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.
Apparently aranea is leaping about to avoid the molestorb/light hook. Or as sydney observes, “spider-manning.”
s’pose it’s time for the unknown orb to make an entrance? or would the life support orb be the med bay?
they’re coming, hide.
-yeah this has been mentioned a lot, and some in the comments who patrol them like sharks are jumping on this question-
Too late – we’re here.
Sydney should have been searching while maintaining her shield orb!
Sydney had been drinking, and was probably too inebriated to Army/Police.
DaveB’s art has improved over the years.
DaveB’s art has disimproved over the years.
The seventh orb must be the emergency medical hologram, and she will realize it momentarily!
The mystery orb can’t be the HMO (Health Maintenance Orb), because every time she’s been injured (including this time!), it hasn’t done anything. At the very least, it should have administered a frozen yogurt enema after the post grakz incident. It should have leaped into her hand like the life support/gas orb did.
Everything will work out fine – this is still part of the flashback.
Think of all the Archon and Council characters that didn’t appear in the one frame before the flashback began. Are they alive? Did they survive? All you see are Max, Anvil, Sydney and one of the guys (Stalwart).
Aranea is obviously a religious nutjob.
Aranea may be a child of an alien tourist family from somewhere where they practice gene-modding, just like Cora. Or she is a super, just like all the other supers we’ve seen so far. Maybe she’s a spider-were! Or maybe a daughter of Hali. If her family were tourists, they may be from the same group responsible for Tamatha.
Me, it’s not my turn to patrol yet.
Tomorrow I shall don my mighty armor (gee, that crazy gizmo really works) fasten my my dollar tree cape to the brooches and bravely sally forth to speculate upon that most sublime Paragon of superhuman unauthorized justice…
… the lovely Marble Maiden.
Until she eventually shows up.
Because I am dedicated.
And purposeful.
And have a livingroom full of furniture with green marble tops.
Sydney probably learned cursive *because* of Lighthook. “I wonder if I could write with this thing… It’s all one line though, so maybe cursive? Do people still use cursive? I’m sure there’s a guide online though, there’s guides for everything online. I’ll add ‘learn cursive’ to the to-do list.”
sadly, cursive, home ec, woodshop or metal shop, typing, economics/govt and history are all things pretty gone by the wayside in todays school systems
It’s funny you say that, cause home ec and woodshop are the only ones of those I haven’t been in, although I forwent home ec for Music Theory/Jazz band and they didn’t offer woodshop until after I was gone. Graduated highschool in 2013, so I don’t know how things may have changed.
Yep. My junior high school had a great shop class. It taught wood working, various forms of kinda art, even even things as dangerous for 10-12 year olds to be messing around with as casting lead. We had to provide our own lead, and I hit up about 5 or 6 different gas stations asking for a few of the lead weights they use for balancing wheels. None refused me as far as I can recall, but they only gave me a handful each so I had to walk to the next one for more. Fortunately in my suburbia the gas stations were not too far apart in the downtown area. It probably wasn’t more than a 5 or 8 mile walk to collect what I needed. I may have biked, I don’t recall, but I usually traveled by bike or skateboard as a kid, and traveling many miles a day was not an uncommon event. Thia was in the pre-hoverparent era…
What I would pay to see?
Halo goes back to the dance scene, still paralyzed, using the light-hook to get herself around, and play it off as a … um. Not sure? Stuff-body? basically, make the claim that everything is fine.
*flashbacks to weekend at bernies*
She can fly keeping her body stiff, see interview where she rotates around the flight orb. She might be able to control her limbs via flight.
Unlike Maxima, Sydney’s flight power comes with localized gravity. And suppression of vertigo, too. Very handy.
It isn’t unreasonable to suppose that, with enough practice, she could hold herself upright using her flight power. But has she had that practice?
Controlling the direction of her body is probably something she does everytime she flies. It’s possible she haven’t thought about it consciously, but given how she tend to concentrate on details and finding out just how powers can be exploited I’m guessing she’s aware of it.
Actually thinking back I’m pretty certain she can do that. Remember when she first demonstrated her powers at ARCHON HQ. She used the flight globe to sit in the air and then rotated herself 360 degrees showing that it didn’t seem to matter if she was upside down or not.
I there is a significant misunderstanding going here about the flight orb. The flight orb may be able to change her position on a x, y, and a axis, but that doesn’t mean anything if she can’t hold the ball. I think the only reason she is really able to use the light hook at the moment is because she can curl her fingers around the orb and doesn’t have to do any moving other than moving her brain and eyes to control the psuedopod.
She doesn’t need to ‘hold’ the ball with her hand, she just needs skin contact. In the last panel, we can clearly see that her hand is still relatively flat, but she’s using the orb just fine.
Given the history of orb use, it’s clear that she can control their position with mental effort alone, but she needs to maintain that mental effort or they revert to their default position of orbiting her head. The lighthook just needs her to ‘hold’ it in place on her hand while moving the appendage, but the flight orb would require a lot more focus to hold against her hand while she moves her body, as she would likely need to adjust it’s position constantly as the position (and possibly orientation) of her body changed.
I strongly suspect it would be doable, but require a level of finesse and coordination that she was missing before she got hit with the paralysis.
In the last panel, we see at least two (probably three) of her fingers curled up in contact with her ball
She has to physically activate the abilities of her balls by pressing the corresponding glyph
Remember when she discovered she could Holo-port? She did that after pressing the now-active glyph, not just by looking at it
“most words should make sense” I only learned enough cursive to write my first and last name in school. I am a bookworm, for context. Trying to decipher cursive from knowing 10 letters was HARD. It took me well over a decade to get up to being poor at reading cursive from things like christmass letters and odd notes here and there(some of which were longer then 84 words, the significance of this number is in the next section).
I got a set of Artemis Fowl books with messages in “Gnomish” in them. The messages are just letter to symbol substitution, or in other words a new font that has no resemblance to fonts I know. After little over half an hour (one lunch break at work) of translating letter by letter I was reading entire words and some of the simpler phrases without looking at the key (84 words, I have the paper I did the first batch of translating on with the books).
My conclusion from these two thing is that cursive is more then just another script in the context of comprehension.
The problem with cursive isn’t the substitution, you can transparently read past letter substitutions in the space of a paragraph or two; Who hasn’t seen those demonstrations where they start swapping letters, and by the end of a few paragraphs you’re reading text that would otherwise be utterly incomprehensible?
The problem with cursive is that the difference between the letters is so tiny, relative to individual variations in writing style. Unless somebody writes textbook perfect, you’re learning a new alphabet with every new person’s writing you encounter.
You want hard, try picking up written kanji. If you think the printed stuff is bad then I advise you pass on studying the written forms.
You have oodles of differences, yes. But it’s less where the ink lands on the page, and more the path the brush took when laying the ink down. That can mean that gaps proscribed in the written word arn’t always there, and you have to decipher what path the pen took, and from that which character was being written.
When it comes to any >written< language, there will be different ways to write the same phrase. slant something a little more, make a bit taller or shorter, lift the pen or let it drag… use a heart for a period or a stretched dot… these will vary from person to person. You have to figure out what are differences in style and ignore those, paying attention only to the differences that are for the content.
I spent some time working in an international claims office, where people in other countries would send us hand-written forms. From my time there I saw many many kinds of handwriting, all of it, presumably, legible to the sender.
Most Europeans write a 1 as 2 strokes. they rather look like a 7.
The sevens can have a horizontal slash through them, which makes them distinct from the 1.
The Chinese write the Arabic 9 as a circle with a line coming down. The line coming down needs to come down on the side of the digit. Which side to use seems to stump them sometimes, as the 9s are frequently backwards.
The Polish write the Arabic 9 as a circle with a line coming down. The line coming down may not be on the left side and may not pass through the loop, but it can come down the middle (makes it look like a balloon and string).
The Japanese 2s, if written small enough, show their attention to the motion of the pen, and some disregard for when the pen is in contact with paper – the 2s tend to look like a backwards c, having lifted the pen early enough that the stroke for the base can’t be identified.
I have some experience with gothic characters from work and so I get how reading cursive is hard for someone that isn’t used to it, but for a sixty years old guy is hard to grasp that it is mot taught at school anymore. it was something interesting to learn.
Times changes, my grandmother was taught calligraphy and wrote a very beautiful cursive, now children don’t learn it.
Sydney’s to drunk for it to occur to her, but she really better bubble up. She can’t use the light hook to capture somebody if they’re out of her field of vision, and laying face down and paralyzed like that, her field of vision is pretty limited. Sooner or later a certain somebody is going to notice that the light hook only follows them when they’re in her view, and it’s game over.
Hopefully the rest of the gang will show up before it comes to that.
True.
On the other hand. It’s night out, she’d just called out ‘you should come see this’ to her friends, and she’s waving a neon-light in the sky.
If she bubbles up, her opponent will likely just flee, and let’s face it, that bubble might well ‘blind’ her with it’s glory nature and all the dark out. she won’t be able to point and tell her teammates “She went thattta way.”
If she doesn’t bubble up, she remains a target, and that neon noodle dance should see her with help in moments.
Winning a fight using just the Lighthook while drunk and under the effects of a paralysis drug might well earn Sydney a power upgrade.
A drunk Sydney might put that who knows where.
Let me go on record as being unsurprised that Sydney has mastered cursive writing. She has probably also mastered Elvish, Dwarvish, Klingon, Romulan, and others, written and spoken. Cursive is hardly a challenge.
Why does everyone assume Sydney is drunk? Because she hasn’t Buble’d herself? There have been plenty of times she hasn’t without having drunk anything
Maybe because DaveB said:
When the author implies that Sydney may be a little drunk in the comments, everyone who reads the comments has no reason to think she is sober. Other than that, the most obvious reason that she didn’t raise shields is that Recruit Scoville just isn’t very good at army or police yet.
Buzzed is not drunk
Your last bit is the major reason why she hasn’t Buble’d herself
Last!
Is that a thing?
Anywho, back at Archon….
The US graciously allows the contaminated Fel ship and associated dead aliens to be thrown into The Sun.
Kora ‘accidently’ ‘misplaces’ an escape pod with functional power and drive systems.
Each side is equally dissatisfied with the arrangement so I guess that’s the best they can do.
Wait, why would Cora ‘misplace’ an escape pod? She was the one advocating the destruction of the whole damned thing, and she has her own FTL-capable ship!
I meant one of the escape pods SHE owned from HER ship.
Giving the humans technology would be frowned upon by the federation but
she needed to get them to release the Fel ship for disposal.
A small working spacecraft would be perferable to a large wrecked one anyway.
Oh, okay, that makes sense, apologies for that (thought you meant an escape pod from the Fel ship) :(
I have this funny hunch that Aranea is also very young. Pehaps a classmate?
It wolud sort of explain her lact of information and black and white thinking (eg no shades of gray)
It’s taken me a long time to comment on this page because I’m so disappointed in DaveB. To have gone so far out of his way to make female readers uncomfortable and to cater to the some of the worst elements of superhero fandom, as to make the central shot to the page a nonsensical bodyish form with an erect pussy slapped on it and shown through material that wouldn’t normally achieve that level of detail. The worst part of it is that in that position, the pussy would be smushed together and distorted, and instead it is shown as open as though her legs were in a very different position.
But it is done, so I demand parity. Let’s get some physics defying dick erection as seen through thin spandex. And it can’t be somewhere in the background but awkwardly, embarrassing ly, in your face foreground.
You… do realise that that is the back of her right knee, don’t you? Look again, follow the leg down from the boot until you get to the bend, and just below that, you can see the left leg
At least you didn’t comment on Sydney’s arse-crack so prominently displayed in panel three
Which would actually be Syd’s shoulder blades.
I know I’m not the biggest fan of the “CGI” drawings here, after enjoying the more hand drawn stuff at the beginning, but at least take some time to understand the image before ranting about it.
I’m fairly sure Guesticus knows that, given how he was responding to Mcm‘s misinterpretation of anatomy. Tone of voice does not come across very well in text alone…
Nice to see the Great and Powerful Turtle reference! One of my favourite series!
The erroneous information here is staggering.
‘Cursive’ simply means ‘joined-together writing’. Most cursive taught in the last sixty years or so in elementary schools is the Zaner-Blosser method. This is different from Copperplate, Spencerian, or the Palmer method – which are ALSO forms of cursive.
Cursive is NOT devolved block printing. It’s writing designed around free flowing ink pens, which started from quills, and proceeded through steel nibs and the enormous variety of fountain pens, and still exists in glass nib dip pens, as well as calligraphy pens. A lot of people still use fountain pens. I’ve been using mine for 35+ years. Copperplate is quill-based script, Palmer and Zaner-Blosser were designed more around steel dip pens. (much less flex)
If somebody doesn’t say “I attack the darkness,” I’m quitting this comic.
Dude I’m 19 and I write primarily in cursive. Granted that isn’t common, but we had to at the public charter school I went to for 4th/5th grade and it just stuck. My boring public school before that taught it in 3rd grade but didn’t really require it beyond that.
No, Aranea, she’s “The MIGHTY Halo”. Get it right.
…I wish there was a way to preview my HTML.
Only just noticed the “Great and Powerful Turtle” reference there.
Nice to see I’m not the only fan of Wild Cards
Flickerlink: Your shortcut to a seamless online presence.