s and Bank’s, etc, to give them access and, POOF!… they’re in like Flint, and since they started up GitMo, they don’t even need to charge you with squat for QUITE some time, and that’s just the “White” side of things. when you get to the “Black” side of the house all bets are off, and you just become another picture on a milk carton… you remember a movie with Gene Hackman, and Will Smith “Enemy of the State”.. the spy satellite tech the bad guys were using: Keyhole Satellites?… yeah, that’s REAL technology recently declassified… so if they just DE–classified it… what do they have and use that is STILL classified? hmm…
… aaand i had another point to make, but my snooze alarm went off and i lost my train of thought… grrr… oh well…
Please, the expression is not “Flint”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_like_Flynn
In their defense, ‘this’ did happen to cloud the turn of phrase..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Like_Flint
ZOWIE should *totally* be an organization in this universe.
this is the one that i was referring to… in fact i didn’t even know that Errol Flynn was associated with that saying… huh! learn something new every day!…
Let me answer your question with a question: what is the best, quickest way to turn nearly all super against your government?
You infer that all the ‘supers’ are in contact with each other, with something akin to ‘capebook’. Unless they are an ‘out’ super, it would merely be another missing person.
‘Capebook’ should totally be a thing in the Grrliverse.
Well, no, I’m just assuming that disappearing that many people without anybody finding out is unlikely. Especially when all of your targets have one or more superpowers.
As a government, there’s a limit to how much you want to threaten, wrongfully arrest, or otherwise jerk around a bunch of people with superpowers…
Somewhere, in one of the brutal dictatorships of the world, there’s a “9-star” superhuman whose family was just kidnapped in order to blackmail her into working for the regime… somewhere, in one of the brutal dictatorships of the world, a despot and many of his men are about to die a horrible death.
Well, assuming the USA that ARC lives in has the same Constitution ours does, they CAN’T make it illegal to have superpowers. That would be a Bill of Attainder, which is flatly prohibited by Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution.
A stickier issue is what constitutes a vigilante in a country where armed self defense is legal. Some people who carry a weapon for self-defense go their entire lives without ever needing to draw it, while others — due to everything from living in a bad part of town to random bad luck — have to use theirs regularly. Obviously, putting on a mask and hunting muggers is vigilante behavior, but all it would take is one prejudiced DA to put a super on trial for being a vigilante because they decided not to lay down and die when shot at.
Actually, the depends quite a bit on what they actually do.
A “vigilante” who wandered around in the bad part of town violently stopping violent crime wouldn’t necessarily be breaking any laws. The police likely wouldn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it illegal.
Using violence to defend an innocent person FROM violence is not a crime… at least, not in the US. Some other places in the world it is… and that’s one of many reasons I don’t live in those places, because they are violently insane.
There is a dividing line. If you are going about a normal person’s business and suddenly there’s a crime happening around you, and you intervene in the crime, that’s one thing and you have a certain level of legal protection. If you go looking for crimes to intervene in, that’s another, and your legal protection is rather less.
I agree. On the other hand, the Punisher is completely screwed in this world.
so is Batman…
There can be a fine line between “Justified Use of Force” (a legal defense for assault) and “Excessive Use of Force” (criminal charge based on assault with only some justification). Excessive Use of Force is applied when a certain level of violence in self-defense or in defense of another person was justified, but you went too far; you have to stop when the attacker is no longer a viable threat (like when Sydney kicked an unconscious bad guy, oops) and your level of violence must be proportionate with the attacker’s level of violence. You should not lose your life because you slapped someone. Many jurisdictions have a list of crimes for which violence can be a justified response and an even shorter list for justifiable use of lethal force. Also, someone with training in the matter, like a variety of martial arts, will often be held to a higher standard than someone who flails away in ignorance.
There are also no laws against a rather wide range of activities that people call vigilantism when superpowered characters in comics do them. Remember, there’s no actual offense of “vigilantism” – it’d be assault and battery or whatever, of which defense of others is a justification.
Here are a list of arrests (most leading to convictions) I have spotted in news reporting, since the press conference. All of which involved individuals taking the law into their own hands, vigilante style:
• Murder
• Attempted Murder *
• Assault/inflicting Grievous Bodily Harm
• Wrongful imprisonment (locking the door on a shop to prevent people from leaving)
• Impersonating a police officer
• Wrongful arrest
• Reckless endangerment *
• Possession of an offensive weapon
• Carrying a concealed weapon
• Discharging a firearm within city limits
Note I approve of volunteers who guard little old ladies through dangerous areas. Likewise campus schemes where single girls are given an escort back to their dorms. And if folks want to add a bit of colour to it, by dressing up in a super-hero outfit, that is charming.
But when others start taking pot shots at cars fleeing from the scene of a robbery or shooting someone, who looks suspicious in their neighbourhood, or electrifying their garage door, in a residential neighbourhood with small kids, then they deserve the punishment for their crimes!
At the end of the day police go through long, rigorous training, to ensure they know both the law and how to deal with criminals safely. Vigilantes just go on blind instinct and belief that Hollywood has given them all the knowledge they need.
* Some relating to setting of booby traps for burglars.
My understanding was actually that they were going to invite supers to join them or tell them “if you commit a crime with your powers, we are what’s waiting for you, and remember that vigilantism is a crime, too.” You could still potentially use your powers to just do your regular job. Like, say, the kindergarten teacher that was mentioned using illusion powers to give her class in-room field trips, or a speedster running messages and packages for DHL or FedEx.
And sir, as has been pointed out, you are ALREADY in several databases and reasonably unarrested. Let’s see, if you’re under 18, you’re in the public school databases and probably the child services database (the vast majority of kids who, you know, go to school like they’re supposed to are, since public schools and CPS are close). If you’re over 18, and have ever had financial aid for college, you are in the FAFSA database and the IRS database; if you haven’t gotten financial aid but you work, you’re still in the IRS database. If you have a street address, and you probably do, you’re in the Post Office database. Ever gotten government assistance in any form? Medicaid, food stamps, even one-time assistance? Database. Driver’s license or state ID, without which you practically can’t function in this country? Database. Passport? Database.
Being in a database and having everything known about you are not necessarily the same thing. If they were, then they wouldn’t be “closing in” on Marble Maiden in this comic, they’d already know who and where she was at any given time. The ARC database probably only has “this power has been observed in public and is attached to this person,” where “this person” may or may not be an alias or a “Jane/John Doe” synonym. Members of ARC and supers who have been caught or gone public may have more information on them–members of ARC because they gave that information to ARC in order to, you know, collect paycheck and/or because they were transferred by a military that ALREADY had that information; supers who have been caught (in criminal actions) because they’re criminals and have abrogated their own right to privacy, and supers who have gone public because they shared that information in a public forum. I very much get the vibe that ARC’s entire database has been filled via volunteered information, official criminal/public records, and data-mining, and that they don’t intend to change that process…they just expect more people to start putting that information out where they can get to it legally, ethically, and probably pretty easily. Like Marble Maiden’s selfies. Facebook ain’t private, and photos of crimes are definite grounds for warrants to get the information Facebook has that IS protected.
Well, most won’t, simply because in a lot of cases they can actually make more money in the private sector, and in a job that doesn’t involve them getting shot at.
In any case it’s DoD money, and you know how America likes having a military budget far in excess of anyone else. (Like larger than the next 16 biggest military budgets in the world combined, most of whom are allies.)
So they are allowed to use their powers, so long as it’s not for vigilantism? Okay, that makes more sense. I was thinking they were going to try and keep them from using their powers at all unless for ARCHON.
Dave actually addressed that in the press conference. Granted, said comic was posted, um…two and a half years ago.
Yeah…time does fly when the reading is good.
Yeah, if you can make squiggly flashes of light and you use that for special effects at concerts, that’s fine and dandy. If you have super strength and you’re in construction great. If you have laser vision and you’re stopping bank robbers, Archon wants to talk to you. And really, if you’re doing something you’re getting shot at for anyway, just join Archon and make money for it.
Of course, you’ve got to find a jury willing to convict someone for using reasonable force to stop bank robbers.
It’d actually be a kind of interesting subversion-of-the-subversion to have it where “press-gang people into the government superhero team” doesn’t work because you can’t make the charges stick.
Untrained people are really really bad at judging what is reasonable. We can forgive people who misjudge things when they are surprised, panicking and in fear of their lives. They have no choice when thrust into a situation like being mugged. Likewise I forgive Halo for slamming the fire guy into the car-park, to protect her friends.
But individuals who knowingly go out to find such situations, whilst fully aware that they are not trained in how to handle them, are being reckless. Any panic and misjudgement, that they make, falls squarely on their shoulders.
Likewise if they have failed to study the law in their jurisdiction, and learn it well enough to make tough calls in a split-second. In which case they are very likely to do something illegal. Again no excuses permitted. They sought out the situation. Any failing they make must be punished accordingly.
Going by the huge number of police misconduct and excessive force stories you can find with even the most cursory search, police are also really really bad at judging what is reasonable even though they ARE trained.
Part of the problem may be a near-universal lack of proper oversight that is willing to treat bad cops as the law mandates, but until we have such an oversight organization, it’s impossible to say for sure.
The average private citizen, upon graduating high school is expected to know every statute, ordinance and regulation relevant to them well enough to avoid breaking them — ignorance is not an excuse, even in good faith. The problem is that police are excused for ignorance so long as they have good faith, creating an incentive for them to be deliberately ignorant of the law! Why should anyone respect the law when someone paid tens of thousands of dollars a year to enforce the law is not expected to?
It comes down to might makes right, and in a world with supers, sooner or later the strongest won’t be on the government’s side.
Marble Maiden vs Concretia, placing all bets!
Concretia is made of a mostly-homogenous bonded stone aggregate. Marble Maiden is presumably made of crystalline limestone which can have many occlusions, cracks, and other flaws in it.
“Concretia” is really just the ghostlike specter that can animate concrete, meaning in any city fight she’ll never run out of body material. Marble Maiden appears to only have one body, but even if she were the same as Concretia and could animate any handy marble, there’s much less of it around. If they weren’t fighting in a bank or other business, she’d run out fast.
Winner: Concretia.
I would be very surprised if Concretia could not do similar things elsewhere too. Using aggregates, rock, soil or the like. She demonstrated incorporating a variety of substances, including tarmac and paint. The latter seemed flexible and part of her body, as opposed to showing signs of cracking, and falling off, as you would expect if it were a separate coating.
But, you were wise to restrict your comment to the known capabilities, rather than introducing speculation to cloud your main point. Which was well made, I should add.
To argue the other side, concrete is actually not all that strong, compared to natural rock – it pulverizes easily, and is brittle when flexed. Remember, it’s actually a hardened mixture of rock and sand – it’s useful because of its flexibility. Natural solid stone is actually much stronger – Marble Maiden could probably take a bullet, like Concretia couldn’t.
to be quite fair, concretia got shot in the head, which turned out to be hollow, by an Anti tank rifle and it only blew apart a portion of her skull while exposing some of her spirit form (which was itself unharmed as far as I could tell).
in short, it doesnt really matter which of them is made of harder stuff, Concretia can simply keep coming back until she wins or the forces arrayed against her can destroy her new bodies as fast as she can make them, turning it into an effective stalemate. So unless Marble can actually do that she’ll lose eventually.
I’m kind of curious about what if any vulnerabilities her energy form has, she clearly maintains it inside of her concrete shell, getting launched by math and deflected by deathtoll clearly stunned her for a short bit but not for long… and while getting her new head blown open by sniper fire seems to have scared her off as she was not seen in the battle after that… well, short of anti spirit-techniques I am not sure what could actually stop her in terms of conventional weapons and tools.
Does she breathe, does she get tired while in spirit form? It seems like a pretty awesome power set all in all.
“it doesnt really matter which of them is made of harder stuff, Concretia can simply keep coming back until she wins or the forces arrayed against her can destroy her new bodies as fast as she can make them”
Peggy took her out with a Claymore, remember? It can be reasonably assumed that Concretia cannot make an indefinite amount of new bodies over a short period of time.
I have an alternate theory.
Peggy is a sniper, and would have been as far away from deadly supers as she could get. Which puts her well out of aggro aura range. Claymore goes boom. Concretia goes ghostie. Then thinks “why the heck am I attacking a police sniper?”
And heads home as fast as her non-corporeal body can fly. Making sure not to form a new body until well out of sight.
I do not recall seeing her since Peggy took her down.
Oops! Peggy took her down with a Barrett, not a Claymore.
The Barrett is a big ass 50 caliber sniper rifle, while the Claymore is a landmine . . . and a sword.
Sorry, apparently I still don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to tags.
The first time Peggy shot her. The final time, we only saw the aftermath. But DaveB‘s comment mentioned the claymore. However, given that Concretia was in teeny chunks, rather than suffering similar damage to before, it would be possible to infer that independently.
Sorry. I must have missed that bit.
No probs. So did I, at the time. One of the perks of the community is pooling observation skill rolls. :-)
Now I’m picturing Peggy dressed in a kilt, and a battle harness with half of her painted blue holding a Claymore sword over her head screaming “FREEDOM FOR THE A TEAM!”
My family owns a historical monument restoration business. We work mostly with tombstones bit have done a few statues and such. I can say with certainty that marble can definitely NOT take a bullet! Not one of any decent calibre, at least.
Any strong impact will cause it to shatter into the consistency of granulated sugar. I’ve seen this in old cemeteries where the local morons think tombstones would make decent target practice.
“Marble Maiden” wouldn’t fair too well in a gun fight.
“Granite Girl” girl, on the other hand, could take one hell of a beating.
For all we know she IS a “Granite Girl” but liked the name “Marble Maiden” better.
Thanks, Keneth, I stand corrected!
any other concern that concrete and marble are just separate characters because of the material animated? could they be the same person?
My mind did kinda start going in that direction. But then a bright and shiny … oooh there it is again!
Ahem… anyhow, where was I? Oh yea, a most worthy question to pose. And a credible one too, once you factor in Vehemence’s aggro aura, to account for the conflicting agendas that we might otherwise impose on her/their actions.
I was thinking to two ladies are cousins. Maybe even sisters.
Marble Maiden looks more like Jade than a green marble. Mind you Jade has been used a few times for superhero names.
I echo other sentiments. Yes, there are technologies that make it easier to connect secret identity and public ID, but most of those aren’t things like DNA. DNA is more a confirmatory technology. The likelihood of you having a non-prior criminal’s DNA on file is really low, so at most you could go to a bank robbery and say “well, we’ve got significant DNA traces for 15 people that might be our target, but only one of them’s on file so we don’t know who they’re from.”
The real threat to secret ID is statistical forensics, as implied by the selfie-ing. But even there you need a good enough hook to hang your research from, so to speak. In a big city there’s many thousands of people, even millions, close enough to the area to be your super. You have to winnow through all of them and exclude them based on other factors.
In my own superhero novel _The Stuff of Legend_ (currently being circulated by my agent), one key reason that it’s hard to catch a Super is that a lot of them transform from a normal to a Super form, and the two forms can be and usually are *utterly* different from their base forms.
This is rather different from a lot of yours, who seem to mostly look just the same all the time, they simply change clothes to be Superhero. That means that simple photo-comparisons have a good chance of catching them, while in mine they don’t look anything like the same.
…looking forward to reading that… I’ve read all the rest of your books.
Hopefully one of the publishers will pick it up. Thanks for reading! :)
Replying to myself… this also brings up the question as to “is there a difference in how such evidence gets left by people like Maxima?” She’s incredibly tough and all, so she’s usually not going to leave blood (battle against Vehemence aside), but her toughness and such VARIES. Is her hair indestructible? Does she lose strands of it periodically? Does it suddenly become normal hair, or stay ridiculously tough? Can someone analyze the DNA if they can’t break it down?
with max it’s “do we have a video of a gold person doing it? no. any video of the event yes color vid? yes. then perps skin color? ok it’s not max.”
Hi Spinny!
Happy to have recognized Giant Girl before reading the blurb :D
Wait, isn’t that guy beside Spinny, Super George Lucas? And didn’t we see him in the auditorium as one of the new un-nameds? o_O
Love the spinny cameo!
Is that Carmen Sandiego in the bottom right? Never really thought of her as a super is all. Mind you, I seem to recall she did steal the gates to the forbidden city in one of the games, and that does imply either super powers or being so damned good it makes almost no difference (sort of like Math).
Gaa! Next time READ THE BLURB BEFORE POSTING!
(hangs head in shame, hides away to console self with cheap wine)
Calling her San Diego is a good way to wind up in a great deal of humiliation and discomfort. Her best friend can get away with it, but nobody else can. She considers it rude.
Considering she’s more powerful than Maxima in her control of size, mass and density, politeness is a must.
Psycho Gecko’s motto: Anything can be killed.
And killin’ is what Psycho Geckos do best, Pooh Bear.
Nothing is impossible. Re-read that, and put a different spin on it. The state of complete nothingness is totally impossible within known science.
Therefore, yes, anything can be killed unless it wasn’t alive to begin with.
and yes, i know those two theories have nothing to do with one another.
however, everything is relative.
Particularly in trailer parks.
Oh shit, PG is here!
Hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your anus!
That which does not kill me makes me stronger.
That which kills me makes me even stronger, and it pisses me off.
I live something like that. if you kill me be very afraid because when I come back I will be holding a grudge. just hurt me and I will be upset for a while then heal then let it go.
You know she can travel through time, right? ;)
So can the Doctor and he exists in a super free universe :-)
But yeah, point taken :-)
super free universe? so, the ‘angels’ don’t qualify as ‘supers’? what about the cybermen? or are they just ‘enhanced normals’? and really, being able to regenerate yourself doesn’t count as a superpower? what about Wolverine?
(just curious)
In that universe they have abilities normal to their species. The others are tech enhanced.
(Read Dragma’s comment, it’s the tl;dr version of what I’m trying to say here :-) )
The cybermen are basically cyborgs and are explainable by nothing other than a higher level of technology (and a disdain for the messy business of individuality), and while the angels are more problematic they basically boil down to being a predatory species of chronovores who feed off the time energy of their victims (which can be considered normal in the whoniverse). Classic who had the alzarians (a species with rapid healing abilites), but this was not due to experimentation, just evolution and was natural for their species..
I guess the bottom line is that the cybermen would fit into the grrlpower universe much easier than Max would fit into the whoniverse.
YMMV of course.
OIMACTTA making some miles seem longer than others!
There’s two ways to look at what constitutes a super.
The first way is to set arbitrary boundaries, and anything crossing them is a super. Using this method, Superman is definitely a super, but if you set your boundaries differently, all humans are supers — in comparison to rabbits.
The second way (the one I prefer) is to look at the species the individual comes from and compare his/her traits to the species baseline. Using this method, Superman would not count as a super, but Tony Stark (outside of his armor) arguably would.
Using method two Cybermen, Weeping Angels, The Doctor and so forth are NOT supers.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised they’re not even considering licensed bounty hunting/merc work for supers.
That’s probably already happening so…
Bounty hunting is legal due to archaic laws and co-exist with anti-vigilantism laws. Nothing stopping a super from getting a normal bounty hunter’s license.
Actually there is. Other than the (implied) law to set up Archon itself, there is only one law that has been passed. If you want to work in law enforcement, and you have super powers, you are only allowed to join Archon.
Therefore this would mean no supers in the LAPD, California Highway Patrol, NCIS or working as bounty hunters.* I am less confident about private investigators, as I feel that their licences are of a different nature to those of bounty hunters. Unless Dave clarifies something to the contrary, I suspect super PIs, and for that matter body guards, will still be legal.
* This is my opinion mind, which I am happy to be challenged on. It is based on combining what we heard, at the press-conference, with general knowledge. To my mind a bounty hunter has been deputised to conduct a specific law enforcement role. Whereas the PI licence is more of a regulatory issue, than granting them any policing powers. Even though their job overlaps policing roles.
as I read it the use of powers in any job military police or bounty is allowed but the government would perfer you be arc afiliated if you have powers as the listed are legal jobs with the right paperwork and training.
Mmm, refreshing my memory, yea I forgot that the wording was loose enough (via mentioning vigilantism in the preamble) to be open for the version you have gone with.
Consider the conviction of my opinion, being the valid one, to be downgraded accordingly.
Assuming the ARC-Earth USA has the same Constitution our USA does, that one law you mention would not survive a Constitutional challenge, since it creates employment discrimination on the basis of genetics/race.
Granted. But they cannot prove super powers are linked to race. Even the hereditary aspect is only a tenuous association at this stage. If it is not matching normal correlations for genetic transmission, then proving it falls under race discrimination laws becomes much harder.
Note that they do have an identacle Constitution, so will have likely been very careful to avoid wordings that could be challenged under the race discrimination laws. Perhaps it might be defined like this:
The precedent I cite for having this decided subjectively by an average citizen is drawn from English law, in that the man on the Clapham omnibus is deemed to be a good judge of what is reasonable.
Should there be a doubt as to whether someone is super-human or not it is simply a matter of asking the jury their opinion.
Importantly Halo would be held to have superhuman powers. But was clearly born a normal person. Ergo the law is not discriminatory due to her race.
Is Iron Man superhuman? Yes, he has powers that are not commonly available. Should he start up mass production, and sell his suits on the open market, then they become readily available and he is no longer super human, by comparison to others in society. How widely available or cheap it has to be, to cross that threshold, the jury can decide.
Is Dabbler superhuman? Yes.
Is Math? Hello, jurors, you have been debating this for over two weeks now. If you are not going to come to a unanimous verdict, we are happy to go with a majority one.
In the United States, bounty hunters do not work for the government; they are independent operators. They do not have general police powers, but are certain training and often are licenced by the state that they operate in.
When a person is charged with a crime, they will often be offered bail, that is they can pay a guarantee to leave jail between being charged with a crime and actually being tried for it. When they show up for their trial, the bail is returned to them; if the person does not show up for the trial, then the bail is forfeited and the judge will swear out a warrant for the person. This happens in a lot of jurisdictions.
In the United States, there are private enterprises that will put up the bail money for you, often for about 10% of the bail money, plus interest. These are called bail-bondsmen. If an accused person does not show up for required court appearance, the judge will issue a warrant and orders the bail-bondsman to find the fugitive and return him/her to the court; if the bail-bondsman can not bring the fugitive back to the court in a given time, then the bail will be forfeited to the court. What happens after a forfeiture depends on the jurisdiction.
The bail-bondsman will then have a bounty hunter attempt to find and return the fugitive. Many times the bail-bondsman will act as his own bounty hunter. The bail-bondsman will get an arrest warrant issued by the trial judge and use the authority of the arrest warrant to collect the fugitive and return that person to either the court or to the police, depending on the rules in that state.
Yea, that warrant and the licence is what constitutes delegating a specific power of arrest to them. Something, in most other countries, which is only held by police. Which is why I think it would be specifically classed as a law-enforcement role.
I do not think the fact that it is privatised, and thus being conducted by someone who is no working as a government employee, would make a difference to the principle. For that matter, the same would apply if Detroit privatised their whole police force. Robocop would have to report to Archon, or stick to being a corporate headquarters bodyguard.
Of course, once they had assessed him and ensured that his training was fully in compliance with theirs, then there is the option of returning him to his hot-spot policing role, in his former position, if that serves the public interest the best. Perhaps with a shiny Archon badge? Or even a modified DPD badge with an “Archon certified” holographic logo added?
I imagine that that, should there be a policy of allowing suitably trained super police to be returned to regular policing, they might be given a personal pip-boys, in order to easily communicate and co-ordinate with Archon, should they hit a rock-paper-scissors situation they can’t handle alone.
What exactly is an “anti-vigilantism law”? There’s no specific offense, in our universe, of “vigilantism”. There are a wide range of activities that someone we call a vigilante might engage in which might be illegal, and a wide range of such activities that are not illegal. The description in the strip explicitly states that there was no change to this situation: “just as illegal as if you don’t” rather than “extra special illegal because you do have powers”.
Examples of specific anti-vigilantism laws are those relating to: Wrongful arrest, unlawful imprisonment and impersonating a police officer.
Plus viglitsim doesn’t meet the self-defense nor the defense of another clauses of the exceptions to the laws of assault and battery.
Those are all activities a non-vigilante might engage in.
“Plus viglitsim doesn’t meet the self-defense nor the defense of another clauses of the exceptions to the laws of assault and battery.” – I’ve already asked for specific citations on laws that stipulate that a scenario where defense of another would otherwise apply is invalidated by someone being a vigilante.
None the less it both answers your question and is true. The original versions of those laws were enacted to prevent vigilantism. The fact that they can also be used to hold officers of the law to account (for example) was not the driving motive in their creation. At that time in history such individuals were held to be beyond reproach.
The fact that in our more enlightened times, nobody is seen to be above the law, does not change the fact that such acts were drawn up specifically to prevent lynch mobs and kangaroo courts. If you wish to track the origins yourself, you will need to follow them to the laws of England and Wales, as that is where the core U.S. legal system was inherited from.*
You are obfuscating two separate issues in that demand. Defending somebody is one act, and legal. Conducting a vigilante act (for instance impersonating a police officer) is another but illegal. However the two acts can be carried out as one. As one of the two acts is illegal, the combined act becomes illegal. So calling out “halt, police”, whilst assaulting someone, even to prevent them from harming another person, is illegal.
You are giving them the expectation that you are a police officer, and thereby know proper restraint techniques. So they will not be expecting you to bludgeon them over the head, for example. All other things being equal, you will be charged with both assault and impersonating a police officer. Even though, without the latter crime, your actions might have been viewed as justified.
Note that this is not due to a specific law, it is though a specific legal principle. The acts committed, during the commissioning of a crime, are considered to be aggravated by doing that. Justifiable homicide for instance can be elevated to homicide, for purely that reason.
* With notable exceptions, such as certain states having their legal system, or aspects of it, drawn from other European countries. Louisiana’s being French influenced for example.
For ARC’s sake, they’d best hope that Giant Girl decides to cooperate. Her power set is sufficiently bullshit that she’d likely curbstomp Maxima in a straight-up fight.
There’s an ancient concept that applies here. Back in the days when armies were mostly backup and most decisive battles were decided between champions — both to preserve the army as an army and to speed things along — there were individual warriors that armies detoured around rather than fight. Goliath (of Biblical fame) is a good example of this. In a world with people like Maxima and Giant Girl in it, that concept has been renewed for the modern era.
Given a person with sufficient control over their size, mass and density that they could reshape the entire solar system — shift orbits, sling planets out of the system entirely, etc — if they were so inclined, Maxima’s power set isn’t all that impressive in comparison.
Giant Girl does what she wants and is more of a force of nature than a person — more anti-hero with a good conscience than a vigilante. You can pass all the laws you like against natural forces, but they don’t alter reality and sending troops to try to enforce them is a good way to lose all your troops.
One sleep spell from dabbler and she is out of the game.
So, Dabbler is powerful enough to put an entire city to sleep? Area of effect limitations are a bitch when dealing with someone who can use planets as stepping stones. Putting someone’s little toe to sleep is not debilitating.
How do you contain someone in a cell when they have enough life support power to EVA without a suit, and enough control over their own mass density to tear concrete like it was soap foam?
There are plenty terrifying powers that can completely dictate fights. Like anyone that can teleport things other them themself. At sufficient speed, they would be capable of generating a fusion reaction, because the object would be teleporting fast enough to maintain it’s pressure, and all you have to do is teleport a large area to a smaller one, or be moving the end point so there’s more mass in the same area after the teleport, and then teleport the new area. Eventually the density will be high enough that fusion will be achieved and now you have someone walking around with a contained nuclear explosion.
Depending on the mechanics of the teleport, you might not have to jump through all of those hoops.
For example, what happens when you convert mass to energy, teleport somewhere in energy form, then ‘forget’ to convert some of the mass back to matter? Dropping a kilogram of energy on the floor is about as dangerous as dropping 500 grams of antimatter.
Hey, hey! You leave Spinny alone! She’s a licensed law-enforcement official!
At first, for a brief second, I wondered why Rheagan Rodriguez, AKA Superbitch, wasn’t included in the “rogue’s gallery”, but then I remembered that she A) is sanctioned by her municipal government and B) would tell ARC to go fuck their collective selves, just on general principles.
But I think she’d like the amount of money for it.
Just… y’know.. they probably have rules about showing up drunk, throwing old ladies into carnivorous blobfish, skipping out on work for pancakes.. so it wouldn’t last very long.
Spinnerette, as mentioned, is legally allowed to do what she does. She might not be in a federally sponsored thing like the League of Canadian Superheroes, but her organization definitely has authorization to do what they do.
Even better, she is in a League headed by the Great Ben Franklin
Based on the comment in the story, no, she’s not. Or if she was the Current law functionaly replaced the ASA.
I don’t think Spinnerette works in this context. She’s part of a government sanctioned team, as are most other superheros in her world. Which clashes with the entire ARCHON thing you’ve got going on here.
Giant Girl would definitely not be happy by this development, she used to work for an agency and left them. They have been trying to get her back ever since and she’s not amused. Trying to force her to give up her lifestyle would result in her taking out every team sent after her. Technically, not even Maxima stands a chance because Ronni could shrink her into sub atomic space and just leave her there.
Ronni is also quite famous, if you lived in her world you would have had no doubts that superheros are real even before the press conference. She has a fansite and everything… not to mention she’s a 3rd generation superhero and one among many others.
So, your Spinnerette and your Giant Girl here can’t be the originals or they’d have to be from other worlds.
Love the cameos but logically it doesn’t work. :)
Spinnerette already canonically has alt universe versions, so look-alikes makes sense to me ^^
You should really get a look at ’90’s Spinny (she even has a pouch sword, and very little else :P)
As that Swiss airport security guy can tell you.
In the comic, Giant Girl was a part of a government agency, and still occasionally does (unwillingly) work with them. I would admit it would be fun to see her up against Max. ;-)
the word “UN-willingly” implied they have some kind of hold over her, and if she’s as powerful as other have said… WHY does it WORK on her? if that’s all it takes for a government to make her do what they want, then all the equivalent government reps in this universe will have to say is: “No more vigilantism” and that will make it stick… no problem anymore…
ps. i’ve read a few of the comics before this thread, but i lost my bookmarks a while ago, and never got it back…
Simple. Veronica Kane was not always empowered as she is now, and she wasn’t when she worked for the Agency.
As for a Maxima fight, yeah- the big girl’s got raw power and a few tricks up her sleeve, but Max is a soldier, and she would never approach a fight like that without a plan. Even a halfway decent plan involving Maxima (forget about the rest of the team) would definitely take out even a full-strength Giant Girl with proper planning, data and application of force. I somehow doubt Max would allow it devolve into a simple slugfest where sheer size and brawn could win the day. She’s too smart for that.
Heck, if nothing else Dabbler could pick Ronni up in a bar with that fascinate ability of hers. Just sayin.
Though I could see Max and Ronni having a beer at the Nexus of Webcomic Realities Bar. If not at odds they’d probably get along, because they are like John Wayne toilet paper- rough, tough and they don’t take crap from nobody..
Step 1: Find out where she is at any point
Step 2: Max out speed while still being able to carry achilles (Potentially use sydney as way to bypass wind
Step 3: Max out strength, throw Achilles while still being propelled by mommentum from maxed out speed
Step 4: Achilles smashes into giant girl, goes through, and reaches apogee.
Step 5: Figure out how to get achilles back.
Step 3.5: Giant Girl sees Achilles coming, increases her density to neutron star levels or shrinks out of the way.
Step 4.5: Achilles bounces off or simply misses.
Step 6: An individual with enough potential personal mass to stand in for a black hole reaches out and turns you into undifferentiated matter or imprisons you in Whoville. Either way, you’re permanently out of the fight.
For OCD girl, I had some luck right clicking the image and hitting “open image in new tab”.
Oh well, I had 2 out of 3. I already follow Spinnerette and Giant Girl. I thought the ninja was from Dr McNinja, a webcomic I used to follow. Sux to me for assumptions XD
Dr. McNinja’s in its last few issues now; once the current plotline’s finished, so is the comic. Good time to get caught up.
He he. Spinny and the other guest vigilantes made me laugh.
Get a PI license, a security guard rating, a bounty hunter license, a repo license, etc.
Oh, and it’s not a secret identity, it’s your business name!
i imagine that for Peter Parker, it’s more dangerous for him to have his DNA tested or in any databank, or even maybe fingerprinted, than it would be for Spider-man. after all, Peter Parker supposedly would have spider DNA in all his tissue samples. they’d sample his DNA, see the spider DNA, and know something was up.
if i was Marble Maiden, i would probably have the skimpiest, easiest to replace costume ever. i imagine she goes through them slightly less quickly than Achilles.
I wouldn’t think that’s much worry- most DNA testing is just ‘are these markers there?’ and not any real sequencing. No-one would think to test Peter for spider-DNA, a normal DNA test won’t have it crop up.
Why do you think his DNA would somehow say ‘hey look I’ve got Spider-DNA mixed in!’? You’d first have to look and go ‘hey that DNA looks all wrong for a human’ AND for some strange reason go ‘hey I have this complete animal DNA database I wonder if the computer can find a match for it in there?’. Otherwise there’s really nothing about his DNA that would make anyone who wasn’t already on his way to being a mad scientist notice that it wasn’t purely human (and technically he DOESN’T have any spider-DNA, the radioactive spider-venom mutated him, it’s Spider-Man 2099 who explicitly has spider-DNA mixed into his own).
because he’d have more DNA than a human. unless the spider bite removed some of his human DNA, they would notice extra spider chromosomes.
Except he doesn’t have more DNA than a non-powered human, nothing has ever suggested he’s got more chromosomes than anyone else (and having fathered children he CLEARLY has the normal human complement in appropriately fertile configuration). He has DNA that’s been altered from what he had to start with, pieces have been swapped out or otherwise changed.
Spiderman has been published over 50 years. Canon has changed a LOT over the years (even if you ignore the Clone Saga and the horrible “One More day”).
I think if someone did a gene-scan on Parker they’d be somewhere between “That’s wierd” and “WTF?! Did someone reprogram the spectro-thingmadongle again?”
For the record, peter parker would probably also have a good alibi for his dna being found on the scene. “Um yeah, I was there taking pictures. See the pictures I got? They’ll be on the front page tomorrow!”
A very good point, being a photographer who often has photos from awesome battle scenes and crime scenes he has a legitimate excuse for why some of his DNA would be at the scene.
“They’ll be on the front page tomorrow!” The Bugle (and the Planet) were created back on the print media age. It is hard to believe they would still rely on this format in the digital age. I have not read either of the comics in years. Did either Marvel or DC ever allow their universes to introduce online formats of their flagship news publications?
Plus, either universe would now have smart phone traffic apps for New York that report delays due to supervillians or alien invasions. *BEEP* “Expect delays on the Brooklyn Bridge due to Goblin attack”
well, we already have the “Amber” alert for kidnapped kids, and the “Silver” alert for ?patients with Alzheimer’s? what would the “Superhero Fight” color code be? i don’t think it should be Gold, or yellow, because that’s way too similar to Amber as a color.
Red is firmly entrenched as an emergency response/threat level so that could be confusing, but possible, since Super-fights DO tend to cause havoc and destruction that needs to be dealt with in the same style, so it might not be such a bad choice after all…
Blue maybe? i don’t think they’re currently being used for anything. well, i think that CODE Blue is used in hospitals, i think for telling the staff over the PA system (but not shocking the patients/families of patients) that someone has died, or is about to die and a rapid response is needed to location xyz… i think? but since that’s pretty specific to the health care industry, i guess that it might not be too bad for implementing as an addition to the Amber Alert system…
and Green should be excluded, simply because of our pre-existing, socially approved, mental brainwashing stating that if something is Green, then it’s Good-To-Go and is, by definition: NOT a problem…
Mauve. Per Doctor Who.
Blue alert is too Arnold Rimmerish. I would go with swirly thing alert.
How about Black, orange or pink?
There are a number of powers that would make tracking someone down difficult to impossible, one good example is the Hulk as the transformation leaves nothing in common to compare him to Banner. You’d have to somehow catch them when transforming or have really good records for the area when things happen to even start to link the two. A reasonably careful super would have as little chance of being caught out as anyone else RL who tries to avoid being identified. You’d either need to not care, be really stupid or clueless, or have powers that made it difficult to impossible to keep a secret ID.
There’s a Marvel-Phile from way back when TSR was publishing the Marvel Super-hero RPG that actually covered the various factors to worry about and what things decreased the odds of being caught out (someone like classic Thor or Hulk were at the highest level of difficulty given the total disconnect in all observable parameters between their human alter-egos and their super-powered selves).
Gamma radiation works for Hulk. Plus, at least once, Banner outright told some guys he was the Hulk so they wouldn’t try to rape him in a shower one time. Dude’s got a point. Superstrong sphincters wouldn’t be kind to the average human.
Yeah, I got that book…Banner had taken a room at the YMCA because it was cheap & they don’t ask too many questions about your ID when renting them & also allow you to lock your door. That incident happened in the YMCA locker room next to the showers.
“That’s right, you don’t want to make me mad. I’ll get big & green & rip your…head off.”
:D
Nonsense. The Hulk is easy to identify. You just look for the one guy who wears really stretchy purple pants. :D
LOL… “my LORD, man, where the hell did you GET these things? They’re stretchier than Plastic-Man!”
All Hulk needs is a good tailor. People worry about keeping him calm and relaxed, I say a good tailor would solve all his problems.
Well, yeah…When he’s already angry enough to “Hulk out” to begin with, those pants have to stretch pretty tight across his…umm…yeah, that. It would probably be enough to KEEP him irritated, wouldn’t it?
:P
Notice that the pants are the only part that doesn’t rip away from body expansion the way they should (see Vehemence for example of proper expansion).
Thus I theorize that his (ahem) is the only part of him that doesn’t grow.
Now you know why Hulk always calls his alter-ego “puny Banner” and how he can remain angry for so long – if you were so much bigger than a normal human the way he is, but your masculine anatomy hadn’t grown to match your new proportions, you’d be pissed too.
Oh, sure. Send law enforcement agents, possibly with superpowers, out in public with orders to check the underwear of everyone they see. That’ll work out just fine. :-P
TSA full body scans to the rescue!
I always thought the ‘Pants Factor’ was the best part of the Hulk. He once re-entered the atmosphere at 50,000 mph and the pants were unharmed….
R.S.P.: Keep last bit of clothing intact no matter WHAT happens…
Comic Code to the rescue! Saving people from seeing basketball-sized… … basketballs…
The Jolly Green Junk, you mean?
Who says that grows? Maybe it stays regular human-sized. You’ve never seen those famous purple shorts sporting a bulge, have you?
No wonder he’s so angry.
Most men would violently resist being pantsed to check the color of their underwear.
Aside from the stretchiness of Banner’s purple underwear, they’re not all that unusual. Lots of men wear boxer-briefs and plenty wear unusually colored or patterned underwear.
Was going to ask about how long Marble Maiden has been active, but then remembered that vigilantism is illegal whether you are a Super or normal (unless you are a flying billionaire rodent with serious anti-social and parental issues)
Bats aren’t rodents, Dr. Meridian.
I once lost a trivia contest after the judges ruled that rabbits are rodents….
Rabbits have their own sub-category, but they match the requirements for rodentia.
Nocturnal Echo-Locating Flying Mammal Man.
– Adam Savage.
Do you mean “Man who is dressed like a bat”?
https://xkcd.com/1004/
Batman is just a very rich furry.
He goes around the city wearing an animal costume, often has sex with a woman in another animal costume (Catwoman), and, technically speaking, spends most of his time in his parents’ basement messing around on the computer looking for people he wants to beat up.
Sadface on including Spinnerette. It WAS a good comic, for the first several issues. Now? It’s terrible. First webcomic I’ve ever removed from my list of reads.
I agree. I also am not a fan of how the creator has a habit of – “Are you enjoying this storyline? Then you can pay up by buying the book.” I’m all for supporting via patron but when you hold the story hostage with a pay wall…. That’s just not right.
Those stories were always touted upfront that they were samples for the books, they were enticements, and a bonus, for buying the book, not a bait-and-switch
His work, his rules. Just because some authors are so generous (and/or so lucky with pay-per-view advertisements) as to allow you to read all the content for free doesn’t give other authors the obligation (or even the opportunity, given hosting and data transfer costs) to do the same.
If it was, it was not done so very prominently. On the grounds that I read it from the outset and was unaware of that.* Therefore was rather disappointed when I hit the pay-wall. It was unscalable, for me. Just to contextualise it, this is not uncommon for me
As such I average about 2-3 bus journeys a year (biassed to more in summer, for beachgoing). But, I am confident that what you have to say is factual. So I only have my own lack of observance to blame.
Mind you, I have no objection to any comic trying to make a financial return on their work, in any event. Unannounced or otherwise. Still sad though.
* Or possibly I misunderstood that it would be side-stories as opposed to integral to the main storyline. I still read several comics, which successfully pull off having pay-for content, as a side-story. In a way that does not make you loose out on following the core one.
This may seem a bit vague, but it is simply my policy to avoid anything which does that, so it may have been for either reason. I am the same with online games, be it demos or online games which only give you limited access. I had no problems with D&DO or COH offering special areas and perks to paying players, because they kept the core experience free.
Therefore carried on playing indefinitely. And even managed to eventually pay to unlock a bit of extra content. It took years, but I managed it, in the end. But I lost my bond with Spinny long before I could do the same for that comic though.
Sorry meant to reply to Guesticus‘s comment.
Grr “2-3 bus journeys a year ” = “2-3 bus journeys a month”
Silly of me. I know how that happened though. I was thinking about locals who could not afford to travel as much in a year, as I do in a month.
This is a point of Archon’s operation that I would oppose, were I in that world. Police should not be keeping, or being granted access to, information on law abiding citizens.
Ok, it is wholly in keeping with current American viewpoints on these issues. Especially with the mitigating excuse of keeping them to aid in the Archon role of dealing with natural disasters too. So my viewpoint shows me to be of the European influenced morality, as regards data protection and privacy rights. But I feel them to be the more progressive, so stick by those.
There is a good case to be made for keeping information that may be needed in a national or regional emergency. But, there should also be strict monitoring of what that may be. If it is ‘lets list everything, just in case’ then that is wrong. I like that in Europe regulators and courts can punish those who infringe rights in such ways.
In an ideal situation these two roles should be handled by separate organisations, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. Specifically because there is a severe conflict of interest when police and the state have easy access to the personal information of private citizens.
This is super registration by the back door! Being conducted without public knowledge or (apparent) oversight.
This particular setting does have a critical shortage of supers though. Shown by the fact that even the USA could not field a separate super police force and army. Therefore it is not practical to separate the roles as I outlined.
Hence a compromise would be strict compartmentalisation and enforced oversight, to prevent unauthorised access. So Arc-SWAT should be refused any request for information on anyone without a criminal record. Unless they got judicial permission to access it. Suspicion of a crime would not be sufficient justification, without proof.
Mind you, these kinds of protest, I have voiced, would be those of privacy rights campaigners, against the establishment. But, it could also lead to severe problems if Archon are found to have a different policy, behind closed doors, on super registration, to the one they publicly announced just yesterday.
There would be a complete breakdown of trust, from the super community. And that might apply to insightful individuals in Archon too.
+1
Except that police ALREADY HAVE access to a great deal of information on law-abiding citizens in our own universe? How else do you think background checks work? I’m in IAFIS from jobs working with young children (school bus driver and teacher), and the DMV from having a driver’s license and the IRS from, you know, being an adult who’s had a job, and the state and Federal Medicaid databases from being on Medicaid and the post office’s databases from having an address, and all of those are openly accessible to the police without need for a warrant.
As long as the database consists of public information to begin with, you’re not violating privacy. That’s why it can be so easy to Google people–all that information that they have put out in public forums. That’s probably why ARC’s database is light on law-abiding supers–like Sydney, they haven’t done anything where it would become public information. But that guy who put out the fires with an arm-fart did it where the news media took notice, and now that publically-circulated video and/or article is available for ARC’s data-mining. And for the data-mining of every private organization in the country, too. ARC might be able to cross-reference the video/article with some databases that private entities can’t access, such as the DMV and post office databases, but that is still considered “public record.”
ARC’s database is subject to the same laws about information usage and information privacy as any other Federal database, though. They can use the information in the course of their duties in law enforcement–hence the hunting down of vigilantes, who are operating illegally–but they can’t just round up a bunch of people who have done nothing, nor can they use the information in the database in a legal case without a warrant first.
They clearly didn’t have Sydney in the database until AFTER the bank incident, or they would have been knocking on her door with a “Have you heard the Word of ARC?” offer much sooner, and it’s been outright stated that Vehemence caught them entirely by surprise because he hadn’t done anything that was PUBLIC up until then.
Most of what you are saying is just pointing out where the USA is lax with data protection. I did point out that there is a big difference in how this is viewed in Europe. Just to illustrate the point, because the American public are relaxed about these issues, you make false assumptions. For instance:
Yes, yes you are. Earlier this year, British police took photographs of attendees, at a public event. Where various crimes took place, such drug dealing. On the kind of scale police are used to seeing at any festival.
They announced their intent to compare the database created (presumably incorporating linking photos to names via other means, such as photo recognition and social media) to known crimes at other events and to share it with other police forces. This was immediately stomped on by regulators and the courts. It is illegal under EU and UK law.
Them appearing in public is not sufficient cause to violate their rights to privacy and protection of their personal data. Which includes where and when they have been places.
I mention this incident because it is very close to what has been outlined in the comic, even though it is not an ideal counter to your specific point about ‘public record’ (which implies a published medium). But the EU data protection laws do cover that in detail. Citizens are the owners of their private data, even if it has entered into the public awareness.
Which means that courts and regulators will place their interests above those of others attempting to collate or distribute that data. Third parties need to show that they have good cause to do so. Plus they must not have more than they need for that specific cause. And they must follow strict rules on the handling of it. Including who they give access to it. And citizens are allowed to challenge their right to do any of that.
Hence why Google (as an example) have to comply with the European citizens’ ‘right to be forgotten’ and delete links to obsolete data (specifically including crimes that people may have committed*).
* Yes, this may seem wrong, at the outset. But why should someone involved in a petty crime, decades ago, still be loosing job offers, today, because that is what floats up anytime someone googles their name? If they have served their time and are honest people now.
Needless to say there are also examples of things which deserve to stay in the public domain being challenged (and even deleted), but that is simply a matter of having not found the right balance, in those particular instances.
Fortunately, the US doesn’t keep a database on dogs – OR DO THEY??
Pffft! You touch on a sore point. I have visited the USA since biometric data started being recorded. Fair enough, as a contingency in case I committed a crime whilst there (factoring in my tolerance of the xenophobia implied). Or, more reasonably, if I dropped off the radar and failed to leave by whatever date I was allowed to legally remain there.
Yet the f*****s still have my paw print on file, even years after I left!
*paces around irritably growling*
*puts out a nice calming steak*
*munch munch munch burp gobble gobble gobble*
*Curls up on rug and falls into a contented dog-nap*
To be fair, your DNA has to already be in a database somewhere for some reason in order for the DNA testing to identify you. Same with fingerprints. You can leave all the DNA and fingerprints you want if you’re not in any database and they’ll never be able to identify you. If anything, voice and body shape are a better way to figure it out. Comic books don’t often get the voice thing. How different is Superman’s voice from Clark’s? There’s a reason they had to try and give Batman a growl in the Nolan movies.
Domino masks are about worthless, though you also shouldn’t be entirely surprised a good mask could do, especially one molded to make it look like someone has different facial features.
Since people bring up Spider-Man, the bigger marker wouldn’t be DNA. It’d be the radioactivity. Guy’s got radioactive sperm. Chances are good he sings a little louder on Geiger counters than most other people.
Plus, knowing what a person’s face looks like doesn’t always make a difference. Like that one cartoon where The Flash and Lex Luthor got swapped into each other’s bodies. Lex Luthor’s like “Well, at least I’ll know the Flash’s secret identity.” And pulls off his mask while standing in front of a mirror. Then, “I have no idea who this person is.” Maybe it works if you’re famous, or if you’ve got quick and handy access to some sort of facial recognition software, but I’m betting that also works on a database.
In short, don’t let the CSI Effect fool you. It’s harder to figure out an identity than you’d think.
Thing is though that Spider-man ISN’T radioactive, or at least shouldn’t emit anything but normal background radiation. That spider would have had to have been pure radium AND eaten by Spider-man for him to end up with detectable levels of radiation. Everybody’s radioactive to some degree (Potassium for example has a minute amount of the radioactive isotope to it, so your banana is actually radioactive) as well, if you gave off enough to detect you’d be a radiation hazard to everyone around you (like happened to one of the Squadron Supreme members, his natural radioactivity increased without being detected, or that is his parents proved to be the detectors courtesy of their fatal cancers).
Let’s not forget, most don’t have access to the type of equipment we see in CSI. Even CSI and shows like it have made mention of that fact now, when someone from out of their jurisdiction comes in “Wish we could afford this.”
A big enough domino mask that has some added mass to it to distort facial markers, maybe even the special lenses that make it so that cameras only pick up a bright light/blur effect could do some good.
My guess though, is David is a fan of CSI and thinks it’s just that easy to catch people.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that DNA profiling is nowhere near as fast as it is in CSI and/or NCIS. Those shows would have you believe a profile could be done overnight, whereas in the real world, practically every DNA lab (in the U.S., anyway) has a backlog so long that you might have to wait two to six months for a result…
Well. The PROCESS is that fast. That backlog is a different issue than the process. (I know something about the speed of the process because my bio teacher was one of the team that invented PCR testing.) The labs also practice a sort of “triage,” prioritizing cases on the basis of urgency, so if your case is sufficiently urgent–say, involves taking down a serial murderer of young children–your DNA results can be gotten within a few days, whereas “We have this cold case from 20 years ago and we need DNA tested for it” is going to net you that six-month or more wait.
Noting about radioactivity and Spider-man: it was never supposed to be that Spider-man BECAME radioactive, only that the radioactivity changed him, and when the concept of DNA came into the comics, that radioactivity mutated his DNA. The latest iteration doesn’t even involve radioactivity, it involves a genetically-modified spider bite that genetically modifies Peter Parker. So a DNA test would probably have the lab techs calling the sample contaminated, rather than being able to use it, because it wouldn’t look the same as normal human DNA–but not identifiably as spider DNA–and anything taken from Peter Parker would probably have been tossed, too. Not that Peter Parker, as Peter Parker, has ever actually been in a position to put his DNA in a database of any sort, so far as I know, so it’s really moot.
Oh, and tripthicket, you are almost guaranteed to not be as reliable as you think you are; it’s why “I identified him by voice” is not considered particularly strong evidence in court. “Not as reliable” in the sense that “if they were actively trying to disguise their voices, you would probably have trouble” as well as in the sense of “if there were interference that you aren’t used to, you would have trouble” and “under the stress of a criminal investigation, you would have trouble.” Most people are pretty good at identifying known people by voice under typical circumstances, good enough that the police will use such identifications as leads to follow, but not good enough to be considered conclusive on those merits alone. It’s why they use all kinds of software to verify similarities between voices if it’s going to be crucial in court. Microphones and wave forms are way more sensitive than the human ear.
You are right, Varika. As I ponder my ‘ability’ further, I find that I’m really talking about my wife of decades, whom I’ve heard cough or make similar non-verbal sounds thousands of times. Even then, my theory is untested, and historically, witnesses are notoriously unreliable (why didn’t I remember that earlier? Insufficient caffeine levels? Must investigate further. Hrm.). If my wife was put in a line-up with several other women, hidden from sight, could I really pick her by her cough?
That is awesome. And informative. Thank you!
Ditto on that, and the rest of the well thought out reply,
Just as an aside, I have found that I can identify a person (admittedly, a person more-or-less well-known to me personally, and not from movies/TV) by their voice even when they’re not actually speaking. Say there’s three female members of my family in another room where I can’t see them, and one of them coughs. I can tell which of them it was (maybe it’s a timbre thing, that ‘matches up’ with their normal speaking voice), and I’d bet that everyone else could, too, in their own personal circumstances. Of course, this would have no bearing on a given person, in a city of millions, recognizing that Batman’s voice identifies him as Bruce Wayne, especially since A) that person likely never met Bruce Wayne, and B) Wayne is disguising his voice as Batman.
I may be a bit biased about the voice thing. I was able to tell some random song was Five Finger Death Punch entirely based on Ivan Moody’s performance in Devil’s Carnival allowing me to pick out his voice. It would work better for someone whose voice is heard often by a lot of people. Kinda shows how sight-biased we are that seeing a person is so much more easily taken as evidence than hearing a person.
Oh, ho! So that’s the Marble Maiden! I was wondering what she might look like. I’d just about forgotten the name, but she has been mentioned before.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/366
Well, I see that Giant Girl has dropped her hat precisely *because* of the similarity to Carmen Sandiego.
Of course, in real life, having your DNA only matters if your DNA is already in an accessible database and/or the people searching for you have a reason to test your DNA against the sample.
In Grrl Power, I assume Arc Dark has magic whoosits that can just find your location based on a DNA sample.
Perhaps, but they only ahve a limited number of people, and there are undoubtedly ways to mess up the scan.
Plus, there may be supers that do not *have* DNA to acquire – robots and AIs come immediately to mind.
For the OCD girl, those tiny comics are actually links to a page that’s supposed to contain the full-size version.
But for some weird reason you won’t see the full-size version as full-size unless you either have your “page style” option set to “none” (in the “View” menu for Firefox), or if you right click on the supposed-to-be full-size version and select “view image”
My mistake, you don’t need to do all that. Just click on the small image to go to the page with that strip all by itself. Then click on the strip again to see it larger. Then, if that’s not big enough for you, click on the larger image to view it full-size.
Ahhh… no. I’m trying to read through the comics now, and it seems that it isn’t consistent. Some of them you just click and then click on it again in the page that comes up, others you have to click and then right-click and select “view image”.
Annoying, that.
“Inveterate” has three “E”s.
And an invertebrate has no spine.
Yet Spinny does. Despite her other arachnid properties.
Spinnerette cameo!!!!!!
Here’s hoping for a crossover comic.
In my opinion, fire is the best way to remove evidence. there wont be anything left if everything is reduced to cinders.
Also, What are Sydney’s views on superhuman registration now that she’s part of law enforcement?
That depends. Did you use an accelerant like gasoline or paint thinner? If so, there are burn pattern experts skilled enough to tell, just by observing the pattern, that an accelerant was used. Then they bring in an accelerant-sniffing dog to find traces of the accelerant. Then they take samples of the accelerant. Then begins the gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, seeing if they can match the accelerant to other recent cases of arson, etc., etc., etc.
Point is, depending on how you start the fire, they can trace it back at least as far as “likely suspects”, though obviously it helps them if you have any priors, and hinders them if you’re careful to avoid recurring patterns… don’t use the same accelerant twice in a row, don’t start the fire in approximately the same location (e.g. kitchen, back bedroom, etc.) But your average arsonist doesn’t think that far ahead.
Fire to remove evidence adds arson to the charge list – and I think it’s a heavy charge for the very good reason that fire is a proverbially dangerous thing to be playing with. Especially if you’re just doing it to get off of a relatively minor vigilantism charge.
Also, another point about if the costume and mask are really good… you’d have to prove that the person you caught in the costume and mask this one particular time is the same person who was in it another time. Particularly concealing costumes that actually do avoid DNA testing means that someone could just claim they were forced to wear the costume if they get caught. Heck, if you had a spare set of robotic, wearable power armor, you could fake your identity being caught. Or even get caught for real and then get exonerated when the criminal is still seen running around anyway.
As has been noted before, vigilantes are often notoriously negligent about how their actions could play out in terms of the courts.
… And, if all else fails, there are always the Evil Twin and the Mind Control defenses.
Wasn’t that the Joker origin story in Killing Joke? Ok, ONE of the myriad Joker origin stories, like the myriad origin stories on who killed Bruce Waynes parents..
On an aside, the one I really liked was that the Waynes were killed by a low level gangster who was really nobody special. Almost certainly late golden/early silver age. I remember after finding out, he boasted about it and was promptly gunned down by his fellow gangsters for being the reason Batman existed. Of course only then did they think of asking about who he’d killed. Which he died before telling.
“the Waynes were killed by a low level gangster who was really nobody special”
Joe Chill…and he wasn’t the guy who became the Joker. It took a few years after Bruce Wayne became Batman, but he finally did get Joe Chill.
The Joker’s real name hasn’t yet been revealed (as far as I know), but he was the original Red Hood & did indeed become the Joker after having fallen into a vat of waste chemicals at a factory that produces playing cards. At that time, Batman was actually going after the Red Hood…
Joker’s origin story isn’t really set in stone. Even in the Killing Joke, he admits that sometimes he remembers it one way, sometimes another. If he’s going to have history, he wants it to be multiple choice.
Yeah, in that version, a gang picks someone else to dress up as Red Hood, so everyone’s looking at Red Hood as the mastermind and thinking he’s the one in charge. While everyone focuses on him, they can get away, or even turn on the “mastermind” for less jailtime if caught.
Take note of the genre red-herring precedent, if you consider Vehemence to be the mastermind.
Beware the Evil Squirrel Overlord!
So Hex was right?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1386
Obviously this was a Checkovs gun which would be unveiled as a major plot development in a few weeks after the battle (or 30 years in the real world :-( ) Ah. So Hex is an anti-squirrel activist who will reluctantly join with Archon forces to deal with the global squirrel threat. A Possible crossover with EGS will reveal pro human squirrel forces (aka: Grace) to further muddy the waters.
On an unrelated point: Firefox’s Australian dictionary accepts the term “anti-squirrel”. Think how unlikely that is, and realise that when the squirrels attack, Google will be ready..
Or Mozilla, as there is no edit function on these messages..
Wouldn’t it be cool if Marbles and Cree were related somehow?
I would love to see Archon try to tell Giant Girl what to do. I would say with her control of matter manipulation she is much more powerful than Maximia. She can control size and density separately. Also she can shrink items and people so small they enter another universe and then recall them back to normal size as well. If she wanted she could and has grown so large she can potentially break the planet into piece.
With her history of government employment I doubt she would willing work with arcswat and as noted by another commenter the agency still has ways of making her take on missions usually through misdirection
One sleep spell and she is out. Rock-Paper-Scissors is why supers form teams.
If she is at the 200 foot level you might want to rethink that sleep spell.
Having your foot go to sleep can play havoc on you mind, no matter how big or small you are.
Anyone recall some fan art from the creator of Magical Girl Neil,which is a pic of Maxima holding Neil’s female self?
If Neil’s adventures take place in the same universe as Grrl Power,would he/she be invited to the team?
I recall you (or another Rose That Doesn’t Reflect Much Visible Light) mentioning it back on https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1883/comment-page-1#comments, but, no, I haven’t seen it.