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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If the gold stuff is a symbiote that has attached itself to Maxima, presumably it will eventually reproduce. If the geode is it’s normal method of reproduction, does that mean Maxima is going to lay eggs?
What happened with her hair when it turned purple anyway? Did the symbiote just crawl out along the length? I thought it would fall out and be replaced from underneath, like her skin was.
No, it’s far deeper than that. I’m pretty sure this symbiotic functions more like a virus, altering Maxima on a cellular level
and then she explodes into spore cyst things
This. It could only end like this.
I’m rereading from the beginning for the umpteenth time, and this time, like every time, I feel SO bad for teenaged Max. She looks so scared and frightened. Which is, of course, a mark of @DaveB’s skill, but I just want to give her a big hug. And I love how much of her relationship with her brother we get in only two pages! I mean. Brilliant.
Oops, replied instead of posted new comment. That’ll teach me to do it on a tiny touch screen. But INTERESTING re. symbiote reproduction. What if it doesn’t reproduce, it just lasts? So the geode is a sort of hardened husk of its last host/symbiote, and if Max died she wouldn’t decay, she’d also ossify and reduce into geode form, until the next appropriate partner-host comes along?
I had to look up the knot Deus used. It’s really cool and I’ve never seen it used before. Turns out it is a Trinity knot. While looking for it, I also stumbled across another one that I haven’t seen used called the Eldridge knot. Talk about awesome, two new knots for cosplay ideas.
Source for how to tie both: https://www.sandalsweddingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/eldridge-and-trinity-knots1.jpg
The Trinity knot was the first knot I learned to make.
To this day I can’t do a regular tie knot -.-
So, are Sydney’s bangs an indication of latent super-i-ness, or just the result of her really liking anime?
..and the most traumatizing thing of all… Prom Night.
Okay. Totally random but…..how does maxima use makeup? Shouldn’t it slide off like the camp paint?
It doesn’t work. See https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1782 :)
She doesn’t use make-up. Her lips are naturally that color.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/414
I think you linked the wrong comic
Read the last panel
What does a vending machine around the corner have to do with Maxima’s lip color?
Sorry it copied the link to the next page try:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/413
You linked to comic #78. I know the comic you’re talking about, but this one isn’t it
So, maybe it has already been brought up, but Maxima just peeled off some skin from her right arm to reveal her new gold skin, but the x-ray a few panels later seems to show that the gold is spreading from her left side to her right side, and thus there shouldn’t have been any gold there yet, as the x-ray isn’t showing that area having been reached yet.
she’s peeling her right shoulder above the collarbone, if you look closely it’s the rightmost portion of the x-ray proof area on the x-ray.
we have seen the brother before right? https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/720
Yes, that’s the same person
I’m just wondering if her hair is ‘normally’ purple, or if she dyes it….
You can see that her hair is slowly turning purple in panel 4.
Poor kid… :-/
Back to the Superman/ Clark Kent discussion…….There was a Superman issue where it talked about the problems young Clark Kent had problems with his heat vision melting the lenses of his glasses, so he used two circular “super-glass” that had broken out of the window of the ship to replace them. In the story Clark began to notice that when people saw him differently, smaller and less muscular than he was as Superman. Even when he compared drawings of Clark and Superman, there was a marked difference. After remembering an incident where a man walked up behind him and then talked to him noted he looked bigger from the back that whet he was from the front. He came to the conclusion that the “super-glass” enhanced his “super-hypnosis” on people to see Clark as the meek and mild persona he portrayed . He even speculated that the cameras and television recreated the effect so that even in photographs, Clark still looked different from Superman.
I shudder to think what happened to the first boy who tried to tease her about her skin color. IIRC, this might have been around the time when “The Golden Girls” was one of the more popular TV shows on the air at the time she was a teenager.
Chose… Is Maxima Captain Planet!?
Too much shiny and gold, not enough elemental themes. My money’s on some kind of Solar Exalt or derivative thereof.
…so how did her ears get pointed??
Peel off a bit of skin, at the top, and ‘BOOOING’ up pops the pointy ear.
I’m fricking loving the origin story flashback we’re getting here! Hope there’s more!
Hi. I’m Smooth on the inside, Crunchy on the outside…
… I mean that is literally what my name stands for.
So she’s a Golden Venom.
That skin peel. Made the skin on my feet feel squeamish.
I’m gonna sit in a corner gently rubbing them.
Poor Maxima. Such lovely freckles! She needs to find a cure. One that will restore just those, without harming her uber super powers.
I wonder if Maxima’s powers manifested the way that they did because she did get a lot of sun exposure after spilling the geode water on her?
So if a goth was exposed to it, she might have kept her pale skin, or became jet black, and maybe have a difference in her powers. Say instead of Maxima’s energy attack (a sun-like power) she might have emotion dampening, shadow control and/or the ability to create darkness.