One of these days, all of Dabbler’s perverse antics will probably be a boon to the team. Today is not that day. That’s the danger of being progressive beyond the fringe. You have to wait for the rest of the world to appreciate your forward attitudes.

Maxima can control her strength, as she has her power pool she can use to boost a stat. Normally that potential energy is there in the void, waiting to be used. She doesn’t have to have it spent at all times, but her baseline stats are still very impressive. She can actually lower her stats to feed more energy into the pool, but that takes effort, and even being in the military as long as she has, sometimes you just don’t feel like putting forth the work that early in the morning. Thus some of her bathroom fixtures suffer more than other parts of her room.

Still having super strength of any sort would wreak havoc on your daily life no matter how careful you were. I mean, Superman towed the Earth once, so you’ve got to figure he goes through a shitload of doorknobs. There’s just no way he’d be able to tell if a door was locked or not. The difference in resistance between an unlocked door and a locked one with that little 1/16th inch pin holding the knob in place would be like the difference between him using 0.0000000000000001% of his strength to open it and 0.00000000000000001% of his strength.

Yes, I know he has X-Ray vision and could just see if the door was locked, or use his super speed and super hearing to tell if there was metal stress happening as he turned it, and react instantly, but you know what I mean.

Fine. Thor. He doesn’t have X-Ray vision or speed or super ear bulbs, and he’s in Marvel’s top 10%, strength wise. He would wreck shit on Midgard left and right.

Yes, I know Thor could become Donald Blake in some continuities and had human stats. Hercules. He was on the Avengers with Thor and would reak everything he touched probably. Except he never pretended to have a secret identity and probably didn’t care about not breaking puny doorknobs.

Aaagh! *punches doorknobs*

---

I remembered what day of the week it is! Progress! So Monday is Christmas, and I’ve considered skipping the regular post that day. I’ve never done that before and I really don’t want to, but I’ve gotten a few days behind on doing the comic, but I wound up writing a page that was better laid out as a double sized page, so I tried a new thing with the art that I thought might save a little time, which it very much did not. Basically, skipping the inking and coloring it straight from the flats. I like the way that looks when it’s done right, only I’ve never really done it before. Once or twice, actually Dabbler’s hoof on this page is done like that. I tried it as a test, but it was actually a poor test case because it didn’t involve two things that were the same color overlapping each other. Without inked lines separating things, I needed to spend extra time on the edges to make sure something like a skin colored arm stands out when it’s in front of a skin colored body. It also didn’t help because I’m not used to that particular workflow. There are probably ways to work faster in that style, so it probably won’t be my last attempt. The other factor is my parents will be visiting for most of that week and I probably shouldn’t totally ignore them and work on the comic? Right?

So yeah, I’d really prefer to post a comic as usual, but I miiiiight not. Xmas, as you might imagine, is a pretty slow traffic day for any webcomic, and if ever I was going to skip a post, that’d be it. The other option is to probably split another double page I’m planning into two singles, which I’d also prefer not to do, but is looking likely, and also really skimp on the backgrounds on a page or two. A scene where everyone stands in an indistinct white hallway or something. :/ So swing by on Xmas, I’ll probably have a new page up, but don’t be too shocked if I don’t. I probably will. I should.

---

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like!