Grrl Power #804 – The hero we read
Apparently Sydney’s control over the lighthook is real good, because writing stuff in cursive with it would be kind of difficult. I couldn’t even write “The Mighty Halo” all in one stroke cause I was trying to figure out how she’d cross the lower case T and stuff like that. Plus I’m kind of a sketchy drawer. I lift the pen a lot, so it was unnatural feeling to try and write it all out in one go.
More amazing than that maybe, is that someone Sydney’s age would even really know cursive. I guess she’s on the cusp, but do they even teach it in schools anymore? I’ve read in several places that most kids these days have no idea how to write it and can barely read it because they barely even hand write anything. All their homework and socializing is done on a screen.
Honestly, that stuff sounds like grouchy old “back in my day” comments from disgruntled Olds. I would think anyone should be able to read it. Sure, the uppercase G is weird looking but from context, most words should make sense. Writing it would be a bit harder I guess. I have to think about it when I do it… which I think I’ve done maybe six times in the last decade. Most of which was because I was drawing someone’s handwriting in the comic.
Aranea appears in dramatic shadow in two panels because I needed to make up a bit of time from travel and family time spent over the holidays. Also I thought it would look kind of cool.
I’ve updated the vote incentive. It’s the same picture of Max from last month but I did a little more work on it. I darkened her median skintone so I could make the highlights pop a bit more, also I fixed some weird stuff going on with her jacket. It’s getting there.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Excellent. A call for help might be in order, though.
I think that was the point of the giant glowing Halo signature by night.
I thought the point of the giant signature was Sydney emphasising that it is The Mighty Halo.
The Mi-TAY Halo
she told people she found something, then her sign saying “Mighty” tells the others where she is at. Whether she captures the spider before or after they arrive is the Question.
Weird, I thought Rene was the Question
I don’t know about the Question, but the bird is the word.
And the answer is 42.
The answer was a question, people keep forgetting that and just go with the answer to the question believing that that is the answer
No, that was the answer to the second question.
Q1 to Deep Thought: “what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?”. Q2 to Earth: “OK, so if that’s the answer then what was the question?”.
She already did that before she got stabbed
Butt, she didn’t tell them where she was, just that she may have found something
GPS transponders in their communications equipment. They know where she’s at.
It’s almost like having a full-fledged Intelligence and Technology division behind superheroes makes them more effective and safe!
That would require them to link-in with Archon HQ, which could take time, time they don’t have
That would be assuming they didn’t already do that.
Talking about active monitoring, wouldn’t really be a ‘night out’ if they are being 24/7 monitored (more like an invasion of privacy)
Neither her GPS transponder nor her coms equipment are on her as she’s not in her tac gear. Sidney’s in evening wear. So unless they can hack her phone (which shouldn’t have broken) and find her location that way, Mrs. Schoville’s best bet is to announce her location so that the others can find her.
She’s only about thirty feet from the hatch they followed Aranea through.
Where do you get that messed up measurement from? o_O
Sydney has obviously practiced the writing.
If she is smart she will use the lighthook to push the shield into her other hand.
She moves them with her mind, so she doesn’t need the lighthook to get the shield. She’s thinking offense at the moment (BAD idea when you’re immobilised).
“The Mighty Halo” is for the bad lady, who called Sydney “just” Halo. She’s corrected others on that point before.
I’m still not sure what the maximum total length of the Lighthook can stretch out…Couldn’t Sydney have managed “The Mighty Mi-tay Halo?”
I’d meant to link the words “Mighty Mi-Tay” in there to the archive of page #155 (Aug. 19, 2013) but it evidently didn’t come out that way.
Indeed, she’s Mighty Mi-Tay, letting her bangs hang out!
…also, link to #155 where she so names herself.
I’m not sure I’d call ‘offense’ necessarily a bad idea in the current circumstances, given that the current form of the offense primarily consists of keeping her only (known) opponent and potential lead in Tamatha’s kidnapping occupied and contained until reinforcements can arrive. Yes, raising the Shield would be a bonus, but the focus is rightly on preventing Aranea escaping.
Shield or telepresence so that she can see the bad guy better.
Telepresence is a good thought, because it looks real and so any enemy might waste attacks on it. Thsi is something I’d like to see Sydney do in the future when she is providing non-lethal* support as she did in the Rumble at the Steakhouse™
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* Fire Guy may protest that “non-lethal” classification, but he didn’t die. I mean, he could have, but he didn’t.
I don’t understand why they didn’t call for backup before they started searching.
I mean, didn’t Sydney already get lectured about that after she nearly got killed?
Before they were looking for a kid who may have simply wandered off at a bar. If they alert all of Archon and/or The Council every time someone “goes missing” for 5 minutes (is in the pisser, went home bored, grabbed a cab with their hook up, whatever) no one will ever get any sleep.
But yeah, when Specs saw her trail heading up into the ventilation ducts or whatever, that’s when “wandered off” should have been upgraded to “enemy action,” and the hue and cry for backup should have gone out then.
They did call for backup: Specs and Pixelicious
This was a preliminary search to see if they can find where she was taken, and depending on that outcome would determine if they needed more, and what sort of, backup
They didn’t really need the entire Pacific Fleet to rescue less than half a dozen people from an island, butt it made the end of that Jurassic movie more dramatic
The big arrow pointing out her location is about the best she can do at this time. Unless she grabs the PPO and sends up a very large ‘flare,’ I guess. :-D
But she should also be deploying the FF orb and making sure that spider-demon-huntress can’t acrobat tumble over to her and put an end to her Lighthook shenanigans…
She’s still not learned her lesson, though: No force field.
Wouldn’t she want the force field though? Couldn’t Sydney use her shield orb to trap both aranea and herself inside to make it easier for her to catch aranea with the lighthook? Or even trap aranea until reinforcements got there
Squishy humans don’t trap their opponents with them in the same force field if they can possibly avoid it.
The lighthook cannot be used inside the forcefield.
She learned this during the fight with Vehemence.
No, that fight shows the lighthook cannot be used OUTSIDE the shield while youre on the inside of it. We havent seen anything that says it cannot be used inside the shield as best I recall.
The lighthook can be totally used outside the shield.
Heck , there is no way it can’t because Sidney can’t be OUTSIDE the shield (that we know)
That is explicitly not what is shown on page 280, Sydney has Vehemence trapped in the shield with her and tries to lighthook him but in her own words “I don’t know how to make it appear inside the shield…”
Those may be the words, but their accuracy is not proven.
We have Sydney saying that she can’t get the Lighthook to appear inside the Shield. However, she then goes straight into a well-executed ‘Plan B’ outside the Shield that’s probably more effective than anything she could have done with the Lighthook on the inside, and which relies on a ‘distraction’ that’s been shown to be less effective on those forewarned to resist.
Consider these possibilities, and which seems more likely. [i] Sydney, despite all her experimentation before that point, suddenly runs up against a major limitation in her Orbs’ capabilities, right when it derails Plan A, and immediately has Plan B ready to go. Or [ii] the distraction outside the Shield was Plan A all along, and the line about the Lighthook was a feint to avoid forewarning Vehemence to resist the distraction.
Note that if Page 280 was a feint and Sydney is in fact able to manifest the Lighthook inside the Shield, that gives her a powerful ace in the hole. We’ve already seen that she considers it important to keep some tricks, like the teleporting ability of the Holo-orb, hidden in reserve even from her own leader. Keeping a tactically useful ability secret from the watching media – even deliberately creating a false limitation to do so – would appear well within character.
Very much the opposite: her attempt to use it inside the shield caused it to appear outside the shield. She then proceeded to USE it outside the shield by having Dabller jumprope over it.
Page 280 explicitly establishes she doesn’t know how to use the lighthook inside of her shield when it’s active.
Not related but other interesting thing the next few pages establish is Dabbler’s succubus charms work through Sydney’s forceshield, at least the passive boob-based ones.
In the context, it didn’t have to be her magical succubus powers, though. It could have just been Vehemence’s Y chromosome weakness vs boobs.
Except it does have to be powers, because we specifically see Syd’s thought bubble remembering Dabbs telling her “they’re literally hypnotic” and everyone in the area stops and drools blankly.
That’s a bit debatable, since Vehemence was pretty much immune* to Dabbler’s other attempts to magic him up, and a passive lust aura seems like it would be weaker than an actively cast spell.
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* Up until he was able to just “turn off” his resistance to her sleep spell, which is a neat trick I suppose.
The lust aura is not just passive – she can dial it up and down at will, but never goes below a 10. When she made her first grand entrance, everyone in the room but Max – including her handler, and each already familiar with her ability – was drawn in.
In the parking lot, her entire team was shut down even though they’re all around her (and other ‘perfect’ super builds) daily.
Fair enough. Despite there not being any of the visual effects, Dabbler jumping Lighthook did seem to have riveted everyone’s attentions on Dabbler, and not just the males, pretty much as it did at Archon HQ. Jiggawatt required a slap on the ass to snap out of just staring at Dabbs…
vote,take grrl power to #1.
Voted. It is currently #3.
I don’t understand how The Depths can be #6. I thought it was out on hiatus… All I get is a splash page, although there is a flash of a comic before that appears. But there is no longer the age verification button, and I don’t see anything capable of being interacted with. And I tried it on Chrome and it looked (and behaved with that flash of seeing a comic page before the splash page appears) the same, so it isn’t just a Firefox issue. Is anyone accessing it?
https://www.thedepthscomic.com/
Seems to be a new page as of the 5th (had to go through an age verification on IE11)
Read ‘The Depths’ some time back, butt then kinda lost the link for awhile, have so many daily webic reads just don’t have to time to play ‘catch-up’ right now
If she were smart, she’d just take the capture now. Cause when Syd can move again it’s just gonna get much MUCH worse. But given she did kidnap a literal teenager who barely knows how to handle her own body to interrogate for secrets of the inner workings of demon/supernatural governance, it’s pretty much established she is not to bright.
Well, that she isn’t the brightest pea in the pod is probably a given. But she at least recognized Sydney! So she at least pays attention to the TV!
She’s lucky Sydney doesn’t have eye beams. Cause she has a look can almost kill as is.
Sydney is NOT happy at all.
Can you picture what would happen if her first word after the sedative/tranq wears off is “Vermillion” and Max shows up purely to protect the demon spider thing?
Oh yes. Kidnapping of a minor, (dangerous) battery of a police officer (does that last part count before she identified her self and is not wearing an uniform? Anyway everything she is doing now will be), possession(whatever was in that injector can’t be legal) and a lot of other crimes and misdemeanors she picked up on the way. Also she can be happy to be picked up by Archon, the Council could be not so nice to Demonhunters, like feed them to the vampires.
Yes, it counts. A cop not on the job or in uniform is still a cop.
Right, because the smart thing would have been to immediately go after the most ancient vampire she could find?
No, if you’re going against an opponent you have very little data about, you pick off the small fry for intelligence first.
especially when the data this person seems to have collected, according to the limited interaction we have with her, she seems to think there is a “dark world” of evil or something where humans are being picked off by the monsters? or whatever? She sounds like an emo kid from a bad supernatural video game/movie. The Darkness is coming to the Dark World and Consume all of the living into Darkness! . . . . DARK!!
At this point we have no idea how much she knows or why she’s acting. Maybe she saw something weird and jumped to conclusions. Maybe she had a run in with one of the few bad ones. Maybe the lady with extra arms was cursed or grew up trying to prove she isn’t evil or something.
Exactly. ‘Spider Robertson’ (powers of a spider, outlook of Pat Robertson) is pulling a classic Daredevil move. If Daredevil is trying to figure out what’s going on, he doesn’t go straight after Kingpin; he goes to Josie’s Bar and intimidates or roughs up Turk Barrett or one of the other street-level operatives to get an idea of what Kingpin is probably up to (or even the highly improbable scenario that Kingpin isn’t involved . . . which means Daredevil might have to save the poor schmuck who’s pulling crime on Kingpin’s turf from Kingpin).
Hah, I mistook that for ‘Spider Robinson’ for a second and was like “Oh, man, what a great series of books.”
Spider Jerusalem from the “Transmetropolitan” comic series was the reference I was going for. The Unfriendly Neighborhood Spider-Nut is pulling a classic Spider move there: soap-boxing a temporarily helpless opponent so they’ll know how wrong they are and how right Spider is.
The difference being, of course, that Spider Jerusalem is usually well-informed and (within the limits of his massive misanthropy) trying to get at the facts, and Spider Robertson is apparently as good at mental gymnastics as she is at physical gymnastics.
Weird, I’ve never read that comic, and yet I am familiar with the character.. Had to look him up real quick for a gentle reminder tho. XD Wonder if it’s Hunter S Thompson related or Warren Ellis related? Memory is bizarre.
Which one? Robinson isn’t as prolific as some, but he isn’t a one-hit wonder, either.
I’m pretty sure I first ran across him in Analog magazine. The name is fairly distinctive, I’m certain I’ve never heard of another person going by ‘Spider.’
I have a feeling that if Sydney didn’t know cursive, she’d learn it to use the light hook like that. I dunno, maybe she has a secret interest in writing styles?
After setting the forest on fire and prior to joining Action, I imagine that she would mostly practiced with the light hook.
I mean , if you have super powers, then you will want to use them. But the shield, flight, and comm orbs aren’t that fun to use in private (well, levitating around the appartment might be relaxing). So doodling with the glowing lien would have been the main source of entertainment. So of course she has plenty of signing practice under her belt.
I’m going to hazard a guess that “flying in an annoying manner” was one of the things Sydney did the most with the orbs when she was still trying to keep them a secret to avoid whisking.
That whole bit about being able to be in any orientation at all with the flight orb sheltering your inner ear would be awesome!
The cursive practice with the light-hook could be done safely just about anywhere she’d be confident of her safety, but I think that she observed how neon lights are formed to figure out how to do things like putting crossbars on T’s, and dotting I’s.
That’s what I was thinking, I’d guess she may not of been all that good at it before, if she could at all. but once she got her light hook now she’s got a reason to get good at it, so she would of learned that.
I got into calligraphy and alternative alphabet characters after reading The Hobbit. I’m sure there are some anime fans who get into studying kanji and Japanese calligraphy. Nerd/geek hobbies and interest in handwriting styles definitely have points of intersection.
You can dodge all you want! Sooner or later the tentacle is gonna get you! Yee Haa!
“Dark”, of course, meaning hidden or not very well known, as in “the Dark Ages” (from which we have few written records) – it isn’t actually synonymous with evil.
So, public superhero is in “the light”, and secretive Skulky McSpider is part of “the Darkness”. (Cue Decolette with “Get Your Hands off My Woman” ?)
Thanks for the one up, I’m a headbanger, from the 80’s.
Thought The Darkness was from the 90’s slash 00’s… o_O
The comics 1996 and the game 2007.
The link Chronocidal posted mentions the band (no, not “The Band”, they were from the 60’s)
At least here in Georgia some schools are teaching cursive writing and penmanship again. That wasn’t the case even 15 years ago though.
@DocSavage- Georgia teaching cursive and penmanship is sorta humorous really, since cursive is specifically what happens when you let your penmanship devolve as your writing speed increases!
Thats how cursive came to exist in the first place- its not some alternate alphabet someone thought up from scratch. Its what printinig naturally evolves into as you get more and more practiced at it. The problem with starting with cursive is that it doesnt magically stop your handwriting from evolving/degrading, so while a person who starts with printing is writing in proto-cursive after 15 years, someone who starts off writing cursive after 15 years is quite possibly writing in doctorese/illegible gibberish.
Doctors write like that to stop prescription pad thieves from, well, using the pads: chemists (or pharmacists) always phone the clinic to confirm the prescription
IE it is intentionally illegible
It is possible to write cursively fast and still have it legible, that’s where practice comes in, it doesn’t get worse the more you use it
I feel constrained to point out to you that if you have arthritis or any of many conditions which affect the hands then it absolutely does get worse.
And that can happen with any style of writing, even ‘Block Print’
I’ve seen cursive that was absolutely beautiful, and utterly illegible. The loops and descenders were all really elegant, but you simply couldn’t decode what any of the letters actually were.
Friends in east coast states have said their kids are learning cursive again too. I know it’s kind of a lost art, but really, if we’re gonna teach kids about art and music, why not the more elegant forms of literature and writing?
Somebody realized it was either teach cursive, or somehow convince Americans to start adopting hankos.
Gotta sign for things somehow, after all!
Surprisingly enough, there is no legal requirement to “sign” one’s name. It is perfectly legal to “sign” one’s name by printing one’s name. In fact, it is legal to simply “make one’s mark” as a signature. This has lead to some legal documents, mostly contracts with illiterate persons, having a simple ‘X’ for the signature.
If you want a good signature example google “Monty Oum signature”, yes it has letters but it isn’t just a name in a specific script; which makes it more distinctive then the vast majority of signatures. This inspired me to modify my signature to make it more unique.
It’s 21th century: the proper way to sign something is with elliptic curves – ECDSA.
Eh, a lot of modern adults I know just print their name, albeit in whatever stylized form of block lettering theirs has developed into. Cursive has sadly fallen into disuse, which is a shame, because as far as signing legal documents, there is an air of significance about signing something in cursive that feels like it holds more weight than just printing one’s name. Something positively Faustian, one might say. }+)
I feel like this is the one super power trick Sydney practices every night. Just being able to flex the lighthook into that specific shape in 1 quick command
it took me this long to realize that she had six arms
It is a good think that she did not do a facepalm when she realized that she had caught a superhero.
OW!OW!OW!OW!
When she first appeared, she had six arms, and people comm… oh right, people don’t read the comments, as you were, nothing to read here
I was just about to compliment Sydney on her cursive when I read Dave’s blurb.
Although actually, it’s probably that good because she’s practiced using the lighthook to make The Mighty Halo like that a lot. I’d think she’d do that everytime she’s introduced during the Q&A panels at comic conventions (as in the Wearing The Cape crossover) and even when she’s at the Archon booth signing autographs.
I also wanted to pitch in my two cents that I think the dramatic shadows used for Aranea where cool and appropriate.
So long as it isn’t written in comic sans. XD
I’m going to say it since no one else has yet. Nice Wild Cards reference, I honestly think that the series deserves a lot more credit than it gets because it is overshadowed by Game of Thrones.
Glad someone else saw that. Love Wild Cards – and agree it doesn’t get the attention it so richly deserves.
I read the whole series, my favorite was The Sleeper.
person after my own heart
I reckon. Sad day when Roger Zelazny died, some of the best story arcs in the early books were Sleeper focussed. I hope the show does Typhoid Croyd.
I was scrolling through to see if anyone else got the wild cards ref. Glad to see im not alone.
Hear, Hear!
I think you’re right that writing by hand is becoming a lost art.
Which is a shame in my opinion because writing a note/post-it
is faster than grabbing your tablet/phone and typing it.
And you can display several notes in your area of sight instead of
having them as a file on your tablet/phone and switching between them.
Also!!!: There is evidence that writing by hand stimulates the development
of fine motor skills in hands and brain.
Also 2: Something written/printed on good paper endures longer than a digital file
(unless you manage to copy the latter on a regular basis).
Saying “hey Google”, or “Alexa”, or “hey Siri” and talking to a device to make/leave a note or message someone is much faster than finding a pen and note pad, IMO, especially since for whatever reason, my error rate when speaking to my phone is probably only 1 or 2%
What if (radical idea coming, stick with me) the person you are wanting to leave a message for, doesn’t have a dumb-phone? o_O
Or (even more radical) you want to leave a message for anyone who is going to visit you that you are not at home, or maybe around the back so don’t bother banging on the door or ringing the doorbell for ten minutes? O_o
Well those cases are not something which happens continuously throughout the day for most people so(I know this is a radical concept, so hang on to your socks!)
Learning block printing is more than enough, and it is, as a matter of fact what most people use in those situations.
The point wasn’t what style of writing used, as much as simply physically writing on an actual piece of paper
If anyone has implied that paper was obsolete entirely on the discussion of today’s Halo episode I missed it.
The discussion has been of cursive writing and how much it needed. Opinions have been advanced ranging from assertions that it should be brought back to one of the primary foci of elementary schools to its needed as kind of an archival thing to making it an optional elective to its obsolete entirely.
Haven’t seen anyone asserting that paper isn’t needed.
Did you even read D-man‘s post?
No one said anything about paper being obsolete or not needed
Writing by hand depends on both ones typing speed and ones writing speed. For me, typing is faster and less error prone.
Fine motor coordination skills can also be developed by playing games like “Operation”, made back in 1965, currently sold by Hasbro, as well as various arts and crafts.
Grabbing my phone and typing it is faster.
Obviously the “light hook” orb extends the capabilities of her motor cortex, or something along those lines. I don’t think a human has enough neural capacity to manage that many degrees of freedom at one time: You can write in cursive, but you’re not writing the entire sentence all at the same time.
Oh boy… the charges for this one are going to be all kinds of fun when they eventually bag her. Kidnapping, resisting arrest, assaulting a federal agent, ect.
Wondering about that. ARCHON just went public X many months ago, timeline wise. Federal, State, and local laws will all be playing catch-up just to account for super-powered humans. Aliens just got ‘revealed’ less than a month ago. Officially, supernatural’s still don’t exist.
So how do you kidnap someone that doesn’t exist?
Resisting arrest? Sydney didn’t identify herself as a LEO, or identify herself at all, when she said ‘you may be under arrest’. And talked down to someone who had just had an anvil dropped on their foot and then thrown through a wall, which I would assume puts someone into a bad frame of mind (not having had either an anvil dropped on my foot OR been thrown through a wall, I can only surmise)
Charge with the best chance of sticking currently is from Max’s public warning about rogue vigilantes ending up in a cell if they continue.
We’ve seen Tamitha in school. She exists, legally. She just isn’t a succubus, legally. Most levels of government probably consider her human, which is probably for the best for the time being.
Tamitha legally exists, recognized as a human (granted, that is, to quote a fictional Secretary of Defense, “not entirely accurate). Dabbler is a naturalized American citizen. Pixel gets a paycheck from Archon and presumably has a Social Security number and the like. Their supernatural aspects are not recognized by the government, but their existence as (or in the guise of) persons is recognized.
Laws do not refer to humans, they refer to persons. Check any statute and one will see they always refer to an individual as person, one or an/other, they never say human. The legal term person would cover ordinary humans, supernatural humans and extraterrestrial beings. The primary requirement is that a person must be sentient/sapient as opposed to animals which are neither. Thus Tamitha is, by definition, a person.
The Supreme Court in the United States recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the First Amendment (ruling limiting campaign advertisement buys was restricting freedom of speech), so they’ve effectively extended person status to a sufficiently formalized idea.
In our universe, Eternity, the Living Tribunal and the other Marvel conceptual entities would be legal persons under that theory, since they, like a corporation or a P.A.C., are ideas that sometimes use a physical manifestation to manipulate events in the material world.
sentient, sapient, and people are all separate things. I doubt you can be a person without being sapient but sentient is questionable.
Animals are generally sentient, that is they can sense things. Even computers are sentient.
Sapience is possessing wisdom and discernment (I could swear the last time I looked this one up it had to do with decision making, though that could be considered derivative of wisdom {knowing truth} and discernment {being able to distinguish different things}) I would say animals like dogs and cats that can be trained/can learn are sapient. For computers I would list this as “In development” it is a grey area as to whether or not this has been achieved yet.
The term for being a person is actually personality. There are other more common uses for that word though.
Also to be noted in addition to all the other comments, under cover or even federal agents are not required to identify themselves. You can see this particularly in play in regards to under cover officers working in the field as well as off duty officers. You also do not need to be “under arrest” to resist arrest. You can pick up that charge even while under investigation.
bullshit cops arresting you for resisting arrest gets tossed too damn often. It’s a procedural act of bullshit. One has to be under arrest. Verbal is all that’s needed at that point. Until that point you’re only being detained too allow process to proceed to the point where arrest may be deemed necessary. At that point you are secured and your rights must be read to you.
I love the way she adds the arrow pointing to ‘mighty’, since her enemy just called her Halo.
The quadriple underline is also a nice touch.
Given the nature of what she’s usung to write with, it ^could^ be ^double^.
Meanwhile, Tamatha struggles to free herself…..!
Kinda confused.
She has 6 arms, but is attacking a small child because she is different?
I mean it’s not like she saw her do anything bad, right?
Tammy is different in a way that matches beings traditionally thought of as evil by society at large. Aranea may have six arms, but as long as she doesn’t pair that with a snake tail, she doesn’t fit the description of any stereotypical demons as neatly.
it’s also possible Aranea’s a super, but her parents were religious nutjobs who taught her it was some sort of demonic curse.
Or scholarly nutjobs.
Because from what we learned at the Twilight Council meeting, the supernatural community really did do a lot of unnecessary damage to the livestock.
If historical knowledge of the Grrlverse has been preserved without the nature of the Twilight council being revealed then demon hunters make perfect sense.
I have the superpower of “Paying attention to DaveB’s backstory
We don’t know that all six arms are biological.
She could have four mechanical arms and two natural arms. And a bunch of gadgets.
So less Spinnerette and more Dr. Octopus?
Spiral
Only two of Spiral’s six arms are cybernetic. Depending on version. Ultimate Spiral has six natural limbs for instance.
It’s a possibility.
Or, she could be a super who manifests energy constructs like green lantern or Tamatha.
Only they can’t extend very far and she has much more control over them when they are close to her body. So she makes extra arms and puts clothes on them to hide their nature.
It’s not just “she’s different”. It’s really a predictable outcome when somebody can see through a lie and is treated as crazy for it, what is she supposed to assume about demons et al when nobody is even allowed to mentally acknowledge them? What do they have to hide, and what else could or would they do if they have the ability and will to force everyone not to perceive them?
These are legitimate questions, and all she’d get as an answer is “ha ha, what are you talking about, crazy lady?” This kind of result of the Veil setup needed to be addressed.
While predictable, the existence of individual who is different in similar way yet doesn’t know what’s happening (specifically, herself) logically means there can be others like her.
The legitimate questions remains, but she should realize that not everyone who is different would be able to answer them.
Since when has hatred of the different ever been logically consistent?
Since forever. It’s one of our most reliable survival strategies.
They teach cursive again now in most states. There is a gap of about 5-10 years where they did not.
(Source-I’m a teacher)
Have they moved it to foreign languages where it properly belongs?
The skill has to be preserved because so many foundational documents to civilization were written in cursive. On the other hand, cursive documents of any sort are not going to be acceptable in business again in the foreseeable future.
Cursive is still acceptable in business. Aside from signatures and certain prescriptions, though, legibility is key.
And both signatures and especially prescriptions are intentionally illegible
I haven’t worked anywhere which accepted cursive apart from signatures and filling in a short form sinc3 2003. And I haven’t worked anywhere that would accept a handwritten proposal or report since the mid 90s.
They might conceivably exist but they are outside the norm now.
I mean Arc doesn’t have to be associated with “The Darkness” that seems like jumping to a rather big conclusion considering you kidnapped a young girl.
Although they do have a division called “Arc-Dark”.
True,but that’s just what they call their “Spy” section
She kidnapped a young demon girl
Yeah, can see where that can be confusing
True, they are a rather overrated band
All three of my iGen kids learned enough cursive to get by.
Back when I was in 8th grade I was given an ultimatum, pass penmanship, pass typing, or fail 8th grade, this was 1971.
I’m trying to imagine how that would look in
Grrl Power the animated series.
She extends 20 feet of glowey hose and starting at the tip
bends it into text like a balloon animal technician?
(She’s good but I don’t think she wrote it starting with the O.)
BUT…. She couldn’t flyswatter her opponent with that?
It would probably look a lot like this.
If Sydney practiced it enough, it could just snap into place in a single go. It’s like when you first learn how to play chords on a guitar. At first you have to very consciously place each finger one at a time on the correct string behind the appropriate fret. As you practice this gets easier and faster, until at some point you just grab the chord shape out of thin air without hardly thinking about it. Muscle memory does the work for you.
As I recall, she got in trouble for doing that back at the first big fight scene. Probably something to do with using something that can exert 16 tons of force without really knowing how to scale it down. Chances are good, if the person hadn’t been a super, they’d have been very, very dead. Like, oopsie, didn’t manage to rip off that arm…
Since then, she’s mostly used the light hook to move inanimate things and make very temporary signs.
I wonder if this is the kind of situation where we finally find out the power of the last, unknown Orb? If it has anything to do with healing, maybe it can deal with the effects of whatever it was that paralyzed her.
Now say something about the change in the art, and you can advance to the next level.
By ‘Spider-Manning’, does she mean “Jump about like a grasshopper on speed”, or “monologue incessantly to distract himself from impending danger”? ‘Cause honestly, it could mean either.
Why not both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯..
I just wanna point out how great it is that she’s such a great nerd that even her speech text hyphens spider-man. as it should be
Sydney is now an expert in both cursive and cursing.
Attributes she gained by pissing off a witch.
coincidentally her sixth grade teach
As someone with a real name starting with a G… Capital cursive G’s always look weird, and context does NOT always help, especially with names. I’ve found most people have an easier time reading a C with a high-indent before the tail than we way it’s “supposed” to look.
I place the unpopularity of cursive squarely on its bizarre shoulders, and have wondered if whoever invented it had just had a bad breakup with someone with that initial.
I wonder if she’ll try out the last orb, on the off chance it’s a sickbay. Though she has more on her mind right now, of course.
Elspeth will have antidotes anyway.
You are this close >.< to levelling up
The Great and Powerful Turtle. Man, I miss Wild Cards.
Wuuhu, i’m not the only one that recognized the reference!
Fortunado, Dr.Tachyon, Captain Trips and the rest of them… i think i will have reread them
Miss them? The series is still going strong and up to 27 volumes, with at least two more in the works. The most recent book, Texas Hold’Em, came out November 2018. The Tor.com website also periodically publishes free Wild Cards short stories. Here is a link to the most recent one: https://www.tor.com/2019/10/16/naked-stoned-and-stabbed-bradley-denton/
You can find the others using Tor’s search function.
They are still running? Well here in the DACH Region we dont get all the good stuff… or at least only if its big big selling in US of A *sigh*
The lust for Money is always the Problem, isnt it?
Correction: it’s the lust for someone elses things that is the problem, most times (in this case: you want something not available in your region, which makes the producers and sellers the ‘bad guys’ because you want it butt can’t have it)
Does Aranea have rubber joints? Or did she just dislocate her left hip? Look at panel the last and tell me her left hip is not bent wrong
She has six arms. There’s a good chance her internal anatomy is not human-standard.
If by good, you mean 100%, yes.
I can just about work out how to arrange the joints and muscles for 4 arms like Dabler’s, arrayed vertically along the torso. (Though I think her’s are just a bit close together to fit everything.) 6 could work that way, too, if you had a fairly long torso.
But this lady seems to have them arrayed front to back, and anatomically, that just doesn’t work. Nowhere for the pectoral muscles, nowhere for the scapula or trapezius. It’s just not mechanically feasible.
It could work if her torso is deep enough. But it doesn’t look to be either, so … still, if you can fit someone human-looking with muscles necessary for wings somehow growing from shoulders, this would be easy.
Maybe she got her powers from a radioactive rubber spider!
Her left hip looks fine, but her right thigh does appear to bend around her left in ways Human anatomy generally doesn’t support. Based on the boot we can see, Aranea’s facing towards the camera, so the hip on the left of the page is her right one.
Aranea is not wrong in the first panel: Sydney is an ally of demons (first couple read-throughs thought she was saying ‘Alley of demons’… )
@ Varia Vespasa – I couldn’t let that one go. Cursive is NOT ‘devolved penmanship’. Cursive is actually a simplified form of Spencerian (As is the Palmer method). Technically, ‘cursive’ is descriptive of a bunch of types of script. Zaner-Bloser is the method that was taught in most elementary schools through 1972. (Script as different from block printing, which people insist is handwriting. I point out that it’s not writing at all, but printing.) Anyway – in Texas, they’re teaching it again.
*Googles* I must have learned the Palmer method, which is why my Q’s look so weird.
I dunno, man. Printers and printing presses print, but people write, no matter what the shape of the letters. It’s all in the derivations.
Personally, I would like to know who her tailor is. Where do you go to get a custom 6 armed leather jacket anyway?
Maybe she has a friend who Etsy’s custom outfits.
Etsy Betsy Spider? Bet she hates the rain :P
It may be advantageous, when sewing one’s own leather jacket, to have more than two hands, so… She may have done it herself (?). Depending on her level of dexterity with each hand in terms of simultaneous independent tasking, she could probably sew it while making an omelette…
Can someone untangle those limbs for me, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how they are supposed to be working unless Aranea’s powers include pure rubber floppy bones?
Glad someone else noticed her left hip
Huh, she looks like the policewoman Elisa Maza from the cartoon Gargoyles.
Other than the “H” and the preformentioned “g” you were spot on with all the cursive.
It makes me wonder what all Sydney did to practice the flexibility of the Lighthook.
Remember the name she wanted call it? Molestorb, ’nuff said
I don’t see what the connection could be.
Flexibility, knots and stuff (trying to think of two special names for the bondage-knotwork)
Shibari a brand new Boy Scout Badge… :p
Shibari is one of them, thank you
I’m sure this point was already made at some point, but the primary reason cursive style handwriting became a thing was because many of the educated stenographers wrote their notes with ink. I had to take a manga course for it to click, but it’s difficult to write, and draw, with ink using multiple pen strokes. Instead, every line and loop you make ships be as continuous as possible, else you’re liable to have any number of splotches amidst your scribbling. However, now that ballpoint pens are a thing, writing in “print” is not only easier but it actually looks halfway decent.
Cursive writing was developed accommodate quill pens. A feather quill holds a small amount of ink and tends to blot when it is lifted up. As a result, it was necessary to write quickly and smoothly to write as many letters as possible and avoid splotches. Cursive accomplishes this by allowing one to write entire words without lifting the pen. The printing press came much later.
Hey, I just thought that brand-conscious Sydney decided on a cursive-looking FONT, for presentation.
Wait can Sydney still blink?
She can still look around (and drool) so I presume so.
FWIW, while there’s a good chance the general population didn’t take cursive when Sydney was in school: even when it is not part of the standard curriculum, it has commonly been taught to kids with dyslexia and/or dysgraphia (both of which are often comorbid with ADHD). See, e.g., https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/connecting-dots-role-cursive-dyslexia-therapy for details.
So, I mean, you could retcon Sydney as dyslexic if you want to give a plausible explanation. ;)
She doesn’t need to actually BE dyslexic: it’s enough if someone though that if it helps with dyslexia, it can help with ADHD in general. Note that she is EXTREMELY ADHD and it’s entirely possible that without medication, her ADHD distracted her multiple times during writing single word … so it’s even possible that it DID helped.
As someone who once wrote banananana on a spelling test without realizing the mistake, I resemble that remark. Except I’m not sure how much cursive helped me with that, as I still managed to write bananana in cursive at least once without realizing the mistake until someone pointed it out. I still had enough embarrassment over the first one to have checked, even. To be fair, most of the time, I caught these sorts of mistakes.
or she could have just read the wikipedia article on cursive.
Cursive is the least legible possible way to write something. One of my favorite things about not being in school anymore is that I no longer have to deal with teachers who were taught that scribbling randomly on assignments is an effective way to convey information. (So yes, it’s presumably still taught since I’m sure it’s still expected that students be able to extract information from cursive writing despite the categorical impossibility of extracting information from undifferentiated looping.)
There is no good reason that anybody in the 21st century who isn’t writing with a lighthook should ever use cursive. Either type for speed or print or type for legibility. Unless it is literally impossible to break a stroke, cursive is guaranteed to be counterproductive.
One needs to learn to, at least, read cursive in order to read important historical documents such as “The Declaration of Independence” or “The United States Constitution”. If one can not read the original document, there is no way to verify it actual says what one is told it says. Reading a printed version of the document originally written in cursive will always raise the question of how accurately it was transposed.
I don’t think current issues with The United States Constitution has anything to do with it being written in cursive. Also, I don’t think current US government would consider people capable to read the Constitution advantage.
Because government bad anarchy anarchy anarchy, usual weird fear of government BS.
I don’t think it’s generalized “government bad”. Sounds more like “current politics”, which we don’t need another argument about here.
I think whether it’s something “we don’t need another argument about” or not would depend on whether or not it is ^in how^ (current‹?›) politics.
Oh »bleep«‼️
I fergot to correct how→fact.
»:scowl:«
Everything boils down to politics, unfortunately most people can’t tell the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘government’ and us ‘politics’ when they meant ‘current government’