Grrl Power #960 – Up next, Never Gonna Give Me Up
I’m sure everyone can come up with a bevy of other songs Harem might “solo,” especially with a few choice altered lyrics. You’s and She’s into Me’s, etc. A few that pop to mind: I Touch Myself, Afternoon Delight, etc. Yeah, Harem makes no secret of her Suisapphism. She also does an excellent acapella “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
There is a party going on while all this jury rigged enchanting happens in one corner. The average super is exactly average when it comes to singing, meaning that karaoke night at Archon HQ is an atonal hellscape just like everyone other instance of karaoke that’s ever occurred. Before you disagree with me, take a moment to consider how much alcohol is usually consumed before and during the typical karaoke session. There’s only a few good singers on the team. Harem far above average. The thing that makes her exceptional, as Sydney points out, is her ability to accompany herself. Dabbler is also an incredible singer, as are most succubi, but as Decollette has pointed out in the past, Dabbler doesn’t have a lot of the standard succubus finishing school skills, so whenever Dabbler does sing, there tends to be side effects, like weird magic she can’t quite wrangle.
It’s still daytime, (albeit late in the afternoon) so at least some of you might be wondering how Crimson is just casually hanging out there in the lounge. Well, she was already there from the prior evening, doing Council liaison stuff, and decided to hang out during the day since the meeting went late. Not that vamps can’t move around during the day. The Council has windowless vans and drivers, for instance. They don’t like traveling like that though, because they’re one bad fender bender away from a shaft of daylight. I’m just saying it’s possible. Also, while there are skylights in the ceiling of the lounge area, there’s no direct sunlight on her, and presumably most vampires travel around with some pretty intense sunscreen in their purse, so she’s fine unless the party moves out into the pool area before sundown.
July’s vote incentive is up!
You guys don’t know who this is yet. (Her name is Xerxa.) I will give you one single guess what she might be from. (And no, it’s not Dabbler’s mother.) It was a piece I had half finished from a little while ago and given my time constraints this month, I threw a little polish and some background on it and here you are. Unfortunately there aren’t nine separate versions because she’s not wearing a ton to begin with. Hopefully you can read about that soon. I hope you like it, personally I think it turned out pretty good.
As always, nude version are up at Patreon.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
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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.
Not having many quintets out there to cover doesn’t seem to have stopped Pentatonix from selling a buttload of albums…
True, but if Harem can hit both high soprano and low bass lines then she’s doing better than anyone in any choir I’ve ever sung with. There’s ‘arrangement for x number of voice parts’, and then there’s ‘arrangement for x number of voice parts with suitable ranges for the performers available’.
The first quintet that came to my mind was the Spice Girls.
Which would be Grrl Power indeed.
That was the first thought that came to my mind. Home Free and Voiceplay are two other amazing examples of quintets. As for range, Tim Foust of Home Free for example has a 5+ octave range so it is very possible to cover both high and low parts with practice.
As of this writing, “Suispapphism” returns as a Googlewhack! It returns one single result (this page) and does not offer or suggest any “Did you mean…?” alternatives.
Well done Dave!
My god, technically two now but still points to grrlpower. Now… wtf does it mean?
Check the first page, DaveB explains it’s a word he made up
A word he made up and misspelled :) :) :)
That’s particularly funny, actually. I sort of love that.
Greater minds invent their own words.
:)
Okay soooo, I went to the first page and no luck. Is there an easier way to find out the made up definition of the made up word?
Also the Pussycat Dolls.
Sui – “self” as in suicide, which breaks down into “self” and “murder”
Sappism, as in sapphic.
So, self lesbianism. Yes, I made the word up, but from existing word bits.
Quoting Dave here from page 1.
I’m sorry, but when heads are bigger than chests it’s just creepy.
Bobbleheads….
But why? You’ve given supers a perfect human form, lining up with all standard concepts of beauty. So why wouldn’t ‘perfect’ vocal chords be a part of that package?
Singing has very little to do with base voice musculature, and almost everything to do with training. Same with playing an instrument – a super might have “better” fingers/lips to start, and even hear perfect pitch, but that would yield only small advantages. Musical skill requires hundreds to thousands of hours to develop.
True. I read somewhere that competence takes at least 5,000 hours of practice. The really good players put in 10 to 15 thousand hours…
I think you’re sort of referring to ‘The 10,000 hour rule,’ from the Malcolm Gladwell book ‘Outliers.’
Basically the rule goes like this:
It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials.
This does sort of ignore natural talent or how good the teacher is, though, which is usually the flaw in this ‘rule.’
Actually, I think it was an independent study of music students in a few different schools. I’ve never heard of Malcolm Gladwell until now.
Maybe you’re right. But I only know of it the Malcolm Gladwell book, and it wasnt just about music, but about pretty much mastering ANYTHING.
Maybe the book based it on that independent study that you mentioned, and Gladwell’s book just popularized it? The book was published in 2008.
Here’s a brief description of it from wikipedia. Not usually a source I’d use but it’s a pretty good cliffnotes version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
“Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours, though the authors of the original study this was based on have disputed Gladwell’s usage.”
It’s the correct order of magnitude, but you also have to pay attention to prior skills. If you’ve spent decades developing broad skills and deep skills, then mastering a new related one might be only 500 hours.
It’s also worth noting the 10K figure refers to world-class skill level, e.g. concert pianists or Olympians. For most people who just want to take a stab at something as a hobby, you may only need 20 hours to become just competent, especially if you can draw on other related skills.
Singing has a lot to do with the base instrument. To quote the late great Anna Russell, “if you have a tin voice and take singing lessons, you’ll wind up with a loud tin voice. Also, as someone who has sung in various choirs and ensembles for 40 years, I can confidently say that the 10,000 hours figure is rubbish. If one isn’t competent well before that point, then things won’t get any better.
There’s singing in a quire and then theirs learning to sing. The 10,000 hours refers to learning to sing… so practicing the exercises. If you’re just singing in a choir and not learning, then you’re not gonna improve. Like… my standard of driving isn’t improving because I’m just driving to work every day I’m not actually learning the craft.
So much fluff, not that I would mind a fulffer , wink wink nudge nudge (see monty python) but I want some action how is Sydney get to Corporal what new powers what new fights? The art is great tho.
CSNY, The Bangles
I am wondering if Harem could be bitten by a werewolf , on one neck , and a vampire on another , making her gestalt organism 2/5 supernatural.
I’d guess that Lycantrophy protects you from Vampirism, and visa-versa.
Not sure if either or both also prevents Zombification.
Michael was asking if two different Daphne’s got bit by two different virus-carriers, what would happen?
We’ve seen what happens when one Daphne experiences an overwhelming sensation and the others are unprepared for it – they all react as though they had the sensation. With somewhat hilarious consequences.
So, if one Daphne was bitten by a werewolf, she’d be turned, but the others would only experience the sensation of being bitten and turned, until the werewolf-Daphne merged with any of the others at a subsequent time.
As to what would happen if werewolf-Daphne and vampire-Daphne ever merged, that’s dependent on the vampire/werewolf fiction.
Either way, the other untainted Daphnes would probably be a little reluctant to merge with their ‘sisters’.
I’d think that until we have several other variables answered, it would be impossible to guess the result the same as it’s impossible to know what would happen if one of the Harems died. As Harem herself says in the below comic, when she says ”What happens if one of me dies?’ Why does everyone ask that? I’d only know if one of me has died and I don’t plan on finding out for a long time!’
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-306-hiring-and-conspiring/
We don’t know a lot of things about this scenario btw:
1) Is vampirism a magic/spiritual thing or a purely scientific/biological thing?
2) Is lycanthropy (and whatever other were-creature things) a magic/spiritual thing or purely a scientific/biological thing? (from what has been described in the comic, it might lean more to the scientific than magic)
3) Can these ‘curses’ become quantum-entangled or are they bound to just one body?
4) When Daphne un-teleports a body completely, can she re-form it at default stage? (probably not or she would have when she got sliced by Mack the Knife, but we don’t know if magic/illnesses are the same as physical injury for her powers).
5) We don’t know if she might eventually be able to have more than 5 Daphnes. Her ability to copy had increased as she got older based on this page (Panel 4):
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-491-leading-a-double-er-quintuple-life/
According to this page, Daphne’s first ‘additional body’ was around age 9, her second was age 10, her third was around age 12, and her fourth was around age 15-16. And it shows that there might, in the future, be 5th and 6th additional bodies. Possibly more the older she gets, unless it gets to a certain age then stops.
We also do know that when she un-teleports a body, she can re-teleport it with all the same changes to it from her default body (hair dye, hair color, clothes, etc).
We also know that the damage to one body did not physically transfer to the others (other than pain).
But, the bottom line is that any such effects would be dealer’s choice, based on the rules of cool, interesting, sexy, or whatever.
All the things she said! t.A.T.u.
Also https://tinyurl.com/tb8sr3 would be a ton of fun to see Harem do
What happens if Harem suffers a psychotic/schizoid episode and develops multiple personalities, one in each body? o_O
While I take your meaning; Psychosis and Schizophrenia both have nothing to do with actually possessing multiple personalities. That’s Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.
Given how Daphne is set up, though, it’d be a little strange for each body to individually have a personality. Her bodies basically all have the same ‘brain’, and I am currently unaware of any DiD systems (That is, bodies that host multiple ‘alter’ personalities) in which the alters fully control individual limbs, rather than ONE alter controlling everything physical, while other alters are ‘asleep’ or basically riding shotgun and giving suggestions.
However, what do I know? I’m not a psychologist or psychiatrist.
In Harem’s case that would truly be a unique thing. As I read it from the story line, each of Harem’s bodies is just an extension of her consciousness. She dresses them differently but they are no more separate entities than your left hand is from your right. Multiple personalities are a real thing but they are vanishingly rare outside of the Hallmark channel. In 28 years of working in a fairly intense psychiatric hospital setting I never saw a full blown multiple personality firsthand. I did see disassociative episodes where the person had no awareness of their actions or the events for a period of time, usually during a period of trauma or extreme stress. Since Harem experiences the five bodies as a single controlling entity an experience of psychological trauma would effect the controlling entity rather than the individual body. A more likely scenario would be physical injury or organic dysfunction within an individual body. Harem’s bodies are described as being “quantum entangled”. Quantumly? I’m not sure about the appropriate grammar. There are indications in the storyline that while this might be interfered with it can’t be severed. At least not in a manner that has been introduced in the story. It looks like severing the quantum entanglement would be the most likely way to have one or more of her bodies separating off into its separate functionality. What would likely mess with her quite severely would be a traumatic brain injury in one of the bodies. In strokes, you sometimes see a situation where a person loses conscious control of a limb other function. A brain injury to one of the bodies might result in Harem losing control of its function but that would be very unlikely to result in an independent functional body.
All that being said, stranger things have happened in comic book canon
Your inpatient setting appears to have been an extreme outlier. DID has been determined to affect between 7.5% to 10% of those in an inpatient setting (Ross, Duffy, & Ellason, 2002).
They are in no way rare. My wife is a psychologist, and DID is not uncommon among people sexually abused as children. (100% of the cases she has discussed with me had that in common.)
Most current studies place the prevalence of DID in the general population between 0.1% to 2%, though a few give estimations as high as 3-5%. The DSM-5 estimates the 12-month prevalence of DID as 1.5% of the population of American adults (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, “Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”, 5th ed.)
Haven’t seen anyone comment this song suggestion yet, but I personally think she’d do great with “Happy Together” by the Turtles. Something like “ Me and me, and me and me. No matter how they toss the dice, it had to be. The only one for me is me, and me for me. So happy together.” Where each of the “me’s” is a different Harem pointing at another Harem
That’s perfect in every way!
I suggest adapting something from Louis Vega:
“A little bit of Co-Ed in my life
A little bit of Goth girl by my side
A little bit of Vogue is all I need
A little bit of Punk is what I see
A little bit of Vanilla, here I am
A little bit of me makes me woman (Ha!)
Harem Number 5! (Ha!)”
This is my favorite suggestion so far :D
This. On so many levels, this indeed.
Copacetic*
indeed.
Also, this is a weird and possibly slightly inappropriate question but… are of Harem’s periods all… synced with each other? Because that would be pretty brutal for her to deal with five times the cramps, or headaches, etc, all at once.
I suppose it would depend on how unpleasant her periods are. Which would be worse, one five way period all at once or one continuous rolling period? Imagine, sharing five bodies, each at a different point in their cycle. FWIW, given her level of quantum entanglement, I would bet on synchronizing.
It might be better for her rather than being compounded if it were actually divided. She’s a singular entity that has separate parts.
My bet is sync’d. Given that women just working together will sync. Though, is the cause of that physical or mental? If it’s pheromones, isolation from the others could make them out of sync. If it’s mental, it’ll stay sync’d due to their shared conscious.
I’m more curious about whether, given how nice supers all look, do they even get periods? I mean, it seems like something about being a superhero is designed to affect the body so maybe they aren’t affected by normal humans things? After that, I’d wonder if they are sterile (men too).
So far the only one we specifically know of is Sydney as she is seen having menstrual cramps. She may not be representative since her heroic qualities are acquired rather than inherent. Apparently supers have become increasingly common over the last 150 years or so to the point where there are now regulatory agencies. There haven’t been any characters identified as second generation supers which does lead one to wonder about their reproductive viability. The level of fertility among supers hasn’t been specified. Given that there is a lot of physiological variation among the supers some of them may not be fertile. If they are fertile, I can imagine that those with strong constitutions would have annoyingly uncomplicated pregnancies and easy deliveries. More practically, I can see where being a super wouldn’t be all that conducive to having a settled family life. Additionally I can see where the more career driven sorts, the type that might sign up for Archon might simply be too busy/focused to take the time to have kids. There may be a whole cadre of low profile supers out there spawning families left and right. Maybe Dave B will introduce us to a super’s kid at some point.
That is in dispute. Apparently it happens in a subset of women, and there is some evidence that it is male pheromones that cause it to happen.
I would guess that they’re not automatically synchronised, because a body that’s not manifested in the world appears to be effectively ‘paused’ at the moment it was de-manifested. We’ve seen that on page with the body that had its arm broken in the Restaurant Rumble and was immediately de-manifested so that the pain was not a distraction: when it re-manifested the injury was fresh, even though days had passed in the world. That body will therefore be running a few days behind the other four.
However, in practice I suspect that any shift in phase by that means would quickly average out, or if it were a definite problem she would de-materialise each of the others until they were back in whatever phase arrangement she prefers.
As for whether she’d prefer to have them all at once or spread out, or how much variation there may be in subjective frequency even without materialisation shenanigans? Those questions I will leave to those more biologically placed to answer them.
I don’t know what texture they applied to Maxima’s face in that last frame, but I really don’t want to see it. Kinda reminds me of Superman III when Gus’ supercomputer Borgified Vera.
What’s Sydney got against barbershop? :( Barbershop’s awesome! :)
The same thing she has against… well, everyone: jealousy
There are some good ones Afternoon’s Delight barber shop quartet cover of Shaggy’s it wasn’t me is one of my favorite.
The genre clash is jarring, yet I can’t look away because it’s so well executed.
Is nobody going to mención the shader work going on Max in the background? Ok.
Alright quick question. What on earth is “Suispapphism”
I’d tell you, but then I’d have to prune you. But independent research never hurt anybody.
Something only Harem can do unless they find another female teleporter who can maintain separate bodies, or another female with multiple bodies. It’s basically masturbation but with another you providing the stimulation.
Its like self love of a woman but five times as she has more bodies to play with
… and suddenly I have to wonder if the choker can do vanta black since they’re messing around in the background.
I see no reason why it couldnt
Presumably, Advanced Alien Technology probably has a significantly darker black than Vanta, given that Galactic Society has had a few more thousand years to work on it. So I imagine it could do Vantablack fairly easily. The Latest-And-Greatest spaceblack might be harder, though, depending on how to how many sigfigs it blocks light.
Yep. One would think it would be quite easy for them.
So we assume the pallet control isolates lips from everything else completely as even removing or paintbrushing all as one don’t seem to affect her lips.
White, black, rainbow,…. sith lord? hmm
Kaleidoscope.
If Dabbler can draw tantric energy from the closest instance of Harem … and the other four Harems are somewhere safe generating tantric energy … each working with a couple of assistants to maximize energy generation … would it be advisable to practice this technique before trying it out in the field?
Asking for a fiend …
I just caught up after archive bingeing the entire webcomic, it is just as awesome as I remembered! (Last time I read it, the fight against Vehemence had just wrapped up, so it’s been a bit).
Just thinking how my chain of command would try to respond to Sidney is comedy GOLD, by itself. 11 years in and I have so many experiences that correlate surprisingly well.
Blame it on my inner fanboy but I’m guessing Xerxa is a new character in the next Enhancer book, my hunch is due to the trees in the background being similar to the ones in the cover of the first book and she may be standing in the entrance to the cave where the gang sleeps.
Or it’s totally a future character and I’m just seeing the stuff I want to see. *shrugs*
I did not notice Max changing colors in the background at first glance.
It kind of bugs me that when it comes to sydney finding out new things about her friends whenever new things that she comes off as a bit cynical.
Yup, specially if it’s something she can never have, do or be
It’s like, she’s the only one who is allowed to learn anything new or different
It’s very real, isn’t it?
She should take a look at The Ink Spots:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOhtZdINkY0
and Manhattan Transfer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1nj6Yla_Vg
Does the phrase “Girl Band” mean nothing to you?
“Acapella” = Italian for “Where’s the piano player?”
I only started reading June 28, and reading all the comments would be intimidating. I have a question about Sydney’s upgrading. She takes the orb to upgrade, but how does she select the pip?
She has not been shown at that point, as far as I can tell.
I don’t think it’s been shown explicitly; she’s just reasoned about which one. Touching an orb selects it, so presumably she touches the pip next.
Gotta admit, Xerxa, and similar characters like Dabbler, bother me. I studied anatomy in college, and the shoulder joint is the most complicated joint in the entire body, with the collar bone connected at the sternum, and the scapula sliding around on your back, and multiple muscles on your chest, upper shoulder, and all up and down your back, to operate it.
The bottom line is, there’s no way you can put multiple arms remotely that close together, and have them work even remotely the same way a human arm does.
Now, I’ll admit that Xerxa could probably be hiding multiple pectorals and collar bones under that rack, it covers some serious territory. But they’re still too close together to allow proper scapula, let alone any range of motion for them. I suppose you could have one arm’s trapezeus riding over another’s, but the scapula can’t plausibly do that.
It just doesn’t work, anatomically. You’d have to invent some different anatomy.
Functionally, of course, having them that close together means they’ll seriously interfere with each other’s range of motion.
Properly speaking, a character with multiple sets of arms should probably have them spaced out along an extended torso, not all emerging from roughly the same area.
Could it use a method similar to a Rubic’s Cube?
I was thinking more in terms of the hip joint.
The shoulder is capable angular motion in two directions, rotation, AND the joint itself can travel freely up and down, and back and front. If you gave up on the capacity to shrug, and settled for just having three degrees of freedom instead of five, you could go with a normal fixed location ball and socket joint, similar to the hip. You’d lose a little bit of reach, at the expense of a lot of complexity.
But, as an alternative, you could ditch the collar bone, place the socket in the middle of the scapula, and reposition the scapula onto the side of the rib cage. The muscles to move the reengineered scapula around could ride over each other easily enough.
That, I think, is a plausible evolutionary modification of the current design. The collar bone could be reduced to a part of the scapula, similar to the way the pelvis is actually made up of multiple fused bones. And it’s compatible with the top shoulder being of the current design, too. (Can’t really see if she has collar bones, or what her back musculature looks like.)
I suppose that’s the way I’d pick, in the end, for the obvious evolutionary pathway.
I assume we’re going to be seeing more of Xerxa? Well, not so much more OF her, as seeing her more… Though I really am curious about what she looks like from behind.
I don’t think the scapulae are such an enormous problem; they can plausibly slide over and past each other, in layers separated by sheets of connective tissue. They provide an attachment point for rotator, intrinsic, and extrinsic muscle groups that run primarily to the sides in the same plane, so the ‘separated layers’ continues to make sense when attachments are considered. The anatomy of the back would be quite different though; multiple muscle groups in close proximity would bunch up, and the layers of connective tissue would cause a very different pattern of what’s softer and what’s harder and what textures things have.
On the front side, claviculae could overlay the upper two pairs of ribs, with attachment points at the manubrium. They serve mainly as struts/joints rather than attachment points so they don’t need too much duplicated muscle or tendon mass. But they’d have to stand at least an inch or two outside the rib cage though, or else your second/third pair of arms wouldn’t have a normal range of motion in terms of being able to reach back without turning the whole torso. So the anatomy of the upper torso would look weird. The unusually buxom could of course have the extra space conveniently camouflaged by a spectacular rack. But being more deeply curved, the second and third claviculae would probably be more prone to breaking than the “normal” clavicle.
Spice Girls, off the top of my head. Also, quite a few different boy bands. Obviously she’s not above tweaking the lyrics a bit to suit her, so quite a few songs in their portfolios should be usable.