Grrl Power #778 – Moving on up
It’s a lot easier to draw Sydney’s circular shield than her Honda Element. I assume that’s either parked back at her apartment or in the garage at Archon. And honestly how often is she going to use her car now? If you could fly, especially if you could fly as fast as her, your car would probably be relegated to doing errands like groceries. She could gather up groceries up by her feet and scoop them up in the bubble I guess. Her bubble doesn’t have a radio though. But her phone still works inside it. I would think flying with earbuds in is probably not optimal, safety wise though.
Don’t go back and check old pictures of Sydney’s shop, because apparently it used to be on the end of the building. Maybe the owners extended it? I thought I remembered it being flanked by other stores but didn’t realize that until I went looking for color references. It has been a while since I’ve drawn it.
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Lessons learned?
I see she’s doing the tactically sane thing & keeping her shield up when flying over territory that has not been cleared of hostiles. This is no longer her first or second day. (Compare: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-297-morning-errant/)
I always assumed shield was just a necessity when flying due to wind and high altitude temperatures.
It depends on how fast she’s going. I remember there was something about a sort of ‘mini windshield’ she got at lower speeds (but still fast enough the wind would annoy people), but once she goes too fast she needs to put up the real shield.
As I recall it, this was instinctual just like the anti-vertigo effect of the flyball.
I thought it was to deflect bugs and birds.
Umm, what hostiles? You mean reporters? o_O
No, I’m talking about yahoos with hunting rifles. Or, really, REALLY stupid bad guys who think they can make a name for themselves.
Reporters are just the vultures.
Yahoos, with hunting rifles, in the middle of the city? o_O
Was going to comment about the really, REALLY stupid bad guys, butt just got the “Gotham Sirens” Book One TPB, and it starts with a really, REALLY stupid bad guy who thought to make a name for himself by killing Catwoman (who was stopped by Poison Ivy, butt followed them to Ivy’s new ‘home’ with Harley… that just happened to be the home of a pollen-controlled Riddler, who di not like being pollen-controlled…)
This is Murica. You all walk around armed to the teeth. You could have one of your AR15 worshipping church goes try to take her out because she colludes with “aliens and Demons”. To be honest, people in your country have shot others for less.
Well it’s either good writing that reflects her recent trauma, or just a lazy artist in a hurry.
I’m impressed her shield protects her from all sorts of harmful attacks and space radiation, but allows a network connection for her phone and neck-communicator.
It’s a smart shield. I figure it actually stops everything, and then just replicates on the other side anything determined to be safe. Light doesn’t actually go through it, it just puts up a 3d image on each side of what’s on the other side.
That’s the basic principle of the laser protection goggles some units of the army are using now. They’re worried about laser blinding weapons, which are pretty easy to build, have an effectively infinite rate of fire to spray around the enemy lines, and can easily cause lifelong blindness.
It’s easy to outfit your guys with goggles that have protective filters to make them immune to your own blinding weapons, but in order to build regular filter-type goggles that protect against the enemy’s blinding weapons you have to know in advance what frequency the enemy is using. And of course, that’s the enemy’s reason to switch to a different frequency as fast and as often as he can have a batch of these weapons made.
So Instead, they outfit the guys with what are essentially refitted infrared goggles that use visible-spectrum color cameras instead of filtering for near-infrared, and instead of projecting the camera output as an overlay on visible light from outside, they project the camera output and close off visible light from outside.
And the resolution is just *ALMOST* good enough to avoid being maddenning. You see things fifty yards away but can’t figure out what they are until you’re too close to them when you know your Mark 1 Eyeball would have resolved it at fifty yards.
Annoying or not though, I’m sure they’re better than being blind.
These goggles don’t need to be “refitted”, they can support BOTH ranges. It’s the user interface that’s bulky, a visible light/infrared camera is tiny — so even if having a single camera that supports both would interfere with its capability, you can have two per eye.
And if the resolution is that bad, it’s because of the army being cheap, not of the technology being immature.
And by being cheap we mean “paying top dollar for hardened technology that can handle a lot of EMP effects that you find in normal daily activity as well as perhaps some of the ones you get from warfare” … and also “proven to work for reasonable time while being subjected to impacts, temperatures, and stresses that are well outside the treatment that your expensive smart-phone can endure.”
Yeah, I wasn’t going to point that out. MilSpec equipment is better along a lot of axes and not as good along a few others. When soldiers are using something hugely complicated and technological, it’s often as not way out in front of what’s available on the civilian market. But the routine things they have to get sixty of to outfit forty guys? They’re often doing what civilian equipment was doing a few years ago, after being tested, redesigned hardened for military (ab)use, prototyped, tested again, evaluated for ergonomics, redesigned, prototyped again, tested again, placed for bids, picked up by a contractor, manufactured in sufficient quantity, sent out to the units, and distributed by the quartermaster.
And I’m sure I missed a few steps, and there’s several subsequences that could be repeated more than once.
But we do eventually get it out to the guys in the field, and they tend to use it effectively.
Actually, even on civilian-grade stuff, quality can be considered underwhelming. Take a standard dashcam for example. Top-of-range will have 1080p resolution, 12 to 20 fps, audio and 60-second clips with live GPS saved to C10 SD card… All packed in a 30mm diameter cylinder about 6cm long with a max operating temp of 70°C (~157°F). The camera lens may be as much as 3mm diameter and a 130° field of view.
What you get for this is very good daylight imaging, but limited to resolving a registration plate within 20 meters. At night the exposure control is at best iffy, so a retroflective rego plate will be totally washed out unless you off your headlights for a few seconds. Even in daylight, if you’re thinking of capturing that incredible cloud-sky scene, forget it.
Don’t forget that a Go-Pro is not capable of long-term continuous performance with such a low battery drain, and probably doesn’t have audio and/or GPS.
That…. is one of the best thought out theories that I have heard about the shield.
The shield most likely doesn’t work like those goggles. It is a forcefield that can filter out any energy beam, field or signature inside a dangerous frequency or above a safe potency. harmless light can pass through, a highly focussed powerful beam of light in the infra-red band would be filtered or dispersed down to safe levels. Radio waves can pass through, even the weak and relatively harmless microwaves used in mobiles phones pass. A strong microwave field that can boil the skin of one’s bones would be filtered down to safe levels. Same goes for X-Rays, Gamma Rays, Alpha, Theta and whatever waves, UV A B and C, …. Probably even works with non-EM forces, such as pressure waves (sound, etc…).
We know with very high certainty that anything “material” is considered too “high power” (following the principle that all matter is just composed of energy) to pass in either direction. Solids, liquids and gases are blocked completely. She seems to have no problems with the cold in high altitudes, it therefor seems to be dual-shielded for infra-red as well. Her lighthook and pew-pew are able to pass despite being high power, though, probably because they were secifically callibrated to be used in conjunction with the shield.
Basically, if it is safe for her to pass, it can pass. If it is dangerous, it will be filtered/blocked either completely or down to a safe level.
The light hook and PPO are actually projected on the outer side of the shield when the shield is in use.
The don’t go through it.
Technically, the 3d model works far better than just filtering because of one simple thing: lensing. On an actual sphere, if you were subjected to directioned light, the angle it strikes the surface of the sphere would cause it to bend away from the direction it was travelling in, and into a new angle, namely the interior of the sphere. This is commonly known as refraction. Due to this, even being in sunlight would be highly HIGHLY dangerous because instead of only the light that physically ray-traces onto her person hitting her, now all the light that hits the surface of the sphere is directed inwards towards the center. This means that effectively she would be constantly irradiated, if not sunburnt.
So, theorizing that it DOESNT have a refractive index, and instead just duplicates inputs/outputs deemed safe, would prevent accidental frying, as focused laser beams from space would be considered dangerous no matter from cannon or sun. If we assume it is nth level alien tech capable of instant processing of all inputs/outputs that touch the shield, it would be capable of filtering out harmful bands regardless of whether it allows it through or blocks it and replicates it. The hard part is the filtering, the rest is just mitigation for being at the center of a giant magnifying glass.
Lets be honest, even in a world with magic and force fields, this shield seems unnecessarily strong. It is my hypothesis that given a different orb literally creates untraceable wormholes, it would be really easy to create a spatial distortion around the user that completely blocks any effect from entering the radius of the sphere. Effectively a black hole event horizon. And, given the 3d hologram idea, it would be easy to project from a tiny orb onto a large area, or just create the photons directly at the surface, as well as making the cool effect of the hexagon-like grid denoting the area encompassed by the shield.
The only time we have ever seen the shield come close to failing was under high energy bombardment by planet cracking alien cthulus. At that level of power, the sheer energy involved would distort space, so it doesnt surprise me that the shield interface decided to denote a failing area of spatial distortion as “red blinky shield segments” which rapidly shrink inwards and are replaced, as the edges of the hole are healed.
If your shield is effectively an infinitely long corridor with no end, you have no need to STOP anything, and can merely redirect it, absorb it, or repel it through distortions in space.
It may just be a plot device shield, as in “it works, and here is what works, and what circumstances it functions in” but it is far more interesting to think up a plausible reason why it works.
If her shield really IS spatial distortion, or even teleporting her somewhere else entirely temporarily (which wouldnt be far fetched) then i suspect that were the shield to ever actually be taken down, it would be the same thing as coming out of warp drive with an alcubierre drive. The collapse of space-time would cause a lightyears wide wave of destruction as space rippled out in all directions, shredding matter as all bonds are suddenly feet apart instead of plank-lengths apart. The occupants would be fine, but anything nearby would be utterly destroyed. This is why even with feasible FTL, we will have to make sublight engines capable of moving us closer to systems, as coming out of warp anywhere remotely close to your destination would destroy it. Likewise, the shield user would be fine, but her enemies would be destroyed. Think of it like an exploding shield in a video game, but with the power of the mass of jupiter converted to energy.
She dropped her shield in panel three, you can see it floating around her head in panel five
As for those special goggles: you effectively are blind, if you can’t correctly identify something at fifty yards
Identification distance depends very much on what you’re trying to identify, or rather on what level of detail you need to distinguish between the thing it is and something very similar that it could also be. If you only need to differentiate between a cow and a horse, then 50m should be easily enough. If you need to differentiate an Ayrshire cow from a Guernsey from a Pinzgauer, you’ll probably need to be a bit closer. If you need to differentiate whether it’s Daisy or Buttercup who’s got her head stuck in the fence, you may need to be within touching distance. (I’m not sure what level of detail is important in what contexts for the military application, hence the cow analogy.)
Halos shields and for that matter all of her orbs are insanely user friendly so its not that big a surprise.Just like how for the longest time Ive thought her “level up” system is actually a safety mechanism to stop a new user from cutting a city in half though not knowing how to use their new highly dangerous gear.
The Aetherial Causeway function of the flight orb does still require a mathematically inclined astrogator to fully use though. Fortunately Sydney knows two who can program it for her in advance.
Finally. I was beginning to wonder near the end of page 1:
1) What were Joel and Sydney’s parents told?
2) Were they given a clue that extracting Sydney – if possible – would take on the order of two months?
3) Sydney has apparently made no effort to contact Joel since her return. Has she called her parents, at least? Or does ADHD mean ‘adult’s don’t have (the) details.”
Sydney’s parents were probably told, by Maxi in person, that Sydney is… on a top secret mission and should be back in fifty days or so
No reason to tell Joel anything other than that she can’t come in to work for a few weeks
Remember, it’s not a case of the extraction taking two months, it’s the fact they have to wait two months to catch up with Sydney (they went to the future, remember)
The official
liestory that Archon put out was that Sydney was sequestered for training. I can’t imagine that they would have told anything different to Joel or Mr & Mrs Scoville. A cover story isn’t much good if you don’t tell everyone the same thing.No, they would have told Sydney’s parents that she was in danger but they believed they would have her safe in a couple of months. Telling her she was in sequestered in training just isn’t at all plausible and the parents aren’t stupid. If she were going to be sequestered Sydney would have warned them first. She is not a full fledged member of Arc Swat. She is a recruit training to become a member of Arc Swat and that is an important distinction.
“Mr and Mrs Scoville –
Sydney is sequestered in training… and she’s jumped about two months in the future.
You will excuse us for not explaining THAT part to the media, or giving any more details, because honestly we’re not sure exactly how she managed it, but we know where and when she went.
We’ve arranged for pickup at the place and time she went to, and we expect her to be fine.
We will let you know the minute we get confirmation of her pickup, but for about two months there will be literally nothing to tell anyone, except, ‘Halo is sequestered in training.’
No her parents would have been told the same thing as the public. You have to think of Archon as a branch of the CIA when dealing with people. They have a lot of secrets and they put out a lot of garbage to cover up those secrets. If they had believed Sidney to be dead they would have invented a cover story on how she died her family and friends would never have been told the truth.
That would guarantee that her parents went to the press and informed them that what they were being told by Arc Swat wasn’t true, and rightfully so. As secretive as Archon may be with it’s operatives, it does not have the liberty to be secretive with recruits who (just like recruits in every other branch of the militar) are not yet operatives but merely paid trainees attempted to become operatives.
There is an important distinction there. Were they intending to send their trainee someplace they have an obligation to tell the recruit and the recruit would call the family and tell them that they would be out of pocket.
In addition, if the worst had happened having lied to the parents would open Archon up to heavy damages because as has been pointed out…Sydney is only a recruit.
I don’t believe that Arianna is so incompetent as to go along with that sort of plan.
Archon is a branch of the military, not secret service
Speaking of resolution that’s just *almost* good enough, I am amused by the fact that Dave actually used ‘Lorem Ipsum’ for the text instead of embedding some clue or message for us to fail to notice.
And it’s right at that border of resolution where you have to already know what it is in order to follow along looking for the shapes of the words, instead of being able to actually read it.
What? Why are you looking at me funny? Hasn’t *everybody* memorized Lorem Ipsum?
I used to have the first 3-4 sentences memorized, then decided I was sick of it and now switch between a few of the far more entertaining text and image alternatives.
Hah! “What is Lorum Ipsum” and “Why do we use it?” Meta.
No show, no call, no text, gone almost three months with zero warning? She is SO fired! Not to mention being a PR liability for the store as much as she is for ARC…
Sydney is co-owner of the store. Owners don’t have to worry about getting fired. And the fact is her sudden fame is what made the store suddenly become hugely profitable, thus necessitating Joel moving the store to a larger storefront. Even if she was an employee subject to termination, Joel would have to be a complete moron to fire the employee who is single handedly responsible for turning the store’s fortunes around.
Exactly so. Before the press conference where Sydney debuted as The Might Halo (she’s mighty might-tay), Joel was saying that if business didn’t turn around, they’d be closed within a year. The day after, they had so many sales before noon that Sydney couldn’t close the drawer for how much cash was stuffed in it.
Nope.
As was mentioned, she’s an owner, not an employee.
And even if she were an employee she couldn’t be fired under the circumstances.
https://www.military.com/spouse/career-advancement/military-spouse-jobs/userra-right-to-reemployment.html.
And finally we know she can’t be fired because we still haven’t caught up to the point where the flashback began.
Failed the advance notice requirement.
As owner, still doesn’t matter.
Not sure if you’re joking, so I’ll treat it as if you were being serious:
Joel can’t fire Sydney — she’s part owner of the shop. If they had some sort of formal arrangement about how many hours they would each put in, and she didn’t put hers in, he could invoke whatever the penalty clause was. No indication that they do, though. He could ask her to pay him back for whatever wages he had to pay to whoever covered her hours (likely Olivia), which she could ridiculously easily do out of the 10 grand she plopped into her Swear Jar Mark II at the welcome home party. She mentioned that her first biweekly Archon paycheck was as much money as she made the whole previous year via the comic shop.
Not showing up at the shop might cause the draw of the comic shop being part-owned by a real super hero. Again, she could cover lost potential sales out of her wages and not miss it. Or some of the ARC-Swat folks could have popped in at the store semi-randomly to keep the buzz going. Harem could literally pop in, and not leave the base at the same time. Hasn’t been referenced, but it certainly isn’t impossible.
Halo bad PR for Archon? Not that we’ve seen. The only indication of a PR effect for the team from Sydney was Arianna’s mentioning Sydney as coming off as relatable during the initial press conference, and her defusing silliness with the sand blow-back after demoing her PPO during the live power demonstration (2nd half of the press conference) and her shielding the press from Max’s Tank Implodey Marble of DOOM ™ probably netted positive press, too. Arianna specifically used the shield to defuse the pants-shittingness of Max’s demo at the time, in fact.
I’m not saying that Sydney’s never done or said anything that could be bad PR for the team — but so far (aside from being selectively quoted when she half-jokingly said she shouldn’t be allowed to arrest people due to how prone she’d be to actually do it) she hasn’t done any of those things in front of the press.
The only point on which she may potentially have lost her co-ownership on the shop without her expressedly consenting to give it up would be the government seizing her assets or her death. I don’t know how it is in the military, but for civilians, she would have to disappear for 7 years without a trace before legally deemed dead.
Arc Swat refused to acknoledge her death…well, Max refused….and they figured out quite quickly that there was a time shift. They trusted her orbs and knew (hoped) she would be able to hold for a day or two.
Yes, Joel probably has some good reason to be pissed about her never responding to any massages. but he knows she is in the super business now, he knows she could be in some deep cover situation or whatever…and yes, he knows she could be dead somewhere (probably didn’t know that she could potentially be on a different planet killing monsters that are powerful enough to oneshot Godzilla). The official story was that she was undergoing extensive training in a secluded and secret location, deliberately cut off from the world to keep her focussed or whatever…
And if anyone would know how much extensive training Sydney would require, would be Joel :P
Ok, after reading the text at the bottom of the comic and then researching a bit, I now learnt the difference between contiguous and continuous. Non-native speakers can really learn something here. :-)
I hadn’t realized that this text referred to her porting through space that’s not contiguous without the portal, rather than her non-continuous existence (from Joel’s point of view), because that’s what she’s talking about in the comic.
The distinction between contiguous and continuous is not basic English. There are many native English speakers who do not know the word contiguous.
I’m a native English speaker. I was moderately gifted in mathematics enough that I was in all of the most advanced math classes my high school offered. Despite the fact that the distinction between these two is important for some of those classes, I wasn’t introduced to the word contiguous until I was in college.
If I recall correctly, the last time I got a funny look or using the word contiguous in public was the last time I used it in public.
Almost had a heart attack when I saw the empty storefront.
I know that Sydney is supposed to be a bit socially inept but us it really so bad that she would wear her own merchandising. That’s a little tacky even for her.
Umm, there is a difference between merchandising and brand
Would you call Soupcan’s ‘S-shield’ to be ‘merchandising’? o_O
Technically, they aren’t selling krypton-weave super suits at the local mall in the DC verse. But they are selling Halo T-shirts, hoodies, and sneakers.
Actually… they are selling kryptonian-branded clothing in malls. In the DC universe. Especially in Japan, apparently. Supergirl and Superman weren’t even able to sue over it. It was in the comic. I’m not sure if it was a Superman comic or a Justice League of America comic, but it was one of them. I know it wasn’t in a Supergirl comic. There was a lawyer and everything. Flash (Wally, at least) has his symbol trademarked, by the way. I’m not sure if he has it trademarked in the New Earth universe, but he has it trademarked in at least one universe. Ray Palmer (The Atom) and Mr Terrific have their symbols trademarked as well, but that makes sense since they’re both businessmen/scientists in addition to being superheroes.
Also, TECHNICALLY speaking, the S doesn’t actually stand for Hope. It’s the House of El Family crest, which looks similar to the Kryptonian symbol for ‘hope’ – which is more like a number 8 in an upside-down pentagon in the Kryptonian language, which is ALSO equivalent to the letter S in Kryptonian.
https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/kryptonian.php
Yes, that’s what meant by it being the symbol (or meaning) for ‘hope’
Not sure if that is legit or some retro bullshit for that crappy movie where Soupcan actually killed someone
Yeah, Man of Steel was extremely problematic, especially with how he kills Zod when there were SO many other things he could have done… including flying up with him so the civilians would not be killed. They tried to make it look like he had no choice, except there WERE choices. It was lazy storytelling.
Worse than just “lazy storytelling” it was British Deconstructionist storytelling, where everything in the universe is soaked in pure cynicism until it becomes sterile and incapable of sustaining life, but instead has a zombie-toxic effect causing everything not-cynical to fail and become cynical and dead.
I identify it as such because the main proponents of this particular cane-toad of a memetic take on heroism is the result of a particular intellectual fashion that arose in the late 1960s-early 1970s in England specifically amongst the various University/College writing community.
You can see the effect of this attitude (which renders the concept of ‘heroism as loving and trustful self-sacrifice on behalf of others whether or not they deserve it’ into some sort of diseased selfish indulgence) through the majority of comics since Watchmen pointed out that the concept didn’t seem to match what stories were being told in comics. (And that’s a separate problem. One I like to burn on the very late 1950s thru 1960s DC editorial gravestone, since Superdickery arose and flourished then.)
Or simply: put his hands over Zod’s eyes
… that would have worked too, lol :)
If that were what happened, that would be a good analysis. But it’s a hollow recollection of a more complex situation. In the moment, yes, Zod is trying to murder several humans with his heat vision. More than that, though, Zod said “If you love these people so much, you can mourn for them.” Superman begged Zod to stop, and Zod said “Never.” In other words, he wasn’t going to just kill those people, he was going to keep killing humans until there weren’t any left to kill.
Superman had destroyed the terraforming (kryptonforming?) machine, and with it Zod’s hope of restoring Krypton. Zod had nothing left to lose, and blamed Kal, and the whole house of El, for bringing him to that situation. Superman was barely defeating Zod when Zod had had maybe an hour to master his powers outside of the Kryptonian environment suit, and a few days of having powers at all. Zod was a trained warrior and strategist. Plainly put, Superman had no way to restrain him at the time, and his chance of defeating him was approaching zero rapidly.
Superman’s action in that scene was, in fact, a heroic sacrifice. He committed an act he was deeply morally opposed to, at great emotional cost, in order to save humanity.
Yeah, but to set up this scene we are subjected to a lot of absolute bullshit. The heat vision is directed by the eyeballs. This is not something that is logically able to be shown threatening but not hitting the civilian family. They should have died, and then Superman killing Zod would have been far more justified.
And let us not ignore the fact that there simply had to have been piles of civilian casualties from the way Superman and Zod were punching each other through skyscrapers and such. The movie failed to show that, even when trying to justify Batman’s fixation on Superman in Batman v Superman. I guess for ratings? Because lots of dead bodies sometimes makes for an R rating, especially if it’s bloody enough. But no, the family of three were apparently the only people actually threatened with death by Zod, because plot holes.
It’s retro bullshit from the comics editorial staff, for the various bullshit around the character having been created and used inconsistently for well over a century now.
It is exactly the kind of nerdy bullshit you might make up if you didn’t really want to think too hard about the consequences of previously rotten bullshit world design, and wanted to make something spiffier than it would have been in a more thought-out world.
It’s not an ‘S’
Yes it is, it stands for ‘Hope’
He also has an ‘s’ on his forehead, that little curl of hair
On our planet it’s an ‘S.’
Just noticed the title of this page: it matches the title of another webic a couple issues back (“The Delve”)
Obligatory link :P
Conspiracy mode: What if they didn’t add onto the building, but rather the reason the store is no longer on the end is because the owners of the strip mall forced them to move over a space to make room for 67 minute cleaners because of some random BS reasons and that upset sidney’s business partner and he decided to find a new place to rent out. dun dun dun!
I’m sure it used to be longer and the place on the end that moved in needed less space so when they moved out the shop was divided and a door was added and current door moved along.
Nah, the interior of the store matches what we saw before, it’s just the exterior that needs to be fixed (better add it to the growing list DaveB :P )
Simpleton Mode: Well they moved, so the store is no longer at the end of the strip. (waits for the facepalms)
Alternate Conspiracy Mode: When the store moved out the mall replaced it immediately with the 67 Minute Cleaners so people would keep ‘accidentally’ go to the wrong store by habit and the mall owner’s ne’r-do-well relative who runs the cleaners might get actual business. But they couldn’t just let it disappear cause the sign still draws people into the parking lot, so they moved the store sign, old interior and the move notice down to the empty spot beside the old location.
Alternate Alternate Conspiracy Mode: Aliens!!!!!
Its got to be in Archon’s mall … hasn’t it? But then wouldn’t Maxima, or other Archon staff in earshot*, tell Sydney that?
As for the shop’s appearance, clearly it is one of them mystical shops, which blend into a neighbourhood and nobody notices anything out of the ordinary. It is probably in a different part of the neighbourhood each day, sometimes is the size of a small shopping arcade, others barely bigger than a single room. With interior decor usually being a modern shop, but some days being musty bookstore whilst others having ancient Tibetan trappings or alien fittings. With nobody remembering that it was any different, or just taking it as being tweaked for some sales gimmick.
No wonder Sydney got lost trying to find it. Likewise the confusion in any artist trying to draw it more than once.
* I know that we only saw Max, but we were also only seeing a corner of the room. There were bound to be others there too, such as Arianna, Super Hiro or somebody taking minutes of the meeting.
Hey Yorpie!
And no it’s probably NOT in Archon’s mall. We see the new shop in the beginning of this comic, and it’s a drive from Archon’s building. Although honestly it would make sense for them to have a shop in Archon’s mall.
What we saw, on the page in question, was a montage of Sydney’s life, in three panels. She works, she drives and she is a super hero. Yes it is reasonable to assume that she was driving from her comic shop to the Archon HQ. But equally Sydney may have popped out to see her folks, go to the bank or que jump at a comic convention.
Something to support my argument is the fact that Sydney’s routine is to go from her super work to her shop work, in the afternoon. The opposite way round to how you are taking it, in the montage. What may well have happened is Sydney spending the night with her folks, then going into work the following morning.
Her folks live too far away to visit often.
Remember, in the phonecall before the restaurant fight Sydney says it won’t be a big deal visiting now that she can fly.
Also, remember her conversation with Jo-El about location; there isn’t a comic shop for eleven miles in any direction. She and Jo-El did their homework on business location and liked factored in population demographics and density. Arc Swat doesn’t want to be in a heavily populated area (duh, it’s a military facility) just in driving distance to get to one. So you have two opposing location requirements.
I’m pretty sure Sydney was driving from her comic book shop, which has a place in the back for roleplaying sessions. I know it wasn’t her parents, since her parents werent at the RPG session. Joel was there, the other girl that works in the comic book shop was there, and two other people were there. You also see comic book boxes on shelves on the wall, leading me to believe it would be the comic book shop.
There wasn’t a comic book shop in any direction EXCEPT for theirs. And when they move, that could still be the case. But in any case, that conversation you’re quoting took place at the beginning of the flashback, while the roleplaying session took place before the flashback starts, meaning in ‘present day.’
That second paragraph was in response to Phogg.
I was using the quote to establish that they aren’t just opening locations on instinct or because they have some sentiments about a place. They are having marketing surveys done and approaching their Event Horizon venture as a proper business rather than a hobby that makes money.
The location requirements for a military facility and a comic book store are pretty much diametrically opposite with the exception of Naval facilities and certain Airforce training facilities.
Part of military security is all that land you have to drive through until you get to things. That screens activities from obsevation and provides a better chance to intercept and stop someone who penetrates the perimeter.
All that forrest and fields on a military base? Not full of comic book customers.
All that rigmarole to get through the main gate (especially a secure facility like actual super powered people would exemplify) would be a heavy negative after the novelty wore off.
Thus the location will be in town. With Sydney as an attraction (and with her income from Archon available when needed) they should be able to pick an upscale location surrounded by coffee shops and restaurants. The end of the game session before the flashback shows a broad staircase, so they are going to be flush enough to have a second floor.
I had assumed Joel moved because of all the extra business and they needed a bigger store as a result :)
Definitely. But the location wouldn’t be Archon.
Umm, doesn’t she do the Comic shop in the morning though? When the new stock arrives?
Good job on drawing that abandoned store. The attention to detail is quite good.
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Well… I missed the reply button, so here it shall stay.
I just realized Sydney has a second weakness.
Sneezes.
Think she wants to touch an orb if someone sneezes directly on it when her shield isn’t up?
I don’t think Sydney has the Howard Hughes thing going on.
The bit with the Purell was just a joke at Dabbler’s expense.
Is she only required to wear her armband thingie when she’s on duty? Because I’d get one of these for off-duty!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HMP7MMG/
She’s not wearing her choker neither
Ummm…Now that I think about it, Sydney’s probably late for payment on all of her regular, monthly bills too. Unless of course, Archon covered them for her & deducting them from her paychecks, presuming that Sydney would come back.
Well now that I’m thinking about that, I’m also wondering if Archon is aware of Sydney’s P(ersonal) L(ightweight) O(mnidirectional) T(actical) Armor, at least well enough that they pre-actively knew she would be coming back at all?
Of course, this also means that she’ll still have to finish “Boot Camp,” but even just her base Recruit Pay should have been more than enough to cover her bills. I also wonder how Gen. Falk reacted when he found out that Sydney was “de-briefed” by an Extra-Terrestrial Alien (specifically, Frix) before Archon had their own chance to discuss her missing time with them?
Remember, they knew (eventually, after Daphne was able to sort her head out) when Sydney was, so it was simply a case of getting someone there, they just hadn’t anticipated Cora would be stealing a priceless Fel artefact at the last minute and get there late
The arched ceiling would allow for VERY high shelves… maybe those wheeled ladder contraptions from old libraries?
Or multiple floors? Or BOTH?
They can have a costume wing, TONS of convention space for events and game days…
OOH! They could host a convention! SydneyCon!
Re audio – bone conduction headphones