Looks like Max has gotten enough entertainment out of Sydney, now that things went and got serious she decided to put an end to it. Really, if she’s fast enough to catch a bullet, she could have stopped the robbers before they had finished saying “Everybody get down” but people don’t appreciate it as much when you save them from danger they didn’t even know was there. Maxima is pragmatic that way.
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SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
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Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
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Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
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SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
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"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Just…amazing my good sir.
Btw I love your comic :) I just wish there were more frequent updates.
You and me both.
It be easier not to forget to check on it.
In the meantime, there’s the RSS feed, or you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook. I post updates there. Not sure how else to get the work out each time.
Slapped down so hard he lost a shoe… That’s the kind of heroics I can get behind.
Not as unlikely as it seems. In many car vs pedestrian accidents the shoes come off. And Max could be qualified as having a similar “impact” as a car. :)
Actually I’ve seen animated gifs/youtube videos of people falling off swings and skateboards where they loose shoes. It really doesn’t take that much of an impact really, depending on the shoe. This guy looks like he was wearing a penny loafer or something and not a boot. Even so, yeah, she did clock him pretty good.
FINSH HI-
…oh, it’s over already.
Really love the comic thus far btw, especially the art style, it seems rare to find someone that can so smoothly switch between serious appearances and comedic appearances. I’m so torn between wishing there was more updates and not wanting you to rush and present an imperfect comc. =.=
Thanks, that’s really what I’m going for in the art. I grew up on Marvel comics and that was the way I learned to draw, then discovered anime/manga and began folding it in to my style. I love the crazy, over rendered detail of mainstream American comics – I could spend hours staring at a high res scan of Joe Maduerira’s pencils – but I think most superhero comics suck when it comes to presenting any emotions other than 1) no emotion 2) anger 3) sadness… but usually as a gateway to anger. I love the cartoonish flexibility that anime gives you, but I have an obsessive need to add in far more detail than is necessary to convey what I need to in the picture. Adding the seams to pants doesn’t make the jokes funnier but I feel like the picture is unfinished if I don’t. I’m just hoping the speed picks up a little in the future cause I’d love to post these faster, believe me.
The artist of Turbo Defiant Kimecan, located at https://www.kimecan.com/eng/ was just selected to be the colorist for Avenging Spiderman, which is a new Monthly Release drawn by Joe Madureira.
here is the blog he wrote on it: https://www.kimecan.com/eng/2011/06/18/new-editor-spider-man-surgery/
and i spelled his name wrong… meh
That guy is an amazing artist, sadly I haven’t been keeping up with TDK at all.
Love that the gun is still rotating in the air when he’s several feet away.
Bullet catch!
CALLED IT!
“Bored now.” And hey, *he* started using deadly force first, so if the poor widdle mushy human *did* break, oh well. Love it!
I hope Sydney has a spare pair of undies, cuz looking at the bullet like that is a real fecalator.
Fecalator, good one ;)
mushy? Usually I hear the weaker humanoid sets described as squishies as in how I describe the five basic ATs of City of Heroes
squishies(actually two different ATs), not quite as squishies, almost not squishies and tanks
“You don’t get XP for a gray, Max.”
Huh? Or were you going for graze?
MMOGs don’t give XP for critters you take out if the threat (to you) indicator of them is grey.
@chattastarhawk
you dont get XP for a gray is a rpg thing very common in wow where once you are of a much higher level then your foe its name plate becomes grey once that happens you dont get any XP from killing it
(and yes both spellings of grey are correct i looked it up lol)
It a city of heroes thing. ((MMO)). When playing as a hero, any bad guy who is more then three levels below yours, cons as grey and gives no exp. It’s a fun game.
Ack got beat to the explanation, sigh.
Oh, got it.
I was thinking more in D&D terms than the MMORPGs. Was an EverQuest player a number of years ago, but when all the members of my guild left for WoW I fell out the game.
I was thinking about mentioning something about an “automatic success” in my comment to the comic – some game systems and usually a lot of DM/GMs will just have gimme actions when the when you start hitting the 5% or 95% side of an action succeeding – but since this whole comic started off with a RPG fakeout, I didn’t want people to think that this was all some kind of Inception style game within a game.
Also items you find or loot with grey text are useless (or near useless) items you can only sell to vendors or discard. Much like the idiot on the floor. :)
Ack, got beaten to the explanation. Sigh.
Good to see that Maxima has superduper REACTION speed too. Being able to move that fast is one thing, being able to move with extreme precision while moving that fast is something entirely different…
Took me a minute to figure out what happened in the last big panel. Looks like she backhanded the guy upside the head (without dropping the bullet mind you) and the gun is actually pivoting in midair slightly to the right (from Maxima’s perspective) of where Maxima is standing in panel five. She actually turns slightly towards where the robber fell to catch the gun in the small panel at the end.
Cool! Go Team Maxima!
Most characters who have superhuman movement speed above a certain level have to have superhuman reaction speed to go with it, otherwise they’d simply go plowing through everything in front of them because they’d hit it before they saw it.
/sigh
And now we get to find out if Maxima has legal protection against using lethal force when she does not have to. Being as she could clearly have crushed the gun barrel (thus disarming the robber and neutralizing the threat) without actually striking with possibly lethal force…
Remember the scene in Hancock with the bank robbery? Remember how he never went after the robbers until the SWAT commander gave him clearance AND said what was an acceptable level of damage? Exactly that. The big reason why supers are going to be either corporate or military (or very, very quiet) is people are going to sue their asses off for *everything*.
Real life case in point: Remember that Hollywood bank shootout back in 1997? The one where two guys with assault rifles and full coverage heavy body armor fought it out with the cops and not quite 2,000 bullets were fired? The cops actually got sued because the one robber bled to death…
Fear not! These sort of concerns will factor in to the comic. I mean it won’t turn in to Law and Order: Supervillian Victims Unit or anything, but I’m not going to ignore the legal implications of super shennanigains. Actually if you go look at the blog at the foivles about the cards I had printed, the “lawer” (lawyer, durr) opposite Maxima is Arianna, one of the major secondary characters of the comic. The team isn’t just superheroes, there are field support teams, an intelligence arm, and among others, a team of lawyers to keep the force’s noses’ clean – legally anyway. We’ll meet her ‘soon’.
And the reason she didn’t crush the gun dramatically (I’ve actually thought about this, I’m not just improvising to cover an opportunity to have had Maxima do something cool) is that if she wrecked the gun, you couldn’t do ballistics tests on it. The bullet she caught is probably ruined for testing purposes – if she grabbed it hard enough to stop it dead her fingerprints would have crushed the rifling striations off the outside of it – but the gun could have been used in other crimes, and that would be important to know.
An excellent point, and one I had not thought of with the ballistics testing. I expect the lawyer will be showing up soonest – probably via Harem’s teleporting if superpowers have been openly used.
Law and Order Supervillans Unit probably would never make it to network TV unfortunately. I’m still holding out hope for POWERS, which would be almost as cool and in some ways better.
Another thing to think about when crushing a gun is what happens to the bullets that are in the gun. Sure, 90% of the time nothing would happen, but they are designed to go off from pressure. Depending on how the gun was crushed and where the bullets were, that could mean anything from an exploding gun to bullets flying off randomly. (And remember: One bullet is in the barrel.)
It’s not hard to argue that knocking him out – even with near-lethal force – is the less dangerous option. Especially to bystanders.
Well, any competent lawyer could argue that if she could catch a bullet, and also cover the 10 feet between them in the blink of an eye, she could have just taken the gun away and then restrained him, but we’ll see how that plays out.
Sure… If he were the only threat.
There’s at least one more mook on the loose in that bank. She can’t afford to be tied up restraining one person when there’s another threat around. The last one she can catch and hold. The rest she needs to either knock out or restrain in some other way, quickly. (Once she gets started at least.)
Besides, where’s the flare in that? I mean, a superhero has gotta do things in style, or what’s the use?
You have presumably long resolved this, but it seems to me that Maxima has a very high level of control of the situation and can afford to wait. The second robber firing the gun establishes murderous intent. He could have surrendered. The two situations will look very different in court.
Semi automatic pistol.
The rounds are stacked up in the grip, all pointed forward. To crush them, she’d have to crush his hand first.
ONE round will be in the barrel, just slightly less than the length of one such round forward of the rest and elevated by maybe a third the width of a round. Still pointing forward. The tail end of the round just about even with the rear of the ejection port this….gun seems to lack for some reason. (But I didn’t notice until I started trying to figure out how long the barrel was.)
The primer is in the rear. Unless this is a rimfire, (unlikely) the primer is about the size of a very small drinking straw, centered inside the much larger cartridge. To set IT off, you’d have to strike it with a fair bit if force. Enough to dent it. Granted, enough shock MIGHT set off the bullets charge, but I find that unlikely.
Ok, 99% of the time. ;)
Yes, I knew it was unlikely. The point is that if it does happen the worst-case scenario is much worse than trying to knock the perp out.
So, in addition to the ballistics argument, this would make a good case for a lawyer to defend Maxima’s actions: Worst case in this situation is that one attempted murderer dies in apprehension. And she tried to avoid that. Versus destruction of evidence and a worst-case of a random person in that room being injured/killed. (Or multiple, if the gun itself were to explode, or multiple bullets were to go off.) Yes, the worst case is a more remote possibility, but it’s still a possibility.
She’s trying to avoid collateral damage, and bring in as much information as possible. She needed to take down a known dangerous individual quickly before he attempted to cause further harm. It would be a persuasive argument – at the very least – in court.
I forgot to draw the ejection port on this page, usually I’m pretty good about that. I’m the sort of person who would be a huge gun nerd if they weren’t so tedious to draw. Using more than one type of pistol as a reference for this thing is probably a capital crime for some. By the time I get around to introducing Peggy I’ll have to get better about that.
huh? all she’d have to do is grab it just above the trigger (come in at it from the top and squeeze the sides inwards)… no path for the current bullet to go, and even if he pulled the trigger it wouldn’t work, no recoil for the next bullet to rack into position and depending on exactly how much she bent it, the rifling may or may not still be intact for testing,… and all this without touching the guy in any way nor detonating the rest of the magazine.
If he pulled the trigger, the gun would explode in his hand, sending shrapnel who-knows where.
Again, probably not worth being the only reason for avoiding it, but it’s definitely among the reasons.
nope… the trigger mechanism and entire receiver assembly would be squished. the trigger wouldn’t move one iota… therefore no firing pin hitting the bullet and no explosion of the primer and gunpowder, and therefore… no shrapnel, Yeah!… a now completely unusable weapon that can still be tested for ballistics!
about the crushing of the bullet… it looks like she just “pinched” it to a stop, yes, the FRONT of the bullet is squished, but I’d say that the BACK of the bullet will be amazingly well preserved for the tests… remember, that under normal circumstances the ballistics tech’s can figure out what gun fired a bullet even AFTER it comes to a “normal” stop… usually after passing thru a person and into the wall /floor/ceiling behind the now dead victim. they won’t have a problem with this one at all because the scratches are on the rear of the bullet which didn’t get crushed AT ALL! otherwise we wouldn’t see a round circle for the bullet in her fingertips, we’d see an oval, or a slightly rounded rectangle if she had caught it by the middle or back end.
Nitpick: the LAPD was sued following the North Hollywood shootout because they prevented ambulances from treating one of the perpetrator’s injuries for an extended period of time (the other perpetrator killed himself via self-inflicted gunshot to prevent himself form being captured by the police), which what was standard police procedure for the time, as the crime scene was not considered secure.
And the jury deadlocked as I recall. But my point is that no matter how perfect your actions in the field, someone, somewhere could find a lawyer willing to file a lawsuit pointing out even the slightest mistake and saying that mistake meant (at the very least) negligence on your part.
Law and superhumans/ magic/ psi/ weird whatever gets really complicated really fast. If the government has supers acting openly then we can be pretty sure there are laws on the books that, at the very least, shield those supers legally while they are in the employ of the state. Which I am very sure we will see shortly when the lawyer shows up. Can’t wait to find out what our storyteller came up with.
Unless, of course, the new possibilities are (more or less) covered under the established laws for agents of the government, private citizens, and so on.
That is, police and armed forces would have rules on use of deadly force/arrests and so on. Most of these would (more or less) carry over even if you had super-speed or telescopic vision. And let the courts and, after the first incident or two, the legislatures figure out when the laws would not be working.
Uh, oh. Two of the most frightening words in the English language.
The third is “Opps”
And then there’s variations on, “Here, hold my beer while I do. . . .”
And then there’s the good ole southern phrase: “Hey y’all, watch this!”
and ALL are precursors to those saying it from being entered into the Darwin Awards…
Which can lead to multiple deaths.
Actually, the two words I had in mind were “Bored now.” (See a little further down in the comments if you don’t understand why that’s frightening.)
Seeing the amount of force imparted on our hapless robber and the stance of Maxima when she does it the robber should be thankful she only shoved him across the room and didn’t concentrate all that energy in one point.
Is Max a vampire? I mean, “Bored now” is Vampire Evil Willow’s signature line.
And Allyson Hannigan delivered it so perfectly.
I really wished they could/would have done just one more Evil Willow story…
God I knew that was from something! I’m ashamed I couldn’t place it till you just reminded me.
Evil Willow and Evil Kira Nerys should team up and… well, I’m sure someone has written that slash fic already.
Hmm, I don’t recall an “Evil Kira Nerys” episode – I must have missed that one…
DS9 mirror universe. Sort of a long-time sequel to the one where Spock has a goatee.
And Evil Kira was a dominatrix bisexual. T’was a good episode. If you ignore the fact that divergent timelines would have made it so that none of the characters in the ‘good’ universe would have doubles in the evil goatee universe because the situations that got their parents or grandparents together wouldn’t have ever happened.
Actually there were several appearances of Evil Kira, and Evil Worf, Evil etc on DS9, though some characters were heroes on both sides and some villains in both. Not to nitpick though, I would have to say that until a person travels to an alternate universe and finds out whether or not there are doubles of people there it is just a theory that there cant be, not a fact, like I said not to nitpick, I just prefer the theory where there are duplicates of people in different universes (and I make use of a lot of them in some fan fiction/DC Heroes setting material I write). I mean if I discard that theory my setting is down to only one Supergirl, as the first 2 are from alternate universes that don’t exist anymore, and then I would lose Power Girl also. None of this has anything to do with you’re comic of course. Anyways cant wait for more.
But there aren’t duplicates. Everyone is their own person; they’re entirely unique, even if they’re extremely similar to somebody from here.
If the Omniverse Theory is correct (oh gods, PLEASE let it be so), then in some world, or worlds, there’s real, actual Peter Parker. Somewhere, you can train with the Jee’dai on Tython and create one of those awesome Force Sabres (if you don’t know them, look them up. Way cooler than lightsabers, if not as powerful). Somewhere, EA isn’t a cannibalistic devourer of souls, and is actually a GOOD company.
But no matter where you are, the Dreamer sleeps.
Eek! And I thought Darla and Dru made a scary combination…
“Bored now” is more Evil Willow in general.
(Not specifically as a vampire.)
She also says it as whilst doing her vengeful uber-witch bit at the end of season 6 when see flayed Warren’s skin from his body.
Given that it does make Maxima saying it a bit more disturbing.
Yeah, that does seem a bit scary, now that I think about it. Willow says that line when she’s evil/psychopathic and about to kill somebody. And Maxima follows the line with a toss that could’ve broken the guy’s neck. Yikes.
Panel 6 – are Maxima’s jeans really that low?
I’m finding I have trouble drawing people in profile, so no, they’re not quite as low as they look in that shot. They’re supposed to be “a bit low” not “I hope you got a Brazilian before you wore those out in public”
no – they’re fine just where they are – it’s low cut enough to show off the line of the lower abs, but high enough to cover any stray… er… stubble. I will admit to doublechecking the profile a few times to see if that was the line of her hip or the side string for a thong (guess which one I was hoping for =D ).
unrelated question though: the “M” band on her throat – is that a tattoo or a choker?
Choker. Tattoo needles don’t work well on Maxima’s skin. I think chokers are god damned hot on women, and it’s not something that Maxima would normally wear, but it was a compromise with… well, Arianna who I haven’t introduced yet. I’ll get in to that later.
Hey Dave, that made me think. If Max has unbreakable, even nearly unbreakable, skin, would henna work on her? Or are even dyes incapable of…. I guess for that it would be absorbed, not something penetrating, but still. It is, yet it isn’t.
Funny, this is the first time I noticed Maxima has pointy ears.
I noticed that back when we first met her, but thought it was orientation. I guess her ears really ARE pointed.
Okay. I noticed in #38, dismissed it as possibly perspective, and completely overlooked it afterwards until you brought it up.
Ahh classic super sound effects… so basically Maxima can shift her powers around instantly, is that what I’m getting? and cool effect with focus for the first three frames. also, despite the jeans, your profile shots are getting much better.
Somehow, the most interesting thing to me in this episode is that Max doesn’t consider herself human.
Classifying the robber as a mushy human doesn’t say anything about if she considers herself human or not. Unless you consider someone who stopped a bullet with 2 fingers (and took a right hook from Sydney on adrenaline without blinking) a mushy human.
‘You mushy humans’ is a category she excludes herself from. She could have just as easily said ‘mushy normals’ or just ‘mushies’. ‘Human’ was part of that category.
Well maybe she just considers herself a non-mushy human.
Classical error of people who don’t understand how categories work.
If all mushy humans are humans doesn’t mean that all humans are mushy humans.
In a Venn diagram this would end up with a larger circle labeled Human and a smaller circle completely inside this Human labeled circle labeled Mushy Human. Leaves room for Maxima in the greater circle labeled Human.
Note that what Maxima said doesn’t preclude her considering herself (not) human. You simply can’t tell.
Her phrasing there isn’t accidental. I mean on my part. You’ll see.
Good to hear it. ;)
And someone with gold skin, purple hair, super speed, strength, toughness (as exhibited so far), etc. can consider herself non-human for all I care. ;) Seeing that, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was a different species, somehow. (Heck, she’s probably at least as different from a mushy human as a gorilla is…)
I would be pretty disturbed to hear that actually. A Superhuman is one thing, a super being who doesn’t consider herself human anymore is something entirely different, and very, very dangerous.
Mind you if Max is an anime elf or alien or something that’s another matter.
That was something that always drives me nuts in the x-men stuff is the whole humans vs mutants angle. ALL MARVEL MUTANTS ARE HUMANS! Did none of those idiots ever take high school biology? If you can interbreed and have offspring which are both viable and fertile, congratulations. You’re the same species. *facedesk*
Sorry, rant over. Nice comic! ;D
It’s not so much that they are a different species, its that the mutants were “different” and difference induces fear of the unknown, which causes exclusion and segregation, which creates hostility, aka the bad mutants… Ironically had they been more accepting of “humans with upgrades”, then there might not have been as many villains as that series had…
Yeah, but even the good guys like the X-Men and allies, including biologists like Beast, kept repeating the “we’re Mutants, we’re a different species” stupidity.
to be fair:
all mutants are humans. true
all humans are mutants. false
mutants are a sub-species of human. i believe Magneto coined the phrase, “Homo-superior”
superior being a word of perspective in that mutants= better. what about the mutant class of (morloc)- being a mutant that was visually disfigured and may or may not actually have any real amount of power/useful ability.
i think that “morlocs, humans, mutants” were of equal level of racial slurs in the x-men universe. but only when viewed negatively, otherwise it was merely to help the audience understand who was being discussed. :)
They’re not a true subspecies, either. They’re separated from baseline humans by the presence of a single extra gene (the X-gene) which doesn’t even have a set affect. They don’t even breed true- Mystique and Sabertooth had a kid, Graydon Creed, who’s a normal human (also the founder of the anti-mutant organization Friends Of Humanity). If the offspring of mutants are not always mutants, then mutants are not a true species or subspecies.
The problem is that in nature there’s no such thing as a clear demarcation between species like that. Humans have the need to organize everything in to neat categories, but if two mutants have a kid who does’t have powers… that doesn’t mean he’s not a mutant, it depends on how you define mutant. The kid will almost certainly have the gene, even if it’s recessive, meaning if he has a kid with a mutant, there’s a 75% chance their offspring will have the gene, if he has it with another recessive carrier, there’s a 50% chance the kid will have the gene, and if he has one with a human, there’s a 25% chance. If you define a mutant as someone who has the gene, recessive or not, then he’s a mutant, if you define a mutant as someone who has to have an active power, then a recessive carrier wouldn’t be a mutant. Nature is indifferent to taxonomy. The gene is there or it isn’t, and it’s active or it isn’t.
Actually, I’m a biology major. While it’s true that the definition of a species can break down when you reach a certain degree of relatedness. However, they still have to meet several criteria to be defined as a distinct species, and mutants, quite frankly, don’t meet any of them. Marvel’s always maintained that “has the X-gene” is the sole qualification for mutant. Whether it’s a dominant or recessive gene has never been explicitly spelled out, and Marvel’s contradicted itself on it as well, but the Sentinels detect mutants by scanning for the X-gene and have been able to find people who had a deactivated copy of it, while Graydon has never tripped an X-gene detector. But in order for him to be a non-mutant it has to be a dominant gene because that’s the only way that two individuals who express the X-gene could have an offspring that doesn’t have a copy. If it was a recessive gene they’d both have to have a double copy of the gene and there’s no way he’d have been able to avoid getting a copy from each parent. Trying to claim that mutants are an entirely new species or even subspecies of human sets the standards so low that every human on the planet could count as their own subspecies.
Well there was one story arc where Master Mold went around murdering every human it came across basically because of that issue, how do you define “human”
The argument makes sense. Basically if you are able to breed and have offspring that are fertile you are of the same species so Mutants in the Marvel Universe are Homo Sapiens not Homo Superior. Those two levels of the biological classification scheme are Genus and Species. A few decades ago Archaeologists began discovering evidence that Neanderthals often lived with Homo Erectus in the same caves. Peacefully, presumably working together and interbreeding. Since Home Neanderthalensis and Homo Erectus obviously can’t do that under the current classification scheme, a new level was proposed, Diem. The sequence would be Genus, Species, Diem and this new level would be the same species with obvious evolutionary advances.
In Marvel Universe then Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Superior. Naturally without any shred of evidence of actual interbreeding this is only a theory and not an accepted new level of the biological classification system, but it’s interesting. It is rare that two different species can crossbreed but not unheard of, Horses and Donkeys produce Mules for example. Almost all of the time the offspring is infertile though.
Actually, there’s a number of cases where two different species are able to interbreed and have fertile offspring. Brown bears and polar bears, domestic cats and servals as well as the Asian leopard cat (presumably this means that leopard cats and servals can also interbreed with fertile offspring resulting), common chimpanzees and bonobos, domestic cattle and American bison (and those two aren’t even in the same genus), and, probably the most well know- the hybridization of European bees and African bees resulting in the killer bee.
What’s really needed is for the mutants to have an isolated genepool. Since the majority of mutant characters were descended from “flat-scans” with no mutant ancestry they aren’t generically isolated from the rest of humanity and therefore they aren’t a true taxonomic group.
I meant good to hear that Dave is thinking about it, and actually meant the implications.
If she is human, I might worry about the implications. But looking at her, and seeing a bit of her in action, if she says she’s not human I’m willing to believe it.
(Now, if she were to start saying ‘inferior humans’, I might start having issues… ‘Mushy’ is fine. From her perspective we are.)
yeah doubt that anyone will read this, but yes mutants are humans the sentinels were smart enough to figure that out in the cartoons. they started replacing politicians and taking control of the governments, when confronted by one of their creators it went something like this, ‘Why are you doing this? you were created to protect humans from mutants!’ ‘Mutants are humans, we were made to protect humans from their selves.’
wish i had noticed this when i read this page. welp 2cents in better late than never
I READ ALL!
It’s an interesting angle to explore in any comic but really, when they were sitting down to program the sentinels, evidently there wasn’t a developer in the room cause he would have gone “Wait, back up a second. I need a definition of “mutant.” “You know… a mutant.” “You have no idea how computers work do you?”
It is a little silly to think that an autonomous weapons platform would be let lose into the general public. I mean, it’s a little like defining “insurgent” How would you make a drone know who it’s ok to shoot? Until you can do that, the idea of a mutant hunting sentinel is unrealistic. (Besides all the other things that they can do that’s unrealistic)
Humans have an automatic tendency to divide themselves into groups (religions, races, countries, political parties, fans of chariot racing teams, whatever). Soon we are saying, “my group is better than your group!”, then, “people in that group are bad and wrong!”, and eventually, “those fill-in-the-blanks aren’t even human, so we can kill them!”. WAR. Genetic cleansing.
We don’t require there be any dividing line in reality. We reserve the right to just make it up.
Love the depth-of-field effect in the first three panels.
Thanks. That was harder to do than I thought because I didn’t draw the areas that over-lapped each other, but I know better for next time. I was going to use some motion blur effects on Max zipping over to him in panel 5 but it didn’t look like I wanted so I did it manually.
Honestly, I don’t see how those frames could have come out any better. Even after looking at it 3 or 4 times, my eyes still cross to focus on the bullet, which is good enough for me.
Max you rock my world *bows and worships Maxima*
Hey Maxima,
When shifting attribute points around, be careful to leave at least one point in each of IQ, Wis, and Cha so you don’t end up saying something incriminatingly blunt.
I see what she meant by overqualified…
Hit in the head hard enough to move his head a distance of 12 feet, dragging the rest of his body through the air behind it. And then land on his head to boot. That goes well beyond baseball bat and into the realm of car-crash level of kinetic energy.
Yeah, the EMT in me says full spinal precautions and a medivac to a trauma hospital in the helicopter. If they don’t have to rebuild this guy’s skull or cervical vertebrae afterwards it will be a miracle.
Seriously, if this guy isn’t dead on impact he will be very shortly from the severe damage that kind of coup contrecoup injury causes.
Check responsiveness, apply the Glasgow coma scale, call for ALS and rush transport.
(In addition to the terms I used here, also wiki ‘Abnormal Posturing’ for reference material in what we might expect to see this guy doing next comic.)
His brain (what little he had) must have bounced around in his skull like a bead in a rattle. Even if his cranium intact he’s probably already a veg.
I’m not so sure he was hit in the head. To me, it looks like he could have been back hand flipped in the mid chest to shoulder area. To perform such a move, her hand would come up in a scooping motion from her midrif, and she would be driving her hand up through his rib cage into his shoulder area.When finished, the movement would bring her hand up to about head height, and the movement would have thrown is upper chest up and over to her right, causing his body to do a half spin around the axis of his belly and inducing a face dive once upward momentum was lost. However, that much force is still going to cause a lot of damage, and such a move with that much energy in it would only be possible because of her superhuman abilities (at least from that posture). Also, I am only suggesting she might have performed this move in the interest of trying to prevent damage to his head and saving her the trouble of an excessive force case. Having said this, it is still more likely she just hit him in the head very hard, seeing that he ended up landing on it anyway, suggesting that she doesn’t really care he is likely brain damaged. So, in closing, I just wasted about 2 minutes of whoever reads this’s time in the interest of presenting another possible case. BTW, Great trauma assessment Bri :)
Not the only one suggesting that she did this to reduce the damage.
Posted earlier writing that that robber should thank Maxima for only pushing him with this amount of force instead of punching.
About damage done; That crack onomatopoeia is most likely one or more ribs (and/or possibly the sternum) breaking.
OTOH, this is a comic. Dramatic (and other) effects do not always have the same results as RL.
Remember Roger Rabbit: he could have gotten out of the cuffs at any time–but only when it was funny.
I would like to say that I’ll be paying far more attention to that sort of thing than most comics do, but I know already that a comedically melodramatic ass-kicking will trump any considerations of realism so I can’t make that promise.
I include these references so you can decide how much detail to exclude from your comic rather than leaving it all out because you simply didn’t know.
And seriously, how many people do you know who know what Battle’s signs or the Halo test for CSF are?
I know what they are and are for, unfortunately if I see them, all I can do is give them pain killer and move on. Injuries that get that severe are usually occurring over an hour from nearest treatment facility over rough terrain (air is not always an option). This much I can say, if we can get the patient in within Golden Hour, it will be done.
Yeah, I was hit with a truck (long story, look up my bio on my blog) and I did pretty much the same thing as the bad guy except I got hit on the leg. Got knocked 16 feet in the air and did about 30 flips and spins before I hit the ground, face first, next stop Parkland hospital for 13 days… But I still think the Bad Guy got off easy.
Wow! Lots of you went to look at my bio on my blog. And, yes, I’m pretty boring, or my life is anyway.
Flew over a car as a teen, (saw him coming and jumped up and cleared the grill)- result two shoes about ten feet from a body that rolled over the top of the car. Then dropped almost straight down to the street. Got up and walked home. 13 years old, and didn’t think I was hurt. Now I shutter at how I acted.
Kids sometimes bounce better. I don’t know how else to explain it. Whether they don’t tense up before the impact or if the ones talking about it are the lucky ones. Ive gone airborne off my bike and I used to jump out of trees and off roofs I’m betting both have to do with how you land. As for dropping straight down, that is to be expected.
Ape with a gun, who had already made a VERY serious try at murder. He got off easy.
Brain damage not really a worry – can’t hurt what he obviously never had.
I’m probably not the first to say it but
Dude you could probably go pro with stuff like this
Thanks! It wasn’t until I started drawing this that I really began to appreciate the amount of work and skill that goes in to even a mediocre comic book. It’s all the stuff that people don’t spend time drawing when they’re doing pin-ups of their characters, stuff like perspective, backgrounds in general, hands in weird positions, office chairs, cars, just really everything that isn’t muscular people looking cool – I still think I’m a rank amateur when it comes to that stuff yet. But an artist is rarely ever satisfied with their work, I’ll just sit over here being self critical (not in a woe is me way, just constructively critical) and I’ll keep getting better each time I put pencil to paper. Or stylus to screen as the case happens to be.
In the comics that have made it into print much of the background is done by other artists who specialize in that. Colorization and dialog are also usually done by separate artists. so basically you’re doing the work of 3-6 people. Check the bonus material on Kick Ass and you can see how many people an “Indie” comic takes. Your work is takes time because you care and you are an artist. BTW would love to see some of the work you do or have done that isn’t in the comics. Maybe some of you character studies or previous versions. Maybe even (I hope) some pin ups???? :)
Yeah I need to set up a Deviant Art page or something and put up some older pieces.
I recommend Hentai Foundry they are less uptight about nudity if you decide to post any. Plus some well known artists like Zone have posted galleries on there. I also like their format better. Haven’t been to DA in a long time but I check HF often.
Hah hah you mean Futa-Foundry? What’s with that place? I mean to each their own but man the signal to noise ratio is crazy over there.
lol there is a bit of that true but plenty of whatever you like too. But like I said less censorship. DA doesn’t allow certain types of nudity and their rabid anti-loli people would accuse Sydney of being underage because of her lack of “development”. I’ve seen it happen before. I predict they will ban at least 1 if not more of you pics. If you don’t like HF there are plenty of others but I truly dislike DA’s arbitrary banning of anything they feel is “inappropriate”.
Maxima for the Win! Yes the Pro shows how it’s done and as noted above proves she is “obviously overqualified to handle this.”
A lot of good points I hadn’t considered about the legal matters and the blunt force trauma. I’ll watch with interest to see how that plays out. Meanwhile @ Hyperboy Dave IS a pro IMO. I de3fine a pro by the quality of their work, not whether they do it for a living. Many of the best authors, for example, can’t make a living off their writing.
I agree, PRO!
When a print edition comes out I will buy it.
Thanks guys that’s good to know.
In the meantime it’d help if you could click the facbook share link, tweet the comic, throw me a vote on the webcomic voting sites below, etc. Printing color is expensive, I’ll need to have a certain size audience before it’ll be possible to produce a color book, as only like half a percent of a webcomic’s audience ever buys anything.
Because of the definitions I would use expert, which he most definitely is, instead of professional.
I figured Max was an alien, but wonder what will happen to Sydney next?
Next time, on Grrl Power!!!
M: So, now that the boring stuff is out of the way, what’s in that poster tube of yours?
S: Uh, hehehe, um, posters?
Heh okay that sounds funny and possible. XP
M: can i see them?
S: Nooooo, flails around woop woop woop.
M: (facepalm)
Comic book physics.
He’s uninjured other than bruises.
I love what I see so far. I think the quality of the art is quite good, and there is great potential in the plot you have revealed so far. Keep up the good work sir. You seem to be cranking out 1 strip a week. I think the pace is fantastic because this comic is always colored and that is as much appreciated as the rest your work, not to mention rare. :)
That was cool!
Fun stuff. Finally checked out the cast (never do anywhere)…. Listing Maxima’s power as Penumbrate. An Umbra is a shadow. Is she the ultimate shadow or were you going for penultimate?
Okay, not sure if you’re being ironic to bait the humorless, like me, or serious, so I’ll assume serious for now.
Penultimate means “second from the end” so I seriously doubt that’s the intent.
A Penumbra is the light that shows in a corona around an eclipse, thus implying an energy that overpowers all obstacles
I always took Penultimate to mean “second best”, basically if Ultimate is best, then penultimate is second best but maybe that’s not the case. I think when I sat down to make my scale I started trying to make up words towards the top end of it… I didn’t realize that penumbra was really a term that’s in use already. That’ll teach me not to google everything first, although I think “Penumbrate” is a unique word, and as I said, I was working under the assumption that penultimate meant second best so… there you go.
Strictly speaking, Ultimate just means ‘last’ and penultimate means ‘second to last’. So, if you were making a list of powers from lowest to highest, ultimate would be the most powerful one. You could look at it the other way around, and the ultimate power would be the weakest. Still, the idea of ultimate as ‘most special’ is fairly common.
Yes–when we talk about ultimate power, it’s not the power to light candles. It’s H-bombs. So penultimate would be one step down from the greatest power. And “antepenult” would be one step further back–only that’s more a grammar term. . . .
Just wondering how you define the term. Created title, no hidden message, natch. The whole umbra thing had me off kilter, reading more into the shadow thing then you meant, meh scuppose.
@Jee: And the penumbra had nothing to do with a solar eclipse. It is the outer shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse, the umbra being the central darker part of the shadow-cone. The light that shows in the corona is the corona, visible during a solar eclipse since the moon occults the solar disk blocking the glare of the solar surface from overwhealming the corona.
The use of ‘penumbra’ in astronomy isn’t limited to lunar eclipses; the concept applies any time you’re casting shadows with a non-point light source. The common concept of a shadow is the umbra, the dark core of the shadow in which the eclipsing object blocks out all of the light, but there’s also the penumbra, in which only part of the light source is blocked, which forms a margin around the umbra.
This explains the difference between partial and total (solar) eclipses: in a total eclipse you’re in the umbra, so no direct light reaches you; in a partial eclipse you’re only in the penumbra, so you can see the rest of the light source (the Sun) poking out. For lunar eclipses it’s the Earth casting the shadow, so we see the Moon passing through the different layers of the Earth’s shadow.
Isn’t limited to solar eclipses, I should say.
In legal terminology, a penumbra is a grey area in the law. This could sum up the legal status Max’s use of force in this situation.
Sydney’s secret is safe!
[Walking…… Walking……. Walk*YOINK!]
“Is this yours?” Maxima asks.
Bwahahaha!
I likes that image!
I’d say he should be dead. A blow to the head that literally knocked him out of his shoes? That means it was an equivalent of being hit by a car at least.
I mean… losing a shoe from getting hit by a car might be common but cars tend to hit the legs. And he lost a shoe from an impact to the head.
this will be the first time having posted here but i have been reading your comic sense about page 18 and i have to say that i love your comic and please continue the good work
please look up the myth-busters show “knock your socks off” it takes a lot of effort to knock off a sock ( imagine a I beam attach to the side of a truck going 60)but much less to knock of a shoe. if that shoe was not properly tied( he is stupid enough to rob a bank, he may be too stupid to tie a shoe) and to me they look like slip-on’s that can come off when kicking a ball, a little toss is enough force to do the job.
Thanks! Yeah I saw that one, it’s basically impossible to hit some one hard enough to knock a sock off and have them live. However in a world where there exist people who can be hit really really hard, and people who can hit really really hard, it might be possible to knock someone’s shoes, socks, pants and underwear off.
Villian: “You’ll never stop me!”
Hero Punchs Villian
Villian flies through the air, various clothes get left behind
Hero blushes as Villian stands back up
Villian: “Hah, that didn’t even hurt.”
Hero points down, Villian’s gaze follows
Villian: “That explains the sudden breeze.”
I just started to read this comic. I got to say I know why it takes you a week to put up a new page. It must take you a week just to think up what your heroin says when she gets mad. Very funny.
I just started reading this, went through the whole archive in one sitting and I’m disappointed I’m already up to speed. Oh well, guess I have to sit and wait like everyone else now.
But I’m really impressed so far and I’m hoping the updates will be regular enough that I don’t forget about it. Good luck, man, you’ve got some great talent!
Every monday Glasto, that’s what bookmarks are for. ;)