Grrl Power #766 – Bullet dump
After I drew this page I realized I probably should have put it before the previous one, showing that Arc-SWAT has a way of interfering with the Fel shields. Jiggawatt’s attack only sets up small groups for ballistic attack, but it helps, and takes some of the pressure off of the bricks like Stalwart, Anvil, Hiro and Mr. Amorphous. And Achilles. He’s not really capable of hurting these things, but he’s great for drawing fire.
I spent way too long trying to make a “loose afro” brush for Jiggawatt’s hair on this page, so you guys get smoke for most of the background panels. I’m not 100% pleased with it, partially because it doesn’t really match the style of the rest of the page, but there’s perfect and then there’s done. Sometimes you have to say “good enough” and move on.
Yes, Goose is using the minigun with six bayonets strapped to it. (I guess someone chromed the barrels in the last two months. Oops.) Unfortunately this fight will be over quickly enough that he won’t get a chance to core out a bad guy with it. But it’s going to happen eventually. I mean, how can it not?
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Jiggawatt used to look better :(
Eh… I think this is more “Battle-realistic trend!” images instead of the usual “Slightly cartoonish style!” to make a point that this is serious stuff going on here.
Her face just comes off really bad in the three frames.
Hair only becomes really bad in the 3rd one.
I’m not a fan of the new hairstyle either (might be that I’m not used to it, but I think it’s just I don’t like the style), but Yorp pointed out that she’s changed her hair style a few times actually. Hopefully she’ll change it again back to something better looking later on. :)
I’ve known women that changed their hairstyles frequently, so Jiggawatt changing hers several times in the past couple of months doesn’t seem odd to me. I’m kinda hoping she keeps changing it.
I havent changed my hairstyle regularly since I was in college, but yeah, I’ve noticed that with Jiggawatt. She’s gone through like …. 3-4 hairstyles if you include the white hair. This one is just really different so it’s offputting to me. :) Not really a fan of it, but I’m guessing DaveB will probably change it reasonably soon since it probably takes a lof time to draw hair like that instead of the other styles.
Jigawatt is only 26.
Changing her hair style, her clothing style, oscillating between some kind of make up and clean scrubbed skin…all to be expected.
I’m literally not THAT much older :) But yeah, it’s to be expected. I’m just not a fan of this hairstyle though. It looks very messy and does not frame her face well.
Triangular face and bowl shaped hair. She can do better.
My adult daughter’s hair has been bleached white, pink, blond, purple, various shades of red and brown. It has been below the shoulder and shaved sides and lengths/styles in between. She has looked gorgeous every way and time. I like Jigawatt.
I’m sure that’s nice, but Jiggawatt’s hair still looks wrong given the shape of her face.
I am not seeing any problem at all in that regard.
But then I was around in the Sixties and seventies when that hairstyle was popular, and I have seen it on every shape of face.
A matter of taste, but the shape her face does seem to have changed. If not for the power and her specifically being identified as Jiggawatt, I might have thought her a new character.
There’s a *lot more* detail in her than we’ve previously seen. I was so confused, I had to go back to the battle with Vehemence just to convince myself it was actually her.
I like it, she looks ticked off and why wouldn’t she?
That’s natural black hair for you. I appreciate Dave depicting it realistically. This is how it looks if you don’t have a lot of time to get ready.
That’s a good point, if you’re told to come fight the alien invasion you don’t stop to do your hair.
Thinking the same thing.
Could be bed head and static electricity. Cause when your power is based off of electricity you gonna have those fluffed out hair day’s. could also be she was in the middle of a haircut since this was happening the next day during a conference and not everyone would have been there at it.
Compared to her last apparent that I read yesterday she looks. . .less sexy, and more like a real person. I’d say it’s an improvement, but maybe that’s just me.
Before I read the author’s commentary, my thought on Jiggawatt was ‘Wow, I really like her hair!’
Still do – she has a lot more character in her appearance now
I also thought it was a nice style. And well done by the artist.
Is that Duke Nuken there?
I think that every time we see Goose, cracks me up.
Exactly my thought each time I see him, as well. He just needs an old-school nuclear raygun now, and the transformation will be complete!
Introduce Dabbler to Duke Nukem, and she just might supply the raygun for yucks.
Or she would give him a REAL weapon.
A crowbar.
I wonder if Goose is a complete and utter nerd like Duke?
I really hope someday it’s dropped that “Goose” is a nickname, and his given name is Duke. ^_^
… and then Sydney rushes in all gleeful “PLEASE tell me your last name is Nukem!”
Goose: “…No, it’s just Johnson. Why?”
(Crestfallen Sydney): “…Nevermind. (sniff)”
Nice to see that Dook is keeping busy these days.
Goose Nukem xD
Hail to the King, baby
Yeah, Come get some.
Groovy!
Some alien *@#$%@!!## is going to pay for shooting down my ride.
Was Duke Nukem just an Ash Williams phrase vomitter? Or are you guys confusing the two characters?
No, Duke Nukem used a lot of lines from pop culture, including Army of Darkness and They Live. :) We’re not confusing the characters.
Hail to the King, Baby,
Groovy
Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt.
He uses all those lines in the games.
https://www.soundboard.com/sb/maxalo
…considering not much time has passed in-setting, the massively differing art styles is getting more jarring. Congrats for improving and growing, but damn it does not do continuity any favours.
Besides that, electricity now overwhelms the shields entirely when done right, huh? Seems like that should have been mentioned at the start. Any peoples with force fields, energy weapons and convenient FTL should have no problem rigging up ‘zappers’ to take out shields then.
I got less overwhelm and more canceling out frequency.
Continuity kinda has to take a burn when it takes nearly a decade to go through a story where barely a year has gone by in story time. Especially for a webcomic.
And in what superhero universe are all shields the same?
I submit that it fits the genre better if all the shield technologies which can be countered all have a different counter which has to be figured out.
continuity in the important things is pretty damn good IMHO. as for the style and artwork, better is better; go with the flow.
Especially the forward continuity. Dave is constantly foreshadowing, and things that are mere details in the artwork turn out to have been very well thought out.
My understanding was that Dabbler figured out a specific way to cancel these specific shields, using Dabbler’s own unique talents…
But that Dabbler’s chosen method for this particular situation only works if she has read access to a very specific form of free energy…. such as the electrical bombardment guidelines she just gave to Jigawatt.
Spectrum analyzer and an inductive amp meter would do detect the shield characteristics, for the parameters she specified. They’ve been real since early 20th century IRL. But some engineering would be needed to pick up frequencies and current flow from a far enough distance.
What would be amusing is if instead of just Carrying the Mini gun. There was a guy behind him with a Heavy duty cart with the thousands of rounds of ammo and the stack of 12 volt batteries that gun uses in Reality. Why? He’s superpowered enough to USE it and not be gutted by the recoil but there is a bit of a limit to how much you can physically fit on a human form :) I cant remember if it’s two or four 12 volt car batteries the Mini gun runs on.
Considering this is a continuity where Dabbler exists, Goose can probably carry the power requirement on his person, or it could even be contained within the gun itself.
You have characters that can defy gravity and travel through time and space. After already establishing how over the top that weapon is, it’s still possible one of the two more realistic weapons on this page. Besides, it’s Duke Nu… er, um, Goose! (that other guy would be grinning while making pop culture puns while shooting a even more over the top gun)
Dabbler’s power specifications are bugging me. The frequency appears to be too low and amperage excessive if we’re just tuning and connecting to the frequency of the plasma (shield) and overloading the electronics. Anyone with experience stabilizing plasma in a fusion generator got the correct frequency range?
I’m also now curious if she’s a constant voltage (a lot in order to arc over any significant distance) or if she can step it down when needed.
But is it just Plasma, or is it plasma and some type of magic?
Too many unknown variables.
Any sufficiently advanced science is magic, but not the opposite. Also we already learned DO NOT DO THE ANTI-LIGHTNING THING. Anti-plasma would probably have an equally horrific effect.
anti-lightning is a matter of charge, i.e. potential. ergo if Jiggawatt generated an anti-plasma it would draw power to her.
that is to say alternating current. Line current in the US is 60 hertz, military is 400 hertz or cycles per second. 12000 hertz is freaking amazing and the amps should be well within lighting parameters. without looking it up can’t say what the voltage is to push across that much air but it could be relatively low V=R/I I being amps, so what is the resistance of 50 feet of air?
A lot.
Unless it is not really air, but airmolecules in saltwater.
Lightning normally strikes multiple times. The first time ionizes a trail of air, and the next two or more times it travels along the ionized path, which has very little resistance.
12,000 Hertz is very low frequency radio. Among other things.
Can we just say 12 kill hertz?
* kilo
You appear to have forgotten… That’s ok. Was a long time ago…
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-234-annihilation-application/
All you need to make antilightning safe is an airbreathing nautilus with Spock ears. You can prolly get those on ebay.
Dabbler probably used an adapter to actually overload the shields proper: she just specified the raw power source she needed from Jiggawatt to make it work.
The frequency Dabbler specifies is in the Very Low Frequency range of the known electromagnetic spectrum. 12,000 Hertz or 12 kilohertz is not high by any stretch of the imagination. It seems that the frequency should be much higher but stay below the frequency of ionizing radiation. Perhaps in the 3 Gigahertz to 300 Gigahertz range. That should also justify the amperage.
Hey! It doesn’t say “Shield Depower Sounds,” growth!
In that second-to-last panel, is Dabbler jumping really high or falling off that wall in the back?
Ditto. This reminds me of Darren on Bewitched, Beckie on Roseanne, Laurie on That 70s Show, and Rhodie in Iron Man movies where they swapped out an actor and just expected no one to notice. Completely different face. I understand different hairstyles, but this could be a guest comic she looks so different. actually, considering how little detail we see on dabbler, and the fact that we’ve never seen duke nukem and seneca before adds to my supposition
No one has pointed out jiggawatt is missing her choker
Hey, you’re right! Actually, everyone who should have one is missing their chokers, including on the previous page.
Now the only question is, are we just going to have to ignore this as an art mistake, or is there some justification for the style change coming up after this battle?
Dabbler is wearing her choker.
They are no in uniform either and the chokers are part of the uniform.
For the team the chokers are communication devices with (presumably) throat mikes.
Given that they are apparently laden with electronics they must be a fair bit heavier and stiffer than the thin band of flexible material that we sometimes wear like a tight necklace. And as such may be a fair bit less comfortable to wear.
Dabbler of course is different. She came up with the idea and already wore one. I presume it is part to her interface to her laboratory and her control mechanism of her teleportation and weapons system. And with her background there may be another reason for her to wear something like that, more in line with what undereducated morons /think/ wearing a choker means when a woman does it.
Last page also had a bunch of missing chokers. These guys were just chilling in the lounge out of uniform, no reason to wear it.
Achilles would seem to be just as capable of picking up a minigun as Goose. Or of picking up whatever Seneca is using. Both of them are doing some damage, so if you artificially limit Achillies’ options just because he is a super that’s completyely your own fault.
What do you mean limit his options? Distractions are extremely valuable, he’s drawing fire away from those that can get hurt by it.
People do what they are good at. He’s good at getting hit.
I get the impression that Achilles is terminally chill and innately stoned. He doesn’t seem to be the type to actively try to do anything that does NOT involve being unchangeable.
“I’ve never done that before!” That’s hardly a problem for someone with the Semantic Superpower of “anything to do with lightning”.
Dave, did you look up the definition of “high frequency” for that lightning?
FYI any sustained lighting has to be AC. That’s just how it works. Impulse is over and done and all you really see is the afterglow, but if she is getting lighting to ARC at those frequencies she is probably also burning out electronics for miles.
There are two ways that Jiggawatt could go from impulse to a high frequency lightning.
One is the true AC where she cycles through pushing and pulling electrons 12,000 times per second.
The other is that she keeps doing her DC but instead of a single continued blast changes it to doing 12,000 blasts per second, of 50,000 amps each.
The first is the most efficient with the use of electrons as the same ones are reused with every cycle, but the pulse might be easier for her to switch to if until now all she has done is just pushing hard with a stream of electrons. She would be still doing that only in very short bursts of approximately 80 nanoseconds (I think I got that calculation right)
Either would hit the shields with what might be the equivalent of a resonance frequency and the 50,000 amps would be the least amount of push needed to put that shield into motion using pure electrons.
That would also mean that unless there is something that specifically requires electrons to interact with said shield, a minigun firing 12,000 bullets a second would tear through it like it is not even there.
Personally, i don´t care about these shields at all. For the GP-Universe they are completely out of whack.
The author of this comic makes it a point to science superpowers that are impossible (sorry, highly unlikely) in the first place, but then his forcefields forget that kinetic energy is energy too.
If they only depower an attack by a portion, then that should go for kinetic attacks too. And i´m not even mentioning the fact that a fist creates kinetic energy as well. So why is it that bullets are “completely useless” but melee works just fine?
As far as i can see, the shields are just a few centimeters (or about 1 3.5/8ths of the funnybone of columbus, for you americans out there) from the host. Now if they were large bubbles you could argue that a melee-combattant coud go inside of the shield, using almost no force at all, and then attack the host from the inside of the shield.
These shields, however, seem to magically know that close combat is supposed to be their weakness. Especially when they are hit by a super, which produces kinetic energy easily magnitudes above that of a 5,56mm bullet.
Now. I actually can think of a shieldsystem that would be all but impervious to kinetic energy, while being utterly useless against melee.
Magnetic shields.
Hear me out.
Humans are one of the few species who are still using gunpowder. Actually, i´d imagine there are quite a few races who do that, but earth was just put on the galactic map, the other “powderusers” are not (developed enough).
BUT, other species use kinetic weapons as well. Magnetic accellerators. Railguns.
Obviously railguns use magnetic ordinance, which can be repelled (or at least caught) by a magnetic field.
We don´t do that. Human wapons use ordinance that is nonmagnetic, therefore our bullets should shred through those shields like butter.
I get that the tired meme of shields that are useless against melee is hard to ignore because it is oh so convenient, but i really expected more from you.
He said what he said, and the images show what they show. Beyond that is speculation.
“make solid projectiles all but useless”. There are hundreds of ways to do this…absorbing kinetic energy, redirecting the projectiles, changing the character of the projectiles, slowing them down, whatever. Then, given any of those descriptions, there is the underlying technology… the method.
Obviously, if you knew their tech and had advanced warning, you could tune your projectiles to have penetration against their particular tech. (Your mag version would be a great example.)
“you’re in for a melee slog” This doesn’t say that melee effectiveness is that much better, or more preferable as a fighting method, just that the range is not going to stay distant for long.
Supposing that the field merely slows down whatever is approaching fast. That makes melee like fighting in water. The field produces resistance to movement, reducing impact. People who are overwhelmingly strong, power armored, etc, can power through, losing a percentage of their kinetics. More importantly, they can punch from close in, where the field affects them over centimeters rather than meters.
“inches” – See page 765. Some parts of the VISIBLE force field in panel 3 extends at least 50 cm from the nearest armor.
More important than all this, of course, is the rule of “make the fight quick and interesting”.
The slow blade penetrates the shield.
Maybe the reason gunfire is useless while melee is not is because their shields are dependent at absorbing energy OVER a certain level. Under that level, it does not so that they can have stuff like… friction when walking. So as a result, melee hits, under a certain speed, are going to be effective. The speedster using his knife, for example, might be totally ineffective because he’s going faster than a bullet.
The shield could be the equivalent of a non-newtonian fluid, that momentarily increases viscosity under a high speed impact. You can /run/ over a lake of that stuff, but you can not easily or safely /walk/ across it.
The shield could also be some kind of point defense system. That would prioritise targets by speed and likelihood to hit, under the assumption that is would be able to intercept a limited number of incoming projectiles per second and the faster the projectile the more dangerous it is.
Then there is the fact that any shield that counters kinetic energy of necessity must selective against high speed impact and leave low speed impacts alone. Otherwise you would not be able to walk (every foot fall is an impact that would be countered by whatever force the shield exerts) or even lean to a wall (the ‘impact’ would either blow the wall apart or knock you away at high speed, or both). Even breathing would become something of an issue as all those air molecues would be repelled by the shield…
And a slow attack is less about energy and more about pressure. At least under the conditions proscribed by Cora’s and Xuriel’s explanation of how those shields work.
Ignoring the rule of cool and going with the point defense hypothesis, Jiggawatt is currently hammering away at those shields with 12,000 fairly powerful lightning strikes per second. That may well be more simultaneous attacks than the shield can handle, leading to some of her strike getting through and burning out the device that generated the shield.
And on rereading the previous pages, Dal is correct. Nowhere does it say that the shield is ineffective against melee weapons. It may be that, like sydney, the Fel can not shoot out of their shields either so their preferend battle strategy is closing to contact range and bludgeon their opponents to unconsciousness (hard to absorb a dead person into their collective) with something they can stick out of their shield?
Yes, that’s literally what I said. But you said it more scientific-y. :)
“The slow blade penetrates the shield.” :)
That is some klingon level nose scrunch right there :D
Just an observation, this is the first time I’ve seen Dabbleer’s back while we can see all four arms. The anatomy of her shoulders is an interesting look.
Are you trying to say she has an amazing stack?
As a matter of biomechanics, I think her upper and lower arms are too close together; It’s pretty clear that they interfere pretty severely with each other’s range of motion, and it’s hard to see how you could fit the full set of shoulder muscles, (Which extend up and down the spine, and to the sternum.) for two shoulders that close together. I would bet that she wouldn’t have full independent control here, it would be rather like neighboring fingers can move independently, but only within limits.
But, of course, she’s not straight anything, and there’s no reason to expect crosses to be evolutionarily optimized.
In the Grrl Power universe, the griffin is an actual beast, so Dabbler has a totally reasonable skeletal architechture…
Oh goody! It worked!
I’ve tried for years to figure out a four-way shoulder-girdle-ribcage arrangement that would work and there really isn’t one that gives full range of motion to all the involved limbs, that also allows them to be that close together.
But partial range of motion is entirely possible and there’s no reason NOT to think she’d have that, possibly to a greater extent than what we’d think.
There’s also the “Tarks” … as in the torso-over-torso of the Green Martians and White Martian Apes from Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series. That works OK because it duplicates existing structures. Weirdly.
Although not so strangely as centaurs would.
ArcSwat cosplay:
https://marvelband.com/products/180-rotatable-phone-wristband
I don’t know if anyone else has posted this but we can see Jiggy https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-732-party-pauser/ in the background here with her new hairstyle.
Goose looks way to much like Duke Nukem. I can practically hear him saying “Come get some!”
when did jigawatt go from Storm to Macy Gray?
Well, -I- like the hair. I like the expression on her face, though it seems like there’s an issue with consistency.
Dabbled is saying “lighting”, I think she means “lightning”
Dabbler* dangit
Is that… Is that THE DUKE NUKEM!?
Ok every one take five the Duke will handle this just fine.
Balls of steel!
I did loved Jiggawatt curly hair <3