Grrl Power #60 – Operation Cover Our Asses
Ok, long comments this time, deep breath. Harem’s teleport is one of the better ones out there. All the ones in comics and shows that I’ve seen have the limitation of not being able to teleport blindly into an area for fear of teleporting into something solid. It seems like a super easy way to kill Nightcrawler would be to fill his room full of rebar. How often does he check to make sure no one’s done that before TPing blindly into areas he’s familiar with? Heck you wouldn’t even need rebar, just a bunch of sawdust and a fan. Try not being dead with some wood chips all up in your brain and organs. Anyway, Harem has to have a passing familiarity with her destination, I mean, she has to know where she’s going, but her TP has a safety on it. She gets a split second of clarisense before she teleports, basically she can feel out her destination and she can make little adjustments before she commits. She can’t really scout an area with it, she can’t see or hear anything before she arrives, just tell if there’s something in the way. While this seems like the sort of thing that would allow her to hang out with Nightcrawler and… actually, off the top of my head he’s the only teleporter I can think of, but she would be able to hang out with them and make fun of their feeble TP skills, but unlike all the others, she can’t take anyone with her. Clothing, equipment, easy, but no people. Possibly nothing else living.
The EMT Black Box isn’t a literal black box, that’s just branding. It’s obviously easy to pop out a memory stick on the thing, it’s just something that this company requires.
This page felt a little directionless to me, I think it’s a victim of trying to too much on a single page. I wanted a panel of Maxima looking disapprovingly at the amount of cleavage that Harem has hanging out before giving her flak about uniforms. I probably could have made the middle panel a POV shot from Max holding the memory stick up in front of Harem’s open, yet fashionable shirt. Not being able to see her teleport out isn’t ideal either. But this page sets up quite a bit, not the least of which is the interview, which will hopefully amuse, and also shows that Harem is at least a teeny bit immature, being the youngest on the team and all.
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Is Harem related to Roz and Robin Deshantis from Shortpacked, It’s Walky, and Dumbing of Age? I can’t believe nobody else caught that.
No, it’s just a coincidence. I’ve been reading Nick’s comics for about a year now, I don’t recall that last name coming up though. I’ve had the name Daphne DeShantis for Harem for a while, before that it was attached to another character of mine. I apparently suffer from the same affliction that Stan Lee has with the alliterative names though. Sydney Scoville, Kenya Cassidy. I try not to but I guess it releases just a little dopamine in my brain when I hear it or something.
I like the alliteration, another signature of your work. It works well! We gotta have our dopamine fix every day.
The last name of Robin and Roz is actually DeSanto.
I’ve been really thinking about your comment about teleports out there, I have to disagree with you however. The best teleport out there comes from a series by Anne McCaffery called “the Tower and the Hive.” In which they can teleport all the way to entirely different planets into places they’ve never been or using a picture including talking mind to mind with people not even on the same planet as well.You might want to read up on it, very well written series.
Dave said that it was ‘one of the best’ not that it WAS the best.
The best I’ve seen were Hiro Nakamura from Heros and Nataru Shinmyou from Birdy the Mighty Decode. They could teleport anywhere and anywhen they wanted without having to know where it was or what it looked like.
I’d say the best includes McCaffrey’s Pernese dragons who could teleport anywhere and anywhen their riders had a clear enough picture of.
That teleport explanation doesn’t quite hold. Even an empty room still has air in it and air inside of your blood will kill you. Presumably then she displaces the air on arrival – in which case the sawdust trick shouldn’t work either.
Two atoms can’t occupy the same space so her ability should produce pressure effects, outward upon manifestation and implosion upon demineralization. Otherwise you run the risk of a nuclear explosion or something very close. Electrons hitting nucleaus and all.
sorry to comment on something posted so long ago, but going over the archives again and well…
this has always annoyed me to no end with most teleporters.
but it is most effectively solved IMHO by the jumpers series of books (not the movie, which sucked quite a bit in comparison) where a gateway is created between the 2 points that moves over the jumper.
this fit quite nicely with the theory that worm holes spontaneously appear all the time at the planck scale and the jumper simply senses the destination trough these existing holes and manipulates and moves them to jump.
I never really liked the pern books that much, is “the Tower and the Hive” better then that ?
just my 2 cents.
I realize that this is also a very late reply I just found the comic a few days ago read it and am now rereading it and the comments below.
In regards to the Tower and the Hive there are actually two connected series in that particular universe of her’s the first series is called the “Talent” series and sets up how everything came to be for the second series the first book in that one is To Ride Pegusas which is actually four short stories collected together there are two other books in that seires you do not have to read the Talent series to understand what is happening in the second series. With Tower and the Hive I have only read through Damia’s Children but I have read most of the Pern books and while I enjoyed them I do like the Talent and Tower and Hive series better.
That’s basically how Christopher Stasheff handles it in his “Warlock In Spite of Himself” series–it seems to be a pretty standard assumption with teleporters that their materialization displaces any gases, airborne dust, smoke particles, etc. in the area where they’re about to teleport. (Also partly explains the “bamf” noise as Herr Wagner appears, although in his case he pops in and out of another dimension, bringing a cloud of brimstone with him from the dimension he moves through when he teleports. [In the comics, it’s the Darkforce Dimension; they never explain it in the movies.])
Blink is another teleporter, if you’re looking at Marvel… well, Blink-295. Not 616. She can’t teleport to save a life. But Blink-295 once tped the X-men to the moon.
Another possibility: the jumper trades places with whatever happens to be occupying the target space.
I heard about someone using that as a power advantage for their teleporting character in a Champions RPG once, actually… thought it would be an interesting effect. Imagine a teleporter with that ability ‘porting into a solid block of concrete and right back out again–poof! Instant statue! ^_^
You teleport into something structurally important this way and dont realise it fast enough… one crushed teleporter. Otherwise too damn destructive power, could dismantle anything.
Like in the comic Spanner’s Galaxy. You could only jump if someone on the other end was willing to jump into your place.
I just now noticed that there’s a typo in the 5th panel. Are those things you’re able to go back and fix? Maxima says “like I stopped” instead of “like it stopped”. Normally I’d blame the character, since it’s in dialog, but Maxima is such an impressive and intimidating character that I’d rather not.
Yup that needs to be fixed. I’ll add it to the list.
Many forget that dialog is different from simple prose. it can be full of “typos” and other linguistic chimeras of common idiom.