Grrl Power #415 – Are you there god? It’s me, Maxima
The first draft of this page stated explicitly what they’re both dancing around, but these two like being circuitous with each other. Essentially, Max is a super in her own right (at least a late bloomer since she hadn’t exhibited any powers by the age of 13.) AND has some sort of symbiote (?) of indeterminate origin adding its powers to hers AND that it was able to determine her superness and made a decision (whether consciously or by some sort of instinct – if it indeed even had any agency at all) to hitch its wagon to her horse. All guesswork by both of them, and probably impossible to determine at this point. Also it would be virtually impossible to tell if it’s boosting her existing powers, or if she would have been a moderately powerful super on her own, and it provides her power pool, or if it’s the source of her armor or what.
I’d love to do the extended version of Max’s origin, which deals with stuff like a 13 year old girl dealing with what seems like pretty frightening disfigurement at first (like girls that age don’t have enough body image issues – hence the coming of age reference in the page title) her first day back at school, breaking the land speed record while trying out for the track team, stuff like that. I just don’t want to derail the main story for that long. Maybe one day I’ll find someone who can draw it for me at a reasonable rate.
I messed up the art a little in this one. Max was supposed to be somewhere around sandy brunette to dirty blonde, but her hair gets really sun bleached and she spends a lot of time outside. She did cross country and track in high school, and kept up with her running over the summer. Really the tips of her hair should be that color, the rest should look like Sydney’s, minus the weird bangs obviously.
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Damn you, DaveB! Now I want a scotch egg. Or several. I’m going to go out and buy the sausage today while I do my shopping, I have all the other ingredients already.
Get some fine scotch while you’re getting the ingredients for Scotch eggs.
I always have fine scotch on hand. A nice single malt is my drink of choice.
Hey Dave, fun Idea, I would love for Dabbler at some point to find out about the “geode” and to recognize it. ;) No need to actually do it, but it might make for some interesting banter.
I think she just might.
Now that he’s come up more, and given the author’s expository comments, what about Max’s younger brother? Does he have powers? Is he in the Air Force? What is his name? All things I expect will come up in future story arcs, but sooner ones or later ones?
Given how extremely rare super powers are, I doubt her brother has powers
Maybe so, maybe not. Genes are a factor for supers in this Verse, after all.
Considering Max’s powers apparently came from the “geode” and he wasn’t exposed? Doubtful.
ProTip: the author’s comments immediately below the comic sometimes contain relevant information, such as “Max is a super in her own right … AND has some sort of symbiote”.
Re-read that comment and you will find that this is what Max and Deus think, not necessarily what actually happened.
Definitely see why Max took to Sydney so well, Though Max is focused on Deus and the implications of her own powers, I wonder if she ever wondered if Sydney’s Orbs might change her physically someday?
What if they slowly started to change Sydney neon colours….
GLOWING NEON!
She’d distract herself … she’d be her OWN weakness, ADD powers … ooooh, I’m SHINY!
There ARE two orbs whose purpose we don’t understand, yet.
One turns all nearby Geode Water into Shiny Weird Power Fluid.
I’ve been thinking of that recently, and what came to mind was an early 90’s series from Malibu Comics called the Strangers. And one of the members of the team, Spectrum, had the power to ignite himself with various colored flames, each with its own “power.” Red was rage-fueled super-strength, yellow was flight, purple was a force-field, ect. And for the longest time, the indigo flame didn’t do anything. Until they ended up on the moon, and it turned out the indigo flame generated a protective atmosphere. So on Earth, it didn’t do anything because it didn’t need to.
I suspect at least one, if not both, of the other orbs are like that. They need some special circumstance because whatever they do is redundant on Earth right now.
You know about The Strangers? Haven’t come across anyone else who had even heard about them!!
I remember those! I read the whole series, heck, I probably have them in a box in my parent’s storage to this day.
Their villainous counterparts were named “TNTNT” :P
Tyrannosaur, Neuronne, Tugun, can’t remember the last N and T.
I collected most of the early Ultraverse. Shame Marvel bought Malibu out and cannibalized the whole thing.
Yeah, got quite a few of those titles, had to order through a special catalogue (“Entertainment This Month” and “American Entertainment” still have them :D), as at that time, didn’t really get many US comics at all except for the big sellers from DC and Marvel (didn’t have a comic store near us until the last 90’s)
I remember them and the rest of the Ultraverse quite well. A lot of good ideas now sadly going unused.
Reminds me of Empowered and her mysterious Hyper-membrane super-suit. One story had her accidentally end up on an asteroid and luckily discover a new power of the suit, that it can protect her and allow her to breath in the space.
Something she never would have found out about if she hadn’t gotten lost. Mysterious Power granting objects shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Yeah, if they had known about what the indigo-flame did, they would have gone to the moon too early and died
Well…poor Max.
Really huggeable in panel 4, and yes, this does explain a lot…but not everything, so I am fourthing the vote for a full (even if text only) PreBio of maxima.
Ikr?
You just wanna headpat her so much.
I would love a text only expansion of the universe
Gotta hand it to ya, Dave!
That one frame of partially-transformed teenage Maxima with that relatively subtle tear streak down her chin is probably one of the best minimalist portrayals of a character’s turmoil I’ve seen you done yet!
I agree, that one frame is more character growth than you see in some entire movies
I keep trying to giver her a hug and tell her it’ll all be OK but the monitor keeps getting in the way.
Reminded me of Angel in X-Men Last Stand.
Indeed; Sydney likely reminds Max of what she might have been, had things gone differently.
Most people worth a damn have had moments like panel 4 – maybe not the gold bits, but the tears and simple brokenness for certain. It’s moments like that that eventually make them who they are.
Had one of those fridge horror moments while re-reading this; apparently I was too tired this morning to fully get it. I thought this morning that, by the time she began peeling, she was already changed inside, and that all that was left to rip off skin and hair. Then I looked at the Patreon version tonight… and noticed the X-ray… and went, “Oh, dear. It’s not done.” That’s gotta be a level of scary I’d rather not think about – knowing your body’s changing into something radically different, that your right hand literally doesn’t know what you’re left hand is doing, and there’s nothing you or anything else can do about it.
Well played, Dave. Well played.
How did an obvious super run cross country and track in high school? If she’s gold by 13, she’s not going to be a freshman yet. Unless Max skipped grades? What’s up, Dave?
THX,
GEP!
Maybe her physical powers took a little longer to develop. Or it takes a concious decision to move her powerpool into speed and such, and she didn’t find out she could even do that until later. I’d imagine her mental state (afraid) pushed her heavy into armour
And of course, the concept of ‘super powers’ didn’t exist in the real world when Max was a teen. That’s only come out into the public recently.
Maxima wasn’t a super, she was weird
No, Supers had been around for awhile, but just isolated mostly and reports were usually passed off as “National Enquirer” level nonsense
Don’t know about in the US, but we have ‘track teams’ in schools before High School
I means he wasn’t super in the eyes of people, because that wasn’t a thing.
She was older when she found out about her fireball powers.
Hmm, crap I might have messed that up. I suspect they don’t have track and cross country in middle school do they? Although, growing up on several different Air Force bases, maybe the kids get to use the same running tracks when the military guys aren’t using it?
” I suspect they don’t have track and cross country in middle school do they?”
Our schools of the 1960s did, for both boys and girls. That was the era when schools were run by, for, and of, the jocks.
Just pass it off as her family being stationed in a country that did, and maybe being ‘forced’ to return to the US once her powers started to fully manifest
I ran track in middle school in the ’80s. No CC though.
My kids now run CC in middle school, but they don’t have track.
I think you are safe.
Simple: remove the “obvious”. Her family and her doctors knew, but at first perhaps she tried mostly-clothed with makeup or flesh masks/gloves for the what “skin” she had to show, and dying her hair? Couple this with going easy on her powers (so she can train/learn, but far more importantly from her perspective, so she won’t rip the mask)…which of course doesn’t last, but gives her time to begin to accept her new self.
Result: she ran track and cross country in HS while being a disguised super. Once she was outed, being removed from the team would have been yet more drama…until perhaps someone (maybe her) pointed out that nothing said she couldn’t still run for her own sake, and that nothing in the rules said being a super excused her from physical education classes, even if she was free to come up with her own drills.
My junior high school had intra-school-district track, basketball, and baseball/softball. State level competition was a high school thing.
Interesting that her skin is peeling, but her hair is transforming. It is not falling out and regrowing, it is actually turning purple while still attached. I couldn’t get a good look at what was going on with her eye.
It’s easier for hair color to change than skin color. I am going grey and not a single hair has fallen out to be replaced by grey hair. Meanwhile, when humans sunburn bad enough they molt. It could be that her skin was in fact turning gold but her skin got so burned the gold came in underneath. Or she’s just molting period. Heh, molting for molten gold underneath.
It’s probably similar to how dyed hair turns back to it’s original colour. The newly grown parts of the hair are the new colour, while the rest of the hair is the old one.
Seems like her skin is undergoing the same transformation. New skin is forming gold, and the old layer is slowly falling off (as it normally does, but you don’t notice because the new layer is usually identical).
A sunburn probably accelerated the process, causing it to happen so asymmetrical
I thought the purple streaks were weird too. I expected her purple “roots” to be showing., even if the purple came in slowly like gray hair, it would grow in, not just spring up over the period of time it takes for sunburn blister to peel.
Remember she also has accelerated healing. Her body functions work proably faster than ours.
But hair is just dead strings of protein. Accelerated bodyfunctions can’t just make that change colour, that only happens by replacing the old hair. And that means the hair is longer
If you’re a Patreon supporter the 2x size shows what’s going on with her eye. The eye on her right side (our left) is still blue. Her left side, where she’s changed to mostly golden, has more purple hair, and has lost her original skin? That eye’s purple now.
well, the outer layer of the skin is epidermis – epidermis itself as several layers. among those, the outermost layer, the stratum corneum is almost entirely made up of dead skin cells :) so if only the living cells have been altered, and broke any ‘bond’ they had to hold this layer of dead cells – it’s becoming quite logical her skin shedded in such manner :)
although whatever altered maxima must have also altered key functions of her skin too – cells in the outer layers of the skin absorbs the major part of the oxygen they need directly from the air, and not from the blood vessels. Skin also play a most important role in body temperature regulation (sweating to cool down, goose bumps (and body hair) to preserve heat.
given the mirror like appearance of her skin, it can no longer perform those functions – so those functions have to be done by other means now :)
Maxima probably has enormous tolerance to temperature extremes, and whatever mechanism fuels her powers is far, far beyond the level of heat generated by normal biological processes. If she notices temperature at all, it’s likely in the same way that she notices things have weight. Which is to say, more intellectually than as a physically taxing experience.
Meanwhile the various weapons in that rack that can have identified her as a suitable host as well and are all like ‘Pick me! Pick me!’. Unfortunately for them, her current occupant is keeping them quiet.
These last couple of panels have been fascinating… Maxima as a teenager seems like a huge goofball, you can almost see a lot of Sydney in her, which is probably why she can tolerate Sydney’s… Sydneyness… so well.
Well, Maxima admitted to being a nerd as a kid
Hmm… Come to think of it, did the Balls choose Sydney?
Are there more artifacts out there? Is there a master plan?
I’ve mentioned on the first page of comments for this comic, my pet theory is… almost exactly that. I really hope we find out about OTHER superhero origins for possible confirmation.
I’ll bet breaking the land speed record made that track quite the local landmark. In fact, I could easily imagine the school (if not the community) attempting to cast Max as a kind of mascot. I’m sure that her trials growing up included combating not only body issues but also simultaneous alienation and celebrity. Not to mention anxious parents who would surely be concerned for their own children’s safety once they learned that a girl who apparently caught some exotic mutation of unknown origins also has vast destructive potential. Especially what with the energy blasts and all.
Yeah, there’s a wealth of material there… I really do hope you do something with it, Dave. Plenty of other webcomics have spinoffs. If I didn’t have Zebra Girl already on my plate, I would seriously consider offering my services in illustrating it. The subject matter is kind of in my wheelhouse.
Hypothetically, she could have worked out with the track and cross-country teams in order to (a) retain a knowledge of the limits of ordinary people and (b) challenge the others on the teams to stretch their limits by deliberately turning it down to just a bit better than said others were last week – but then not entered competitions against other teams. But then, if there’s no recognition that supers exist, there can’t be rules barring them from competitive sports with non-supers – it would be just a problem of supers outclassing non-supers so badly that it’s no fun for either of them.
Also, those two sports pose unusually low risk of injuring other participants – you aren’t deliberately running into them, or sending flying objects in their general direction. (The latter being somewhat dependent on the exact layout of the event area; there could be some other event area downrange of the throwing or long-jump area – but nothing says that any object-launching event and downrange event have to happen at the same time.) In contrast, tennis involves using an instrument to deliberately launch a ball at high speed into an area where there’s another player or two. Let’s just not even think about Max playing rugby with non-supers.
You raise a good point there. How come no super speedster ever went into sports and ran in the Olympics, before supers were officially a thing? That would break the secret/unknowing real quick
Remember that scene from “The Incredibles” where Dash was competing in a track race? He had to keep slowing and speeding up to make it seem fair
Cross country running would probably be where Mini Maxi would have felt the most comfortable (and by ‘cross country’, actually mean ‘cross continent’), most long distance runners tend to ‘zone out’ and focus only on the course or the simple action of running
When she and Sydney we visiting the Grand Canyon she made a comment about “Flying for fun.” I have a feeling that was/is her zone out method.
“there can’t be rules barring [supers] from competitive sports with non-supers”
Event Judge: “so, exactly how were you able to beat the old track record by 8 minutes?”
Max: “Well… I drank this geode water… and just changed”
Event Judge: “So, performance enhancing drugs? You’re disqualified”
And here I thought she was an alien.
No, that’s Dabbler.
yeah, I know,
I just thought Maxima was also an alien
Wonder how long after this was Max blowing out the side of the house? She had obviously been allowed to go home by that point and certainly had finished her transformation.
She also, ummm, er, grew a bit in between which just added weirdness to weirdness for a girl at her age.
Might be her extreme feminism is her subconscious tying all the male attention she gets to the sudden and violent upheaval in her life caused by her origin – which is also when she started getting excessive attention from men because she was a teenage girl with giant boobs.
Dude, she was a teenage girl with boobs. A traditionally good looking white teenage girl with boobs. she’s already well on her way to feminism. The gold plating just added anoth layer to it.
I couldn’t find the page where Max does a flashback about accidentally blowing away a good sized chunk of her family’s house, but in that she clearly had finished becoming gold and had gone up several cup sizes to put it mildly. In that picture she is a minimum of a full DD, supposedly at age 13.
The sad fact is that a great many men and an even greater number of boys would suddenly begin talking to her chest, and many would seek her out to do so. Not too much of a leap to think she hates the one because of the pain the other caused. Nerdish girl turns centerfold in one month or less and now she isn’t completely human – it’s gonna leave some big scars.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/720
No, she would have been closer to around 16 when she brown-pants’ed her brother, she was 13 when she drank the Geode Juice that triggered her latent abilities
16 based on what?
I’m going to break this into several posts, because this (potentially) clarifies a lot of things for me.
First: Max (and Dabbler). Max has puzzled me since the beginning, since most heroes of her type normally cannot shunt power from one aspect of their power grid to another. More importantly, she shouldn’t be able to reinforce one aspect of her powers without detracting from the others…unless she has something absorbing her extra power, that can just make that extra available at need. The symbiote would fit that description–it clearly bonded to Max when she was just starting to develop her powers, and almost retarded them for a time as it did…something. My guess is that it somehow altered her (and is probably still altering her) to amplify her powers, essentially by reinvesting the energy that she produced to somehow increase her total output. Likely, it is still doing so, meaning that her powers will continue to grow as time goes on, and is only taking a portion of her power to feed itself.
My guess is that this is something that would have been deliberately developed to allow supers to handle people like Dabbler–energy users of some sort. Be it vehemic, tantric, or some other type, such people would be able to charge energy very rapidly to become effectively invincible. Without something like Max’s symbiote, Dabbler or Vehemence would have been effectively unstoppable. As it is…well, you saw how much work Vehemence had to put into fighting Max, and I doubt that most people fighting somebody like him would have avoided killing him first off.
This, in turn, would imply that there is an entire galactic civilization based largely off of (and putting a great deal of study into) super powers. In all likelihood, most of those civilizations would only be a little bit more advanced than ours except in a few key areas…and in other areas, they might not be even that advanced. Which would be the first real excuse I’ve ever seen for why an alien empire can’t exceed our newest technology.
Actually Maxima IS detracting from her powers in order to reinforce another aspect. We see this clearly in her fight with Vehemence.
When he blasted her with lightning, Maxima was forced to pull her power out of strength and put it into armour. Vehemence interpreted this as lightning sapping her powers
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1557
No, we see that she CAN. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1508 has her reinforcing her existing powers, but not to the same extent, and in her bio, it states flatly that she has a power reserve that she can call upon at need without detracting from her current abilities.
Sure, but a power reserve is just not yet allocated power. It’s effectively the same thing. In a fight she’ll always be using all the reserve, so detracting from 1 aspect or using the reserve is the same thing.
Your example doesn’t show anything different then mine though. In both cases, it’s pointing a big arrow at 1 power (the one she wants to put all her ‘points’ in). In the before in my example, it has 3 small arrows in 3 powers, showing she spend her reserve on all 3
What RobK said.
Imagine this way: Max has 10 points of energy, and six powers to allocate them to. (Note: these numbers are not necessarily canonical.) With NO points allocated to a power, she’s at or slightly above non-super human capacity; with ONE point allocated, she’s well above. So she allocates one point to each of her six powers – holding four points back. She’s a super in every way that she’s currently capable of, just not as much so as she’s capable of being.
Those four points are her reserve. If a situation occurs, she can beef up whichever powers are immediately needed – by quite a lot, if there are only one or two – without having to decide what powers to turn down.
And then she’s still capable of cranking most powers down and pouring the energy into whatever is really critical at the moment.
Generally correct but with one correction. She is strongly super human without using any of her power pool. At base power she is still stronger then a lot of supers.
Secondly, this explains a bit about just what those orbs of Sydney’s probably are. See, way I figure it, if somebody can develop technology to amplify super powers, they could build tech to imitate them. And if you can technologically imitate super powers, you can add a whole bunch of powers onto one person, giving them a much wider range of powers than would normally be the case. Because the user isn’t interacting directly with the powers, they have a less accurate feel for the powers’ limitations, not to mention less fine control, but that’s something that can be dealt with using other means. Yes, computers are awesome.
Basically, this would mean that Sydney’s orbs are the equivalent of a suit of power armor, probably created for wandering (civilian) adventurers or explorers, that got left on Earth millions of years ago when the previous occupant died. This would explain both the broad array of powers available to Sydney, as well as their sheer…well…power. In all likelihood, the orbs draw power from something else–possibly a black hole on the other end of the universe, or perhaps something even more exotic–and have effectively unlimited range and a huge array of potential uses. My suspicion is that Sydney’s set was probably embedded in the coral reefs that Sydney was diving among, and then, due to the reef poisoning that we have been hearing about, was exposed to the ocean. In all likelihood, this would explain why Max can’t just drag Sydney around in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/370–she's trying to go against technology specifically engineered to prevent that from happening.
If this is the case, than Sydney’s set of orbs is almost certainly a civilian model of armor–I can’t imagine why anybody would make a set like this for military use and only let you use two powers at once–and it was probably created by a relatively benevolent civilization, simply because otherwise there would be a great deal more evidence of their existence lying around (and Dabbler would know what she was looking at when she first saw those orbs). The civilization that created them is likely gone, possibly ascended to a higher plane, or possibly destroyed in some kind of vast civil war. Whichever might be the case, the reality is that, by now, only a handful of relics from that civilization remain. I would also assume that the orbs need a set of implants of some kind to function at full capacity, and since Sydney doesn’t have those implants, she can’t really control the powers as well as she should be able to. This would explain why Sydney can’t really aim her death ray, and why her shield doesn’t have air holes, but doesn’t simply trap her in a hamster ball when she activates it.
Now, if I was the storyteller here–and I’m not, but if I was–that would mean that somewhere out there in the galaxy there would be a military version of those orbs, and the person with THAT getup would have the full implants needed to control their gear…but that would just be me. I’m sure that Dave is MUCH nicer than that, and would NEVER do anything like that to us.
It is just like Arthur C. Clarke said about Dabbler: “Any sufficiently developed alien technology is indistinguishable from magic boobs.”
It would explain how women always know when you’re looking at them
It is highly likely that sydney is a super in her own right, and the orbs chose her because she is the long lost descendant of the original owner.
But i will say, that its not that she can only use two at a time, its that she only has two hands. If dabbler were using them, she could use as many as she had hands.
Also, since it is a skill tree, i hypothesize that the large point put into the unknown green sphere (the one im pretty sure is HP or something similar) is what gives her her super reflexes, she DID out-reflex the super ninja, after all.
There is more, but I’m too tired to write it all up right now…maybe later.
I’m actually intrigued by the idea of TeenMax and what she went through. It would make an amazing spin-off comic.
Your average ‘teenage dork growing up and getting bullied’ drama.
Only the dork is just developing superpowers
I think they did a movie like this once. It was called Carrie
Actually, it makes her life choices make a lot more sense. People who join the military are usually either gung-ho Patriots in love with America, or people with no-place else to go. Max as a teen doesn’t seem to be the sort who would have grown up to join the military, she probably would have been an athlete. She also probably DID get harassed like all hell due to her appearance, evidenced by her attempts to cover herself in makeup. So my guess is that she joined the military mostly out of looking for someplace to belong, recovering from having all of her prior dreams crushed. It would explain why she is so in love with her place as a soldier, she found purpose through the military.
Her father was military, so there’s also that
“I think they did a movie like this once. It was called Carrie”
…also The Amazing Spiderman.
This is actually fairly disturbing on a philosphical level. Is she even the same person after this process? I mean it appears her tissue is being replaced by this golden nano-tech metalic alien thing. Including her brain. It basically means she’s a pod person. She may think she’s the same person, but its more like her brain was replaced by a nano-tech version of itself that duplicated every neuron (assuming the change is sytemic and not skin deep?) If it happens slowly, with each neuron replaced and integrated with old biological neorons before the next biological neuron is replaced, until all have been replaced without the person being able to feel the difference in any way. Is it the same person?
It’s a bit like the dilema with “Argo’s Ship”. If you replace every part with a new part, is it the same ship? Does it matter if the process is slow or fast? If you took all those replaced parts and made a whole new ship out of used parts, is it a clone or is it the original ship?
Your question makes no sense. I am not the same person, philosophically or practically, that I was at this time yesterday. Sydney is not the same person that she was before she joined ARCHON. And Max is not the same person that she was before she became all golden and stuff. People change with time. That is what time does.
The question I think you may have MEANT to ask is whether Max is the same person she would have been without the whatsit merged with her. And to that, I have to say that the point is probably moot. A slow change, such as what you are speaking of, would not be able to predictably change a person in any way–not without killing her in the process. If Max is not dead, than she could change, adapt, and recover from any negative personality consequences. What Max is now is who she likely would have been had she not met the golden liquid thing.
As for the Argo’s Ship dilemma, the question boils down to simply this: is the ship simply a collection of parts, or is it a separate object in its own right? As an answer, I will present to you this thought: the word “ship” is one of the oldest words in the English language, and one of the handful still in use that can be traced directly in a form very similar to its modern form all the way back to the Indo-European proto-language that English originally came from. In other words, the concept of a ship as a separate entity, not simply as an agglomeration of parts, is even older than our language…or even our civilization.
So…yeah, you can replace every part of the ship with a new part, and it will still be the same ship (although speed does make an impact, much like how quickly you lose your hair affects your self-image). A new ship made from the old parts will be just that–a new ship. Not a clone, or the original. Just a new ship. Even if the original ship is destroyed, and the new ship is built using the original’s parts, it is still a new ship (I’m told that the new vessel is considered to be a daughter of the original, but I don’t actually know this).
The only thing that never changes, is that everything changes
A person isn’t is body. A person is that spark of awareness that drives the body. So long as that’s still there then the person is still there. Put a computer program in the the diver’s seat of a car, replace every single piece of that car… still the same computer program. Replace the computer the program is running on too… _still_ the same computer program.
also, technically, we replace every cell in our body every decade or so anyway. So any one over 10 years old is technically a pod person by that standard.
To clarify your car comment: If you play a game on an old computer and it’s a little laggy, and some of the effects have to be turned off to run properly. Then you replace the CPU, add memory, upgrade the graphics card, upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Then the game will run faster, and have more effects, but it’s still the same game.
And, funny enough, if you could somehow copy your exact conciousness onto a computer, you would exist inside that computer. It wouldn’t be a program pretending to be you, it would BE you
Zenopath’s point was: is the change to Maxi’s brain due to her life-experiences, or due to whatever the Geode Juice is?
Same as: is her change to the GEOD due to the Geode Juice, or would she have become the GEOD anyway (her latent ‘mutation’)?
YOUR brain is also being replaced on the atomic level, with new atoms. 7 years ago, you had an entirely different set of atoms making up your body. Would that make you a different person? Of course not (not counting emotionally different here, physically different)
It’s the neuron connections that store your memories, and make you who you are. If your cells are replaced 1:1, those connections stay intact.
And yes, I also believe that an exact replica of me, down to every neuron, and thus having identical memories, would also be me. There’d be 2 me’s. It sounds fun. I’d probably be great friends with me
You’d love the Gav’s from Schlock Mercenary then…
I think I’d hate another me. I’m god dammed obnoxious.
Pohl and Williamson’s Saga of Cuckoo does teleportation through matter duplication. Both duplicates come out of the process thinking that they are the original and wondering what the duplicate is like, since it obviously isn’t them. Fortunately, they are usually separated by light years, so they don’t have to find out…
The fun part about assuming I’d be friends with myself is that neither me nor my clone would think of myself as ‘the original one’. I (and thus my clone) have already accepted that we both are
@Zenopath:
She starts this process as a 13-year-old girl. She comes out of it an adult. Having raised two children through that, I can confidently say that the answer to your question is no. And the unusual physical changes and development of superpowers would only make the “no” more emphatic.
Agrecian: the only difference is that Mini Maxi had additional physical changes not normally found in humans
I was just running through the list of things that teenagers want to do, and sometimes get to do, that Max can’t do. She can’t get piercings, she can’t get tattoos, and she can’t dye her hair. If she was using makeup at that age, she can’t use it any more after that. It’s been implied before that she might not even be able to get her hair cut, certainly not in the typical mode.
In my personal experience, I’ve never wanted to do most of those things. But if I hadn’t even had the option at her age, I’d’ve been pretty resentful of the fact. Doubly so if people around me DID get to do those things, and maybe even double again if they assumed I’d done the same because I looked so radically different.
Frankly, it’s almost astounding that Maxima didn’t become a supervillain just from teenage resentment alone.
Something tells me, that Mini Maxi may have been on the verge of turning rotten, but something or someone stopped her (maybe she did something out of anger that horrified her, punching a bully too hard is a likely option, or she had a very good councillor who talked her through her issues)
I think you miss the point of what I’m asking. I mean, yes, every atom in your body gets replaced eventually (though not at same rates, stuff like DNA for example doesn’t get replaced nearly as often). Yes, your cells do get replaced too, (again some more than others obviously, central nervous system tends to regenerate very little new cells ever, compared to skin and muscle cells that get replaced a lot).
So yes, this natural process is completely normal and not to be equated with what is essencailly a metaphoris from organic tissue to bizarre alien metal. If she were turning into a werewolf, she’d at least still be a mammal. The doctors can’t ex-ray her and can’t draw biopsy. Her blood sample is confusing as hell… this means its probably not just a skin deep change. She’s becoming a non-organic person. I see it as bio-mechanic, obviously, but still, alien technology created bio-mechanic nano-tech.
Call it what you like. But unlike say a mutant ability based on genetics that lets you turn into metal (I’m talking the x-man Colossus), this change is implied to be alien in nature. So if the alien picked her because of her latent ability, it would be a bit like wolverine being picked for adamantium bones. It wasn’t a part of him, it just happened that he was someone who could survive that process due to healing factor. Is Maxima someone who’s latent super power allowed her to survive the tranformation or did the transformation come from her latent powers? End of the day, still disturbing either way, because even if you accept that her consciousness is completely unchanged, the hardware it’s running on has been completely replaced by alien tech. If you managed to get windows 10 to run on an alien computer, would it be the same as a human computer? I’d think not. It would still be something not human-made.
Of course, I’m not saying Maxima is evil or not a person. She’s still a person, has her own right to exist, so forth. I’m just saying that poor teenager had her personality uploaded into a new body while her old body was eaten by an alien nano-tech process. Creepy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS5uppCR33U :D
That might actually play into Maxi’s and Deus’ assumptions that she was ‘chosen’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHaahKa1Nk
Boy I’m glad Cronenberg wasn’t an inspiration for this. I can always count on this comic to not make the same mistakes Fant4stic did.
Maxima: Now, if you’ll excuse me *eats half-geode*
Deus: WUT
Ouch. The next step is for the doctors to call the CDC, as they have an unidentifiable medical situation. Once the government gets involved, Max goes into isolation until they deem that she is not a threat to the human race, her family goes into isolation for the same reason, everyone who was at the museum that day will get contacted, tested, questioned (probably under another excuse). I am surprised the geode wasn’t found when the men in the contamination suits went looking for it, as I’m certain Max would have told the doctors about the object that splashed her. I’m estimating that Max’s family was isolated for at least a month, and Max for nearly a year, with family visits allowed regularly. If her parents were smart, they probably got a powerful lawyer and some political connections to keep Max from simply “disappearing”. Of course, once her powers showed up, keep Max disappeared would be a bit more difficult…
We know supers have existed before her, and the government is fairly benevolent towards them. Pretty sure at some point somebody important raised the issue of “If we treat some new super like less than dirt, and they turn out to have megaton nuke-generating capability, we will kinda deserve what we get.”
I doubt Max even remembered the random geode water at the time. All she knows is that she came back from vacation with a sunburn, and her new skin is gold. She wouldn’t remember a random splash of water
Both good points.
Oh I’m sure the geode water in the mouth came back to her mind once she started really shedding. It would kinda hit the top of the mental list of, “strange things that happened to me before my skin turned to gold.”
Doesn’t mean she told her parents or the featured set of doctors about it.
Her x-ray opacity changes some of the suppositions about using x-ray vision in the locker rooms. The other people may be just skeletons covered in grey fog, but Max will show up in full body outline.
On the medical side, her doctors may have to resort to ultrasound to get any idea of her internal structure.
And did they even check the ‘geode’ for radioactivity? Because everything is better with a big dose of gamma rays.
Just an outline though. And I doubt any of the guys would dare use Xray to look at her through the shower. She’ll know. somehow.
Math might, given the opportunity….
Well, I personally find the “Shower Curtain Sillouete” trope to be very erotic. It’s got that, just enough to let the mind fill in the blanks, thing going for it.
Got to say,the biggest loss was of those freckles. They were adorable.
Agrecian, poor Maxi misses her freckles more than anything else :(
Gotta almost agree with moridain this one, but the hit to her personality likely edges it out.
The Innocence Lost its strong in this one. Poor kid.
Those were not freckles, those were midichlorians. That is why the space egg picked her.
HERETIC!
Midichlorians are a lie.
You must be scourged.
Or be the scribe for Jar-Jar Binks while he is telling his life story.
Darth Binks, if you please.
Anyone else have a deep-seated desire to beg Disney to re-write Episode Three as the reveal of a very clever and spectacular actot that Jar-Jar should have been?
I mean, it couldn’t be any worse than what we given, right (mostly because George wouldn’t be allowed to write dialogue, but still…).
Soryy, WAY off topic now…
Robot Swim agrees with you on Jar Jar.
*Groan*
Obviously that should have been Robot Chicken from Adult Swim.
So this brings up an interesting point: Varia cannot draw power from Max. And now we have a good idea why, because Varia isn’t actually making contact with Max herself, she is touching the gold entity that has latched onto Max. This also brings up a few questions: For one, why does Max have blue blood? How deep has this lifeform penetrated her body (giggity)? Has it fully integrated into her DNA, or is it still possible to separate them? And finally, the big question is how does this thing connect to Halo’s orbs, and perhaps all supers in general, because it seems like this is building up to some outside force dicking around with humanity, as was hinted at way, way back.
Also, getting a serious Cronenberg vibe off this page.
DaveB explained that Maxima’s powers come from a forcefield that envelops her cells, and acts as a scaffolding for her powers. I’d guess the ‘symbiote’ is that scaffolding
Varia doesn’t ‘drain power’ from anyone, she gains a random-seeming power from DNA
I didn’t say she drained power.
Not sure why read that as ‘drain’ :(
does the symbiote have a name? please let it have aname
Marvel has used lots of symbiotes in their stories. Their species name is the Klyntar
https://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Klyntar
The closest one to Max is Scorn. It is a machine-human-symbiote fusion that created a shiny metallic skinned female (and is purple). https://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Scorn
Marvel took a very ‘fan service’ design for this character. From the image, their opinion is apparently “She’s wearing a symbiote, who needs clothes?”
Well, first off, it needs to be determined if Mini Maxi was infected by a symbiote or if the Geode Juice simply triggered her latent powers
Also, none of the ‘Klyntar’ wear clothes, not even Venom
The symbiote is (now) named Maxima, or “Max” for short.
Separate names are for separate identities. That doesn’t seem to be happening in this case: the person and the symbiote are one.
i’m wondering how quick maxima’s ears got reshaped following her transformation :)
Fascinating developments, but running against my own personal biases. I’d prefer to think that, yeah, Max just happened to be the one who handled that and had that happen. No grander purpose, just a billion to one chance. I’d rather subscribe contrived coincidence and happenstance to events than willful design any day.
Mini Maxi is the only one to have ever touched that geode, in a pile of other geodes, and not even the staff or the one(s) who found slash dug it up touched it either?
Oh, I’m sure other people touched it. But not in the exact precise way she did. Just the contrived coincidence of right place right time.
Now, little symbiote, show me on the geode dolly where the teenage girl touched you…
‘There’ god? Seriously? The word is ‘Their’.
No, he has it right. First, it’s a reference to a book called “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.” And the way the sentence is written, it’s not asking “are you who they pray to?” so much as “Are you around, can you hear me?”
“Their” is a possessive article, as in “he’s their son”. I know this because as a former English teacher, I’m the SS of grammar nazis.
You quite literally just got schooled.
Hey, DaveB, check it out!
Phil (Jonathan Slavin) and Lem (Malcolm Barrett) are talking about being in your comic last week!
https://imgur.com/4bWy7En
Have to say, DaveB got their likeness down better :D
Hah that’s pretty cool!
Hey Dave? Small thought to expand things for you a bit: Have a competition every now and then involving Max. Tell use something like: “Max tried out for track at age 16 and scared X number of kids, adults, teachers.” Then see what we can come up with: fan-art to expand the ‘verse.
So lets see if I’m right, the items background are the sword from kill la kill, the sword form soul caliber, the scythe from RWBY maby, and are those the daggers from Riddick
Go back a couple pages to see the full display, and get the names for every weapon
That 4th panel captures so much while being so “simple”. Great work.
Now I kinda feel sorry for Max. Mentally, she doesn’t seem like the type to become a military officer, and definitely more a Lee than a Grant.
My money on the geode is its what happens to halo’s orbs if they are left to sit for a billion plus years, and their innards ferment.
I’ve no reason to think this except it would be fun for six more of them to be out there, with varied properties.
I think I can settle the identity of this ‘geode’ once and for all. Max was doused with the contents of a Horta egg. https://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Horta
Interesting, but I recall very very clearly how Horta biochemistry interacts with Humans – Max would not have been transformed by that stuff, she would have dissolved.
You used memory alpha, so that settles it as far as I’m concerned.
The question i have, is if her skin is made of basically supergold, is she wearing lipstick? or are her lips the only vulnerable part of her?
I mean, there are other anatomical questions i could ask, like does the supergold include any mucous membrane? is her nose invulnerable to nose bleeds? are her eyeballs vulnerable, but not her eye sockets?
Im pretty sure though that at this point, there is some connection to sydney and her orbs, either in the plot device (she was already a super and the orbs chose her) or in technology.
She’s not wearing lipstick: that’s how Heatwave (eventually) figured out it was Harem who kissed her boyfriend in the ecnalubma and not Maxi
Note that, in the Big Fight, Vehemence got in a good solid punch to Max’s face. She got a mild nosebleed from that.
Not to mention a broken nose
Seems like it would be an interesting story to do lower quality comic and use for vote incentives.
But the whole, setting new records on track team, has been done to death and beyond.
Varia’s unicellular cousin.
What I’m bringing away from this is that Max used to be a lot like Sydney. And it’s a shame we can’t have two crazy ladies wildly feeding off each other’s lines.
Maybe Sydney will awaken the Nerd buried deep beneath that golden crust :D
not sure If anyone has said anything yet about it but in the last panel her jacket is almost the same shade as the rock, when I first looked at it I thought she was groping herself…