Grrl Power #86 – OMG It’s… The hell are those?
So here they are. I know after all the buildup the reveal is going to be a letdown to some, but this is what they’ve always been. It’s interesting to finally see them though, even for me – this is basically the first time I’ve ever drawn them. Of course, revealing what they actually do should be fairly amusing, and will happen quickly over the next few pages. Then her meeting the rest of the team, then… arrg, I wish I could draw this thing faster. :P Speaking of which, it’s ridiculous it’s taken this long to get to. 86 pages and a year and a half just to get the tube open? As some of you know, I had Sydney’s powers listed in her bio on the cast page for several months, cause the reveal was always “soon.” Hopefully things will start moving a little faster now, but it’s a balance of getting in those little moments of character development, jokes and keeping the story moving.
This page, being the big reveal, is unfortunately a little short on content and jokes, but we’ll… uh, call that pacing. It would be nice to be able to say I got lots done on the next page since this one didn’t take quite as long to draw, but that didn’t happen. I did get some banners made up that I’ve been meaning to, it occurs to me I should make a page with all that stuff on it in case anyone wants to grab stuff to link back to this page with. That’s another project for the upcoming weeks.
When I drew the tube, I didn’t pay much attention its size, but now looking at the orbs, I’m not sure they would have fit in the thing. There’s 7 of them (hopefully I haven’t forgotten one, hah) and they’re about the size of a tennis or baseball. Each time I draw the tube its size is a bit different though… the version on this page seems especially skinny, but we’ll say they just barely fit.
There were quite a few good ideas bandied about in the comments (lots of really silly ones too of course) but more than one person suggested the tube was full of gaming dice. I really liked that idea. So much so I almost started trying to figure out how I could merge the idea with everything else I had planned – baseball sized dice, one of each kind, etc., but it would have changed things too much. Still, I could easily do a whole other comic around that idea.
Thanks for all the TWC votes guys. Hitting #1 and even holding it for a couple of days isn’t something I thought would ever happen. I thought I’d be at this for years before even getting into the top 100. It’s quite a feat given the sheer number of webcomics out there and the size of their audiences’s. I’m glad you find my daydreams as amusing as I do.
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YAY! FINALLY!!
… the hell are those?
REMEMBER TO VOTE!!!!!
Because voting nets you a bonus page!
Also, I think from now on I’m gonna call Sid’s powers “THAT!”. Mostly because it stands for “the hell are those?”, plus I mean, I have no clue what the powers are, so I’ll just point and shout “THAT!”.
well at least they don’t have little stars inside em and the tendancy to summon a dragon when you shout “Come on out, Shen-Long!”
Whoa! It’s so….Anticlimactic? Considering what their ideas were. XD
Fortunately, this is not the climax of the story…
I’m looking forward to lots more to come!
Looks like Elemental Orbs to me.
Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Heart, _____, ______
what would the last two be? and what would their powers combined create?
Insanity would be the squiggly line one & the yellow one would be Sun? creating Captain ID?
Reminds me of the seven world rings or the seven chaos rings.
If they are like the world rings they would be: Blue – Prayers; purple – sadness; red – rage; gree – hatred; yellow – joy; cyan – pleasure; white – wishes. (shift the colours a bit and it would match up).
Oh, and…heart is and always has been a terrible power.
Earth, fire, water, air, light, shadow, and aether (life,spirit… yes I suppose it could also be called “heart” like int he sense of some one having heart or being all heart)
when dealing with an odd number of elements… aether is almost always the odd man out.
Aether was a concept by early scientists studying the stars. They would examine the heavens with their telescopes and see nothing there between the stars etc. Thing is, they had no concept of a vacuum, to them it was an impossibility. So when they looked up and saw nothing they said, “We can’t see it but we know it has to be there so we’re going to call it Aether (or Ether). The term lives on today in Ethernet, the IT term for the process that computer data moves through a physical network. You can’t see that either, just the network it travels through.
If you want a really strange It name though, look at TWAIN. It’s the term for scanning protocols but it really stands for, “Technology Without an Interesting Name,” because they couldn’t think of what to call it. :)
Oh, wow, thanks for that little tidbit. :D I have seen and used TWAIN several times, but for some reason I never thought to look up what it stands for.
Actually, the concept behind the term predates astronomy by at least 5,000 years (9,000 if you are talking modern astronomy) and the first recorded use of that specific word predates modern astronomy by a good thousand years or so.
Originally it referred to the “soul” or “life-force” (yes the very same as the “force” mentioned in the Star Wars series)… which, as you said, is something that can’t be observed but (in the minds of the people of the time) MUST be there… so yes… I understand… but it isn’t an astronomy term at all… at least not originally. And it *has* been used as part of elemental paradigms since the beginning of recorded history.
Just an fyi.
“Technology Without an Interesting Name”
I have an uncle who once worked for a company called NBI. Which stood for Nothing But Initials.
I’m also a fan of the recursive acronyms the linux world seems to favor, such as PINE (Pine is Not ELM) and GNU (GNU is Not Unix), etc.
I would totally go for elemental too, starting with the green with a little orb inside i would say :
Earth
Water
Metal (kinda look like copper)
Wood
Air
Fire
And the last one could be Soul or Mind but i’m not quite sure
BTW there is 7 orb so this could be the 7 Sin, i remember an episode of Charmed where each sin is locked in an orb like this ones, but this ones really look like elemental orb
Or, since her super name is Halo, a reference to angels, it could be the seven virtues. That doesn’t sound like a very useful power when it comes to combat though.
https://www.sincomics.com
the virtues beat the sins the first time and labor is very good at combat
plus if you were able to make people virtuous you could have an instant win as a hero
hmm… wood (or rather tree) is typically seen as part of earth… or as a combination of earth and air (hard like stone yet also empty like air. metal would likely be a combination of earth and water (malleable and tries to return to its original shape like water but is hard like stone).
But then that’s assuming these things are all elemental in nature. Could be 4 elemental balls and 3 that are more like Mind Body and Soul.
Or it could be what some one below mentioned… each one offers a very specific power that has nothing to do with the elements.
In at least some asian systems, both wood and metal are different elements from earth, and I think there is at least one that has wood as the extra element.
Chinese. They had 5 physical elements: earth, air, fire, water, and wood. *Most* traditional break down of elements included metal as part of earth (it comes from within earth/stone). I almost want to say that it didn’t become it’s own element until people started writing fantasy systems and broke it out separately, but have no evidence to support that statement.
Chinese elements are :
Water
Fire
Earth
Wood
Metal
Here the wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Xing
So metal and wood are classical element, just not european classical.
BTW Japanese has earth/air/fire/water and Void as element. I found void pretty cool, but nothing here look like void.
Earth,wind,fire,water,Aether,Lightning, Life,Void
Sleepy, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Dopey, Bashful, and Doc.
Does that make Syd the fairest in all the land?
I say it’s Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Aether, Gravity and Void. Sydney is the heart and mind that connects them.
Seeing that ‘Chaos Rings’ typed there made me think of ‘Chaos Emeralds’. However, I doubt she gains any similarity to Super Sonic when using these orbs, as awesome as she probably would find that.
The idea of Orbs as weapons also makes me think of one of the characters from the original Star Ocean, Mavelle Froesson. They gave her a decent reach as she seemed to telekinetically throw them at enemies (medium range attack, I think?), and I think the orbs generally had elemental effects.
The chaos rings were in the same area as chaos emeralds, but had nothing to do with them. The seven chaos rings were something Tails absorbed to save his own life. It also gave him a 16 year old body, and Hyperion (a mad, sadistic, perverted sentience that resides in Tails’ hyper form).
Yeah but with the power of heart you can mind control the other planeteers to do your bidding so effectively you have all of their powers combined without the wishy washy captain planet nonsense.
well,, aside from there beeing seven instead of six it reminded me of these;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infinity_Gauntlet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Gems
Love the wood grain in the background.
The rest of the strip is okay too :-P :-)
DaveB did you draw them or photo shop the wood grain into the background?
Either way great details on the page.
didn’t notice till you mentioned it but darn that is a LOT of lines to draw.
I googled “wood texture” or something, and found one that had heavy lines on light colored wood, played with it in photoshop a bit, then dropped it over the background layer and set it to multiply. The first few panels of them in this room have some hand drawn grain textures, which quickly led me to an image search. Work smarter, not harder!
Great job Uncle Scrooge!
It’s just like what my grandpa used to say, if you want a job done efficiently get a lazy person to do it and watch what they do.
i kinda thought they would be more egyption looking floaty orbs, but im good with this.
course we all still need to wait for next week for an explanation. :p
Now I get the “Halo” reference too – they float around her head right?
They’re the giant marbles of absolute power! :D
So that’s where they went. I lost mine waiting weeks for the big reveal.
7 its a magic number.
width looks big enough to easily hold those maybe even a little to wide, but then its not like she had it custom made for them (did she? would she?). I think it might be a little short for them though.
Considering the inherent weirdness factor here, why should The Tube’s interior volume be “normal”?
All things conseired, I half-expected Sydney to stick her ENTIRE arm in there and start rummaging around. ;)
…this time for sure!!!
(nothing up my sleeve)…
PRESTO!!!!!
And she pulls a roaring lion’s head “Whoops! Wrong tube!”.
Sorry Bullwinkle flashback!
“And now for something you’ll really like!”
Fractured fairy Tales please.
They look like hovering super balls! :D
Oh man!
Now I have to report to the Council, I can’t believe they were on THIS planet!
That has to be the most stunned that Max has ever looked, And Sidney looks like a girl caught with her hand in a cooky jar. :)
Like the light effects in pannel two.
DaveB. If you’re worried about the orbs fitting in the tube, you can always claim that they’re slightly flexible, not rigid, so that they squash down a little bit. Now we have to wait for the demonstration of what the orbs actually do.
They don’t have to be solid, they could be energy constructs.
Looking at them, that may be what they realy are. Solid light constructs that hold trans-dimentional beings that bestow powers to whoever is bonded to them.
Looking again, there is packing foam poping out as the orbs leave the tube.
I also saw that the tube is wide enough that you could stack them asemetricly and they would just be able to all fit in the tube.
They might be glass or crystal orbs.
Or Sydney could have “TARDIS” stenciled on the other side of the tube.
lol,, this is great,,, and i love the look on both sidney’s and max’s face on that last panel :)
now i just wonder what is the origin of those spheres,,,
DaveB could you fix the cast page now that the orbs are out of the tube? PLEASE
Yup, that’s on the to do list this week.
Thank you.
You know, you COULD just ctrl-U while on the cast page, search for “Redacted” and read the description in the source.
Thanks, it never even occurred to me that the description of her powers might just be commented out in the source code.
Shouldn’t she have said…..
Taa-Daa!
She didn’t have to say it, she just shows it with her pose.
Given Sydney’s a gamer, I’m surprised she didn’t call them her Ioun stones or something similar. I just hope their powers are a bit more spectacular than the original Ioun stones :)
My exact thought. “Hey! She’s got Ioun stones.”
Also I like how Maxima’s “What” is not a question. :)
Mine too.
I thought of these powers so long ago I honestly don’t remember what prompted their origin. I want to say I thought of them before I saw Empress Lynn and Subtracto (from Gold Digger), but I can’t be sure about that. I suspect I had, and that pair reinforced the idea. I don’t actually recall coming across Ioun stones in my own D&D adventures (I had to look them up just now) obviously there are some immediate comparisons to be had though.
Yeah Ioun stones tended to be mid to high level things because the ones that were actually useful cost like 100k gold
Once I read a story by Jack Vance that mentioned Ioun stones but I had a totally different imagination of them. Seeing them mentioned here made me wonder whether this story was so famous that everybody knew about it – and the it turns out that “Ioun stone” was somehow adapted to a game.
…
No idea what to think about all this.
Ahem.
Cool… er… we still don’t know what they are. They look like glass balls – sooo fragile. Obviously they are not because they withstood getting thrown around and created some very unusual movement of their container themselves…
Also, aside of the facial expressions I love how they create some color on Sydney’s hair and the wall :D Yay for details!
Yes, that game was a fairly obscure one created by some guy named Gary Gygax. Name was Dungeons & Dragons, I doubt you’d have heard of it.
You may be surprised to read that I even played AD&D for a short time, maybe 4 weeks. That’s about 25 years ago and I’m absolutely positive that nobody ever mentioned Ioun stones back then, even though there was a wizard in our group.
I agree they weren’t in the books 30 years ago either.
I think they were introduced in 2E.
From Wiki:
“In 2E Dungeons & Dragons it had been conjectured in Dragon magazine that Ioun stones instead come from the Positive Material Plane.”
This being the earliest noted example in D&D.
Arrgh more proof I’m old. Funny don’t feel a day over 35. :)
as for the size,, remember that the tube wasn empty,, a bit to empty if that mean anything,, so they could have been able to alter its internal dimention the same way they could fool the scan
may be it’s a tardis
Well – did that scan scan for anything or just for stuff that is magically relevant? In the latter case the tube might appear empty because the spheres were magically inert. Just an idea.
They scanned for magic,psionics,radiation,bio-agents.
Just voted on TWC. I note that Grrlpower is the only one of the top 10 not showing a banner. Any idea why?
It’s there. If you are using AdBlock in Chrome, it treats about 10% of the banners on TWC as ads for some reason.
Using Firefox, and Grrlpower seems to be the only one I can’t see, not just on the top 10, but on others that i vote for.
Hmm, that’s weird. I can’t explain that. Maybe if I had accidentally saved it as a CMYK jpg or with some progressive encoding but it seems to be a pretty straightforward image file.
Tuns out it was AdBlock running under firefox – i had to turn AdBlock off for the TWC site in the end.
I’m sorry, but the only word that really comes up in my mind is “BALLS!!”
Dragon balls ;)
Sydneysydney! Sydneyball… SHITE!
Just a small comment on the cast page.
In Gwens bio the word spells is written spels.
that’s because she ironically can’t spell.
ALL SHALL HAIL THE HIGH PRINCES OF CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS!! HAIL! HAIL! HAIL!!
And Twidget earns today’s Snot On My Keyboard award.
Hail indeed.
to be honest i was expecting some kinda floating runes of power after the asleep comment last page.
I have to say this
“Holy Balls Batman” said robin
“Indeed boy wonder” said Batman
One More thing
WTF man WHAT IS HALO DOING WITH MY MARBLES
Oh my god, it’s full of – bubbles?
oh, sorry, wrong switch.
click.
AIEEEEEE! It’s full of LAWYERS!
shouldn’t that be “Lawers” ?
No, definitely Lawyers.
A lawer, as well as being a word that doesn’t actually exist, would be ‘a person who ‘laws’.
A lawyer is a person who practices or studies law; an attorney or a counselor.
No, wait I stand corrected. This is what happened when I googled ‘definition of lawer’:
Lawers is a village situated in rural Perthshire, Scotland. It lies on the banks of Loch Tay and at the foot of Ben Lawers. It was once…
So unless you think it was full of a village from rural Perthshire in Scotland, it is lawyers, my friend.
Perhaps you have not heard of the great postcard lawer debacle?
They remind me of Kakari from the Brent Weeks night angel trilogy.
Sydney: These are the orbs. Say hello to everyone orbs!
Orbs: Heeeelllllo!
Everyone else: ???????
Would love if the orbs said ” Hellooo Nurse! ” to Maxima.
Just as long as Max reply’s “Wan’ta see my pet?”
I’d think she would see if the orb’s were crushable.
As long as they don’t say “I’m sorry I can’t do that Dave.”
Nah, they need to do a Hello…hello…helloooooo ala three stooges, one of the orbs has to have the sound effects of curly too… wooooob woooob wooob etc… Hey they remade the three stooges into a movie for release this year. Neh?
Combo of three stooges and animaniacs marathon on tv just after they awakened? Wouldn’t put that past Sydney as a way to entertain them if she was ordered to do so. That in exchange for power… maybe the orbs give her power in exchange for entertainment. Quid pro quo? So she doesn’t have access to all of the orb’s powers yet. They are not all amused enough.
Maxima, from what she knows of Sydney, should be very very worried/scared of this possibility should that come up in the Q&A to follow.
I’m just a reader and that thought line made me twitch a bit. (Grin)
B
AT LAAAAST ! T^T
This is so cool ! :o
OK, dave, since you’ve made us wait that long for the reveal, you need to make the balls pervy little things, like Kon from Bleach.
Always trying to snug up to Harem or Maxima.
I knew she had some serious balls.
One wonders if Sydney lost her marbles before or after she found these…
I’d say she found them…. YEAAAAAAH!
pretty sweet but… what do they do?
Heheh. Perfectly executed flat what from Maxima. Times like this I remember Dave reads EGS.
Jackie Chan Adventures.
Each Talisman grants a specific power.
I’m also assuming since they hover like that, her code name “Halo” is obvious now.
Like the large pic of Sydney here.
Also like the added detail of the packing foam. Erm, it IS packing foam, right? ;)
SPOILERS, MAYBE
from what i can remember from her bio before the redaction, she can use any power that shes holding, so it allowes her to combine or dual use abilities, and each orb is a diffrent power.
flight, shield, ranged attack, i cant remember the rest, but she diddent know what two of the orbs did.
SPOILERS END. MAYBE
hmm… they must emit some sort of field around themselves that strengthens the structure of other objects… even when they are “asleep.”
Else Maxima’s prodigious strength would have bent the tube in half when the balls inside refused to budge. Perhaps even ripped it in half. At the very least crushed it.
addendum: i almost pointed this out when that scene happened but the thought of a dozen mundanish reasons that wouldn’t matter… such as whatever’s inside being liquid (thus having the same shape as the tube) or paper like (in that its conforms to the outside shape of the tube).
But spheres don’t work with the mundane explanations :-/
lol not like it really matters… i didn’t notice till like the third time i went over that page… too busy laughing till then
I disagree that Maxima would have crushed the tube:
1) There was no need to grip at max strength. Do you hold on super tight in anything you’re holding? Or even pulling on? You reserve that strength for when you need it.
2) She wouldn’t have used full strength for the pull. Sydney probably doesn’t weigh more than 120, a feather compared to what Maxima can lift. If she used her full strength (and Sydney had moved as Maxima had thought), then poor Sydney would have been thrown into orbit. Instead she used a fraction of her strength with the intention of dragging Sydney out. The whole fall was because she expected 120-ish pounds resistance and ended up with more resistance than her own weight.
I agree to point 1 but I don’t know about point 2: Assume you would try to lift something that you expect to be very lightweight but then find that its somehow fixed to the ground. Wouldn’t you automatically&instinctively increase the strength you use? Also, using only some light strength, Max would not fall out of balance. I’d say, Jörmungandr has a point. And I’d assume that the orbs reinforced the tube.
I can say from Experience that no, no you don’t automatically adjust your strength. Although the opposite happens (life something you expect to be heavy and end up throwing it because it was too light); however with an object you expect to be light and ends up too heavy it can leave you off balance for a second or two. Had once I nearly tripped on my own feet; I thought the cardboard box was empty I was about to just shove off the truck bed with one hand intending to throw it; and tripped myself up as it provided a good deal of resistance (it still had stuff in it, metal stuff); not more than I could have lifted; but surprise can throw you off balance.
I can agree to that… google for “cement soccer ball videos” it’s kinda sadistic the way the jokers do it, but as you can see somebody is expecting a very light object, and it has a resistance to moving that they are not expecting and almost without fail, they fall over because they can’t react fast enough to NOT continue the moves they ARE prepared for, but can’t complete. that is effectively what happened with Max as she was trying to drag Sydney out, the tube stopped moving but she was already in the process of pulling and couldn’t react fast enough to stop pulling, and thus was off balance, being off balance meant she needed to radically shift her footing, but that lack of reaction time, and friction of boot to ground, etc… = she fell over…
OK (also @ Rhuen), I agree to the surprise effect. What I wanted to say: Wouldn’t you apply more force than you originally planned to, it would not be enough force to drag you out of balance.
she had a WTH moment while standing at a curb, slipped off the curb during her surprise and landed on her rear. It happens, ever fall on your butt on slippery grass when trying to rip a twig off a tree that turned out to be a little less dead and a little more flexible than you thought (standing on the side of a hill)?
So she’s got the power of the Magic: the Gathering elements and then some.
Or maybe it’s those damned gems from that whole stupid Infinity Gauntlet Marvel crap. Or its DC counterpart: the crappy rainbow “Green Lantern”-ish rings.
and then sidney tap 2 island and 3 colorless and perform a time twister!
Cool :)
On the graphical side, it looks a bit like there’s a layer misaligned – there are currently round colour effects corresponding to the different balls, showing below and to the left of them.
The glow being away from the actual orbs like that might be intentional, as a sort of odd ‘shadow’ effect for the orbs. I see the ones closest to Sydney’s head are casting some glow on her hair properly, and the glows on the wall are not perfectly aligned with where the orbs are in the scene, so it would seem intentionally laid out based on distance from the wall.
It’s light effects to show that the balls are glowing.
Yeah that is weird now that you mention it. I was doing the glow like it was a shadow. I also forgot to put their shadows in. I’ll see if I can fix that stuff tonight.
If they are emiting light they cast no shadow.
So you don’t have to put shadows on the orbs.
Sorry, just thought about it, I was wrong. NEVER MIND!
How do you do shading do you dodge/burn or do you just add a darker colour?
A combination of things. For most of the coloring, hair, skin, etc, I have a palette of colors I’ve built up as I needed them. I have some brushes set to multiply if I need some quick shading without having to futz with the palette, and I also use multiply layers for stuff like the reflections of Max’s hair on her skin, and the orb lighting effects is an overlay layer I think, set to about 65% or so. Dabbler’s stripes are an overlay layer, the 5 0’clock shadow on some of the guys like Faulk/Leon is a multiply layer.
I noticed that, too, but then I thought that the orbs don’t glow and that the shadowy lighting comes from a light source shining through them. That would create something like a smooth glow exactly where a shadow would be. The light in Sydney’s hair on the left side could be light that was reflected from the surface of the orb.
Was the fake robbery just a promotional stunt or was it a setup just to bring Sydney in?
When and what caused Sydney to appear on their radar?
Guess I’m going back to re-read the whole bank episode again.
It was a promotional stunt that Maxima didn’t know about, so she would treat it like a real world situation. They had no clue that Sydney would show up that day, and the chaos that she would generate. Right now they are seeing what kind of powers she posesses and if she could be a asset to them.
Bank episode was set up by Arainna without Maxima’s knowledge. Maxima noticed the tube when it moved on it’s own to follow Sydney/. ARC had no idea Sydney even existed before that unless they have a precog stashed somewhere who told them what the perfect day/ time to stage it all was.
If I had a precog on staff, I’d probably use them like Austin Powers group. All Yes we were aware of that.
Because, if you know the future you can’t change things, only manupulate the perception of whats happening. Sort of like Bill & Ted’s movies.