Grrl Power #985 – Big bodyslam diplomacy
Maxima is not often invited to diplomatic events. “They” learned early on that she only has so many knuckles to crack.
Assuming Tom is 90 feet tall, he would weigh… (one quick googling later) Huh. Not nearly as much as I would have guessed. Roundabout 260 tons. Assuming he’s of a similar composition as a human, of course. I really thought it would be something like 7,000 tons. I don’t know why, a blue whale only weighs about 200 tons. I guess my exponential-math-in-my-head-cortex is out of whack.
I like panel seven, because it makes Tom look like a demonic version of Beaker.
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:
I finished the last chapter! Man, the fight went in a super weird direction for about 10 paragraphs.
Now… don’t be mad… But the chapter was pushing 10K words and I wanted a little wrap scene, so… There’s going to be one last chapter. I think that’s 4 or 5 times I’ve said that I’m starting on the last chapter, but this time it’s probably not a wild underestimation. It’ll be short.
September’s vote incentive is up! Nude version is up at Patreon.
The October one will be posted with Thursday’s comic. I spent all day Sunday working on it, but I spent all day Saturday working on T:E 2, so I didn’t quite get it done in time. I need to sleep less. Yes… that plan has no possible drawbacks.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Yep. Thothogoth ain’t so big after all.
Nyope, he’s still the same size as he was, just now it’s horizontal :P
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Q.E.D.
The taller they are, the more of their potential energy is transformed to rotational velocity which is then applied directly to their head upon impact.
this is more than just falling — you have to take into account the likely rotational velocity of him being completely flipped – 200ish tons probably wouldn’t leave impact displacement / craters like that under a simple earth-gravity fall – I’m sure someone with more knowledge on the topic could either correct me or work it out based on the likely geological strata and figuring out just how much rock was displaced
Return of the one finger nose boop
Nah, in frame 6 (?) you can see Max is flipping over by the hand he used for ill-advised poke.
Y’know, everytime Max just easily beats a powerful villain like this (which is pretty much all the time), I start hoping more and more that someone will come along and just completely upstage her, just so that I can se \e the look on her face
Its got to happen eventually but it will probably happen when we least expect it
The orbs did at #66, complete with the look on her face.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-66-hero-baiting/
Way too early to be satisfactory for how later arcs have played out
Think it just proved how OP those Orbs are. Excluding Kevin, they are the only thing that stopped her.
I am hoping we get a decent villain again soon. Not been impressed since Sciona [probably spelt wrong]
Except, they didn’t stop Maxi in the same way others are hoping someone (or something) will stop her
And you spelt Sci-frights’ name correctly
I remain convinced that this exact incident played a huge role in Arianna wanting Sydney on the team. Anyone who can get Maxima that wound up *needs* to be close by. It also helped that Sydney has absurd-tier power right in the palm of her hands.
The art style looks so different – was the art/touchups done by someone else back then? I think I like the first style more
nope all DaveB. upping the anty as he goes along.
just wait till ya get to ‘cookies’ in your catchup read ….
* ante
Also, sorry for being that person.
I’d forgotten the ORBS are on the list!
Vehemence already did that once.
Sciona tricked her as well.
So I don’t really get where this desire comes from.
Vehemence straight up admitted he need time to prepare to face her, and even after getting juiced up was barely a match for her
Sciona pretty much relied on evasion and distractions and even then barely got away
What I’m looking for is an opponent who can straight up own her!
Pretty sure the Arab is going to be that guy.
He did put her in the Hospital and survived their last encounter seemingly intact.
V didn’t barely match her. He was killing Max with sheer brute power near the end before the team intervened.
Yep, but she also was holding back as well.
It also took V having a LOT of chargeup first too.
Yeah, he needed strategy and planning to gain the upper hand. Which is good villain design.
So… How do you see that situation resolving in a way that the comic can continue? There’s always a bigger fish, but if the bigger fish just comes along and eats your whole story, what do you do then? And if you’re that annoyed by Maxima, how annoyed are you going to be by the character who can beat the problem that beats her?
Max is one of those heroes, that if you want to go up against her, you need to be sure to do it in the middle of the largest city available at time where your guaranteed to have the maximum number of civilian bystanders around. Also have a setup that pretty much ensures the solution is not one that can be solved by simply employing violance. Challance one of the strongest people on the planet in a location where she can fight unrestrained, not a good idea.
Do people whine like this about Superman?
No, It’s Ok when another Man is the most powerful super. Woman having the job make a lot of people feel all funny inside.
If Max was the kind of person Superman is, I would have NO problem with her being the most powerful. Supes is nice, generous, and generally optimistic and positive. I like that. If he had Batman’s personality I would like him a lot less. I have the same problem with Dabbler and even Sydney: they’re arrogant, abrasive, insensitive and generally full of themselves. I don’t like that in anybody, no matter their gender.
If they were truly all of those things, they wouldn’t be superheroes.
They’re just confident in their power. Which isn’t a particularly egregious character flaw.
“Do people whine like this about Superman?”
Oh, Hell yes. There are plenty of people who piss and moan about Clark being a Mary Sue. Ironically, a large percentage of them are Batman fanboys.
How is it ironic for someone who is the fan of a normal human that uses his billionaire superpower to play at being a superhero to look for *anything* they can to say that Superman isn’t as amazing?
Personally, I’d just point out that Batman works for a living, while Superman’s biggest challenge is just communicating with people. Not that he struggles with that like I do, but there don’t seem to be other challenges for him. Sure, he doesn’t exactly seem to be an intellectual, so he probably wouldn’t do well in a job where he needed to do something more complicated than news reporter or punching bad guys. But he apparently doesn’t *need* to do anything like that.
Superman basically can’t really hero. He can save people from stuff, and people can look up to him. But the part where he risks for it? Sure, there’s kryptonite, but unlike when we encounter something radioactive that isn’t kryptonite, he’s completely fine after it’s removed or enclosed in lead.
On that particular note… how many people have gotten cancer from kryptonite? From the Superman stuff I’ve seen, the answer seems to be 0. Why aren’t we affected by it, if it’s radioactive?
Disclaimer: I’m not a Batman fanboy. Bruce Wayne is a dangerous lunatic, and should be locked up… as soon as the more dangerous lunatics in Gotham are dealt with. In that “more dangerous” list, I am including the lunatics who keep letting the most dangerous residents of Arkham out.
Pretty sure Bruce would be okay with your plan. The thing Batman desires most is for Batman not to be needed. I’d wager he’d gladly trade his own freedom, if the payoff was that result.
As for OP Maxima constantly effortlessly solving every problem… eh, yeah, that’d get boring eventually, but I don’t really feel we’re to that point, yet. And adding a NEW even MORE POWERFUL villain to take her down seems like an uninspired way to counter her.
Maxima has her weaknesses. She can be impulsive and temperamental, and while she’s no idiot there are definitely characters smarter than she is. It would be much more satisfying for her to find her match in someone WEAKER than she is, rather than an ever-escalating cycle of STRONGER THAN YOU.
There’s also the turncoat option: build Maxima up to be undefeatable – and then have her become a villain. That could be entertaining. The seeds for it are there. Maxima has a strong sense of justice, but not even her own teammates always agree with her interpretations of what is “just”.
There’s already a character in the vein of a match for Max who’s weaker: Deus. And he’s narratively invincible in a different, more frustrating way by being a magical genius.
(Between him, Max, and Dabbler, the blatant author favoritism is maddening.)
Truly, Deus is more than a match for Maxima. Fortunately he is not a villain, but is instead the paragon of humanity and a beacon of hope for us all.
All praise Deus, amen.
“ut not even her own teammates always agree with her interpretations of what is “just”.” She outranks them, therefore her word is paramount!
Lots of things that aren’t kryptonite or magic can hurt, and even kill, Clark.
Every member of the Justice League is in mortal danger while on the job. Batman deals with mostly regular humans with the occasional metahuman.
Superman has to fight alien invasions and beings like Darkseid, the interdimensional God of slavery and evil.
The number of people who have gotten Kryptonite cancer is very non-zero. The list, ranked in descending order of how well known the character is, starts with Lex Luthor.
Blatman is the purest example of ‘Marty Stu’: he is able to beat everyone with a little planning (including fucking GODS!!!), and everyone loves him for it (even his enemies at least ‘respect’ him)
Absolutely. I’m convinced that at least half of the Superman fandom just follow it to whine about how OP he is.
Read Watchman if you want to see an interesting use of an O.P character.
bored god … is a good summary of Dr Manhattan
Or HP:Methods of Rationality.
Or Worm.
Dc actually had both dr Manhattan and superman square off in one comic series to compare the too.
The man of action vs the man of inaction. Doomsday clock if anyone interested
While I personally hate superman for various reasons, you can’t say he never puts his life on the line.
He regularly squares off against beings cable of hurting/killing him even if there are other heros nearby better suited to fighting them.
Afew times off the top of my head
When he/batman fought a magical monster(will o of the wisp) to save some people, the creature very presence caused him pain and his powers were all but disabled.
He saved batman from metallo who put a kyptonite bullet in him.
Superman is kind and idealistic, as opposed to Max being a smug grouch.
Plus, Max isn’t Superman so much as she is Goku in terms of why people don’t like her strength.
She’s not Goku either. She doesnt get more powerful by training.
She’s more like… um… MCU version of Captain Marvel. Got her powers via something which did not actually take effort – just happenstance, is reallllly arrogant, sometimes hypocritical, doesnt really use strategy and just relies on her powers, and is considered a de-facto strongest ever person although others HAVE been shown to be more powerful.
I still like her though, even though I really don’t like Captain Marvel (in either comic or movie version) Probably because her arrogance is actually more like Monet St. Croix than Carol Danvers, which means she does occasionally get shown up for humor (ie, “I am conflicted.” during Vehemence fight). It’s been a while though which might be why some people don’t remember that happens.
That’s not what I mean. It’s not the method that hearkens back to Dragon Ball, but the effects it has on the world and other characters.
The reason why some people dislike Goku as the MC is because his status gradually nullified the contributions of everyone else in the series.
In superhero stories, having varying power levels on teams isn’t a problem as long as everyone is portrayed as equals in the fight to do good. Max, on the other hand, seems to do all the heavy lifting because she has every advantage in the world: godlike power, years of skill, flexible morality (which is a whole other problem), and she knows that.
At a certain point, this kind of one sided beat down doesn’t make her look strong anymore. It makes everyone else look like chumps. It’s narrative invincibility, which is a trait she shares with Dabbler and Deus. I don’t want to read a story about god-tier characters messing with each other at the expense of everyone else. I had enough of that with Bleach and Sherlock.
I see what you mean. But maybe we should wait a few scenes before we definitively decide for sure that’s what’s going to happen here. Imagine if we thought this during the Vehemence fight, during which it was utterly one sided for the first several pages.
If the entire fight is like this, I’ll concede that it’s a badly done arc. But it’s hard to make that assumption after one page.
I’m not sure why people might think Max is arrogant.
She’s a cop and a boss of cops. She gives orders while on the job; that is her job.
I’ll grant that the winning strategy against For Whom The Death Tolls and Kevin came from Halo. Archon seems to be still catching up in the super-strategy department.
“I’m not sure why people might think Max is arrogant.”
Let’s be honest about the character, even if we like her as a character (which I happen to). People think she’s arrogant because she IS arrogant. She constantly behaves and talks in an exceedingly, sometimes annoyingly, arrogant manner. Sydney’s even pointed it out before in the interview when she seemed awkward about the idea that her punches were not even taxing Sydney’s shield when Sydney says ‘Sorry if that hurts your pride.’
Maxima is arrogant in much the same way that someone like Tony Stark or M is arrogant, but she has powers more like Superman-level, which most people tend to associate with needing to have a bit more humility so she doesnt feel too Mary Sue-ish (I don’t think Maxima is a Mary Sue at all but I can understand when others make that argument, or where they desperately want to see the ultra-powerful character have more losses on the antagonists that are set up as ‘boss’ characters, since the non-boss characteres are usually such fodder for her to deal with, with the exception of the very annoying Hench Wench).
It makes her very nebulous response to people like Heatwave asking why Maxima couldnt have just beaten all the restaurant supers on her own seem to be lacking. Sort of like how a less well written Superman would make people wonder why the rest of the Justice League was even needed as well.
Part of it is that she’s not just a cop (Though that comes with its own very hefty baggage as the law is not always Just). She’s the epitome of a militarized police force, being a literal military officer while acting in the role of a police officer. It also runs into the tendency to resort to Big Stick diplomacy when something might threaten her position as undisputed authority in the situation. She’s escalates situations, rather than deescalating them.
It’s sorta why I’d like to see her put in a situation where she *isn’t* the local authority (For example, in space where her rank and governmental position means nothing) or in a situation where ‘Law’ and ‘Good’ directly conflict (Like a classic robin hood style impossibly good thief).
> It’s sorta why I’d like to see her put in a situation where she *isn’t* the local authority (For example, in space where her rank and governmental position means nothing) or in a situation where ‘Law’ and ‘Good’ directly conflict (Like a classic robin hood style impossibly good thief).
Those would actually make some good story arcs with some character conflict for her.
“Do people whine like this about Superman?”
Ummmm…. yes. Yes they do. I am making a guess that you are new to comics. Check out Quora or comic battles or reddit.
this, im somewhat getting bored of this
We came pretty close when she got hypnotized by the sionas blood golem.
I think this will come up again….
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-150-not-sure-where-max-stencils-her-kill-marks/
“In fact, there are only two individuals who have ever fought me to a standstill. One of them is dead…..”
(Thinking to herself) ‘As far as we know.’
Might this mysterious person who fought Max to a standstill still be alive, waiting to strike?
I’m pretty certain that the consensus is that Sciona is the bad-being being referenced. Lots of things point to that.
How? That conference was before Sci-fright and the Council of Monsters and Aliens was introduced, and Maxi asked why she had never heard of Sci before
No. Sciona in that splash is represented by her underlings – the two vampires.
You’re always so confident when you have no evidence.
I see why you’re a lawyer now.
“You’re always so confident when you have no evidence.”
Okay, what I’m going to say now, I don’t mean in a way to insult your intelligence but…. do you understand what evidence means? Because it feels like you don’t understand what evidence means.
Evidence – the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
The splash page is LITERALLY evidence of what I said.
The reason I’m confident is because I very clearly am correct. This isnt even something that’s difficult to prove that I’m correct about. This isnt even an ‘in my opinion I’m correct’ sort of thing where there’s a possible argument against what I’m saying.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-186-fingers-to-maximum-steepleage/
Look at page 186, panel 5. Looks at the two shadowy figures. Look at the distinct hairstyle each of them have.
Now look at the hairstyles of Gunnhildr and Zvonamir (page 482, panel 3) and page 532, panel 3).
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-482-panty-raid-0/
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-532-monster-hunting/
They’re the same people, and page 532 and 489 definitively show that the vampires are working DIRECTLY for Sciona. How are YOU so confident on being so salty when you’re very clearly wrong. At least my confidence DOES come from having evidence to support what I’m saying.
“I see why you’re a lawyer now.”
Lawyer jokes aside, you do know that lawyers tend to rely on evidence, which really helps with being confident about our arguments, right? Which…. I already showed you?
I thought lawyers tended to rely on the other side’s *lack* of evidence just as much as their own side’s *presence* of evidence.
And a good speaking voice, white skin and good looks in the courtroom, of course.
This had me laughing so hard I had a coughing fit. Dude wasn’t even worth a fight scene, love it!
At lest vehemence got a little snack
Kinda lame. I had expected more.
Agreed… Thothogoth has a point here… that should be impossible even WITH magic. His finger should have broken or even been ripped off before it could be used to throw him like that.
Unless Mrs. “Edit the Natural Laws of the World” was somewhere nearby doing her thing… he’s right… Shenanigans!
Remember how Max can extend her force fields to things she lifts so she doesn’t break them?
Like when she lifted the ambulance.
It’s Zero Point Telekinesis, which was actually explained in Dabbler’s Science Corner.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-1/
(Panels 7, 9, and 11 explain it)
His coming shall be heralded by a great burning. Or something like that. I think lobster face hasn’t yet started.
The ‘Great Burning’ was during the Press Conference
Um… Where’s Kevin?
Under Tom and laughing.
It’s a size adjustment spell. It probably doesn’t maintain your density; The strength of bones and muscles is proportional to their cross section, size squared. The mass you need to move around is proportional to size cubed.
That’s why you don’t see yard long ants, and elephants are built differently than giant mice, and the most massive animals are all in the sea, where water supports the weight. And Godzilla would collapse into a meat puddle.
In short, Thothogoth didn’t weigh anything like he looked like he should weigh.
If it was pure physics then your right, but magic spells came out about your rules of reality
It’s odd how people say that Thothy would be too heavy for his size and can’t support it. In a comic where eyeballs are tougher than steel and Max is subjecting her body to incredible forces.
In Dave’s world, anything is just about exactly as tough as he wants it to be. He’s the entire set of laws of nature.
factor = thothy_height / human_height
thothy_weight = human_weight * factor *factor * factor
Yup. And we have already seen that Max’s strength per se is not of the pure physical type, but more of a telekinetic variety, which changes how things like leverage work. Remember the ambulance she picked up 1 handed by the corner of the bumper. If say The Tic had tried that (purly strength based) he would have only lifted the 1 corner of the ambulance and possibly ripped the corner of bumper off.
That’s the formula I used as well and I came up with about 337.5 tons, not a mere 240.
6′->90′ is a factor of 1500%. 15 cubed is 3375. 200 lbs * 3375 = 675,000 lbs = 337.5 tons
You’re actually making an argument for why he SHOULD be heavier. You’re going to need density and tensile strength several orders of magnitude higher than ‘human’ standard in order to maintain that body. Probably also want multiple redundant systems as well, like a circulatory system for each limb, so that no one heart as to pump all the way through him.
No, increased density doesn’t make sense. If the issue is weight, making himself heavier doesn’t help him at all, even if it comes with a corresponding increase in structural strength by density.
Tensile strength, sure, but that has no direct to weight.
Also, he’s a demon, he can have magic support his body.
“You have been weighed…”
“You have been measured…”
“And you have most definitely…”
“Been found wanting. ”
“Welcome to New World. God save you, if it is right that he should do so…”
Such a great movie.
I know, right?
And I managed to find the scene too
https://youtu.be/pOsAqP4PNto
Alright, so I got it a tiny bit wrong. Still a awesome movie…
Sydney: “And also NYAH NYAH!!”
Beat me to it! I could hear that scene in my mind when I saw the page…but which one is Chaucer?
The one not there?
I was scrolling down to post this, and saw you said it first.
Thank you very much.
So his nails are more stable than I assumed previously.
That’s part of “impossible”. Probably that whole telekinetic field extension thing that keeps the bumpers and the cars connected when bricks throw cars around.
Drawing Max at the angle in the final panel must have been difficult.
Looks great tho
I was kind of wondering if it was aftermarket clip-on nails for monsters.
another fine product from monster outfitters warehouse – K-thulus
K-thulus would be press-on tentacles
Someone did try marketing ‘Lee Press-on Claws’, but the trial run did not go well.
whoops – attached to wrong comment.
supposed to be tho. tho. goths nails
I think before Thot complains to anyone about the impossibility of the leverage he need to explain his mouth!
meh, vibrating membrane, only a aproximation and he is projecting thought, or “magic” ……
a Human-like body composition with 90 feet height would be crushed under earth’s gravity… is not structurally stable. be he also has no larynx and can still talk so i might have to include **Magic** in the calculation… and 260 tons is a lot to be distributed over the area of his feet… so, with all that in mind. just say it’s because magic an put any weight you want… but he may or may not have to be burning magic power to be stand still.
Sure, this is also time for the physics chorus on “mass =/= weight”. The spell could increase his mass as the cube of size, but while adding the extra mass, not add weight proportionately. That way, he would get harder and harder to knock back, while not getting as much heavier as you would normally calculate.
He is a Demon… A race/species traditionally known to treat our vaunted Laws of Physics as “Entirely Optional”.
Because (as Dabbler and others have shown several times) our current understanding of those laws is wholly lacking to the point we’re canonically set as Stone Age for, literally, the entire galaxy of existing civilisations.
Tom is right to a point though.. That finger-bodyslam should have been impossible without some serious “magic”, which max is *confirmed* not to have a shred of capability of. And judging from his reaction would need some major effort if performed that way.
Then again.. Max may just have used her superspeed to pick him up and slam him down properly. From Tom’s point of view that would have *looked* as if she slammed him down by the finger… And Max sure as hell isn’t going to enlighten him about how exactly she did it…
> That finger-bodyslam should have been impossible without some serious “magic”, which max is *confirmed* not to have a shred of capability of.
Except when she lifted an entire ambulance by it’s bumper.
It’s more ‘impossible’ than everyone seems to realize…
He’s lying sprawled across the floor and wall of the quarry. A body slam, from where Max was, SHOULD have thrown him into the forest behind her. Instead, it appears to have piledrivered him backward (or back and sideways) across the quarry.
You’re assuming she stayed in place to throw him, rather than flying to yank his arm behind his back first. She (or someone in team leadership) picked the quarry to contain the fight, she has no reason to expand the damage radius outside its boundaries.
zero range telekinesis was confirmed in her power set very early on. It allows her to lift objects without regards to weight distribution issues. Hence being able to life a car by a corner without ripping through the frame or the weight of the rest of the vehicle pulling down.
in short if you tried to pick up a dresser on its side by just a leg, regardless of you being able to bench-press that weight you’d like break the leg of the dresser because that leg can’t support that weight at that angle.
however Maxima extends a telekinetic field via touch around objects, so that dresser’s weight gets treated as an absolute value rather than a distributed one, so she could lift it by the one leg without the leg breaking.
That’s the point..
*WE* know that… the Thot only got aware of Maxima after the press demo bit, giving rise to the famous Faces of Evil page. And even then he spotted Dabbler and quite likely “wrote off” Max until the Fel carrier incident, and the subsequent intergalactic media bruhaha.
Even then, Archon has kept the lid on everything pre-Big Reveal, and most of the team’s antics has been well outside the Eye of the Press, except, again, the Fel carrier incident.
Unless Thothy boi has the best spy network in the universe, he can only know what Max has shown *in public*. Which isn’t all that much, really.
He started out focused on Dabbler, and considered Max a mere “one man army” nuisance. Stuff he, as a “Warlord”, has plenty of himself.
If he had any *real* info on the team in the way people assume, and we as readers have, he would very much not be wary of Max, but toned things down rapidly after seeing *Sydney*..
Especially given her demonstrated ability to give an Enema Special if he’d annoyed her too much..
“Tom is right to a point though.. That finger-bodyslam should have been impossible without some serious “magic”, which max is *confirmed* not to have a shred of capability of.”
Although Maxima’s powers don’t work based solely on strength – they work based on a type of telekinesis that only really works if she’s touching the object, like she did with the ambulance. No magic needed.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-dabblers-science-corner-1/
It’s sort of similar to Superboy’s Tactile Telekinesis, or Superman and Supergirl and Power Girl’s ‘kryptonian biomatrix’ which work pretty much in the same manner as Maxima’s ZPT (including for how both team Superman and Maxima are able to extend, to a degree, their invulnerability around their clothing when the clothes are skintight…. so they don’t constantly have a Caitlin Fairchild (from Gen 13) clothing damage moment.
I like how his glowing eyes are illuminating their faces. Nice touch (following the Bad Touch),
Yeah well this is not exponential, merely cubic-or-so, math. Hard enough on the bones as it is. Whales live in water, they crush under their own weight on land. (Also apparently overheat without the constant water cooling.) The very largest dinos are also thought to have lived in marshes, so largely in water all the time. And they had twice the feet to stand on.
There’s also the problem of no anchoring for that leverage. Once you start handwaving “supers”, it can never end.
The bit about the largest dinosaurs living in marshes, largely in the water, was discarded by most palaeontologists several decades ago:
Firstly, most fossils are from drier land.
Secondly, their feet’s ground pressure per square whatever would have been too great for walking on soft ground — such as swamps — without their feet & legs sinking too deeply into the surface.
Thirdly, if they were deep enough in the water to use their necks for feeding at the surface, as commonly portrayed in the old days, then the water-pressure on their bodies would be too great for them to breathe with reasonable ease.
Fourthly, their bones are now known to have contained air-sacs like those of birds, making them lighter (thus needing less support) but — due to internal bracing — surprisingly strong for their weight.
It’s now thought that most of those very large dinosaurs browsed on tree canopies, although some types might have had their necks arranged for browsing on the ferns that were the predominant ground-cover back then instead.
[/zoologist]
There you go, bringing facts to a fact-nitpick. I don’t mind, though. My dino knowledge apparently stopped improving several decades ago. Recently found a thirty-odd year old dino picture book cleaning out the parental house. Funny how such things, dealing with subjects millions of years old, age so poorly.
Not sure I buy the breathing argument. Whales breathe air, while stuck in water.
Recently got told that bird bones are hollow but also denser, so not actually much lighter. Stronger, though. And more trouble to mend if broken.
Browsing tree canopies they would be doing with todays trees. But with trees then, why, wouldn’t they be bigger too? Not to mention a pain to stick your long mostly horizontal neck in, or through, if you’re in a dense forest.
Re the breathing argument _ Whales, like all other mammals, have a a sheet of muscle (the ‘diaphragm’) that splits their body cavity into separate thoracic & abdominal compartments: They can use this to change the size of the thoracic compartment — the one that contains the lungs — which plays a major part in the in breathing process. Some of the now-extinct “mammal-like reptiles” also seem to have had this, but all other air-breathing vertebrates do not and therefore have to rely solely on expanding their ribcages out sideways to pump air inwards.
Trees then weren’t bigger [on average] then because species don’t evolve bigness just for the sake of being big: The evolution of herbivorous dinosaurs might have prompted someselection for greater height among trees, to make the foliage less accessible, but insects do a lot of damage (quite possibly more, overall, than even the dinosaurs were doing at that time) regardless of that factor and tree’s main reason for growing taller is probably so that they don’t get too badly overshadowed by other trees instead. (Note that the first “tree-sized” plants had already evolved before the first herbivorous reptiles did do…) Also, there are practical limits to height based on [apart from anything else] water supply & the ability of plants’ internal capillaries to transport water upwards. Also, remember that even the tallest trees have to begin as shorter saplings.
Palaeontologists apparently haven’t yet reached a consensus about the angles at which the various types of ‘Sauropod’ dinosaurs (i.e. the large, long-necked herbivores) could use their necks… but some scholars even suggest that certain genera (e.g. Brachiosaurus, IIRC) could even — as modern Elephants sometimes do — rear up briefly on their hind legs to reach higher vegetation!
All they need is Dues and Vehemence looking down with them, and it would officially be the biggest “I’m Doomed” moment to be in.
Ah, I see we’re going the comedic route for Thoth then.
That at least means he is far less likely to die now.
Except in a way that would be funny. (and reversible).
Truly, though, it seems like he’s going to be a special guest star played by Bob Denver.
All characters in this comedy are more or less comedic, even monsters like Vehemence.
He can’t die. Do you know how much police tape it would take to go around the body?
Dabbler has a chalk dispenser drone for just such occasions.
He’s not wrong tho, about the leverage. His finger should have broken long before he got flipped. It’s a superhero thing to protect what you are attacking from pesky physics.
Exept Max’s strength has already been demonstrated to be of a telekinetic variety not purely physical strength type. Remember the ambulance.
Ka-Doosh!
Awww. Where’s the pink fluffy unicorns circling his head?
You don’t see them? There are three in the last panel
I am So So Slow in my dotter-age, I only just got the Tho Tho Goth, lisping play on words. Liking the art of Gothy, he appears to be all neck wearing a ‘Sutur’ type head piece. He better take care that Max doesn’t go all ‘Thor’ on him. I’m assuming his appearance, like his size, is for ‘show’ and intimidation and he has a more normal look ‘au natural’ otherwise, how could Dabs get all kissy face in their intimate moments.
Wait! That begs a question that has long been on my mind regarding Xuriel. How does one get all kissy face with her regarding her horns. I mean really, one could loose an eyeball or otherwise suffer all kinds of facial injuries in passionate moments with her. Leads me to a scene where some dude shows up at breakfast in the Arc Swat mess hall with bandages all over his face and the common snickering comment goes like “Heh! We know what he was up to last night”.
You are not the only one… BTW, I am still giggling at the last panel….
Thanks for spelling out the Tho Tho Goth bit. Until you said that, I was thinking he was Thoth-o-goth. But this makes much more sense now.
As far as Xuriel’s horns… I think she’s more into lust and sex than love. Her horns seem more of a problem for loving contact than they are for intimate contact.
So, that means she never goes down on anyone, male or female?
My theory is that Tom only has 1 pair of yellow horns, and the black ones are just his overcompensating eyebrows (since he can’t grow a decent mustache to twirl).
I trying to imagine tomorrow when the people running the quarry show up again.
Foreman: [ On phone] Hey, boss. I just got to quarry 17 and it looks like it has been torn up.
Operations Manager: How much damage is there? What do you think it take to fix it?
Foreman: That’s the thing. Our stuff is fine. The structures, the trucks, the fences are all fine, but everything is covered in rock dust. It’s the rock that have been busted off the walls. There are some places in here that are really torn up. It will take us days clearing and sorting all this gravel before we can get back to cutting slabs in some places. What did the renters do in here anyway?
Operations Manager: I was told they would not be using explosives, but they did say some rock might be knocked loose. We were told we had to turn all the inward facing cameras off for the couple of hours they were there, something about national security, so I can’t really tell you more than that.
Foreman: Knocked loose?! There has got to be several tons of large gravel knocked out of the walls and floor. Do you have a good way to sell a whole bunch of Aggregate-A and B? I’ll send you a picture. This kind of stuff is all over the place. Who did we rent the place to yesterday anyway?
Operations Manager: Some government office, hence the “national security” stuff. I would have to check the paperwork to narrow it down for sure.
Ok, He HAS to draw this up for a comic. It could be 2 panels, but I think it would be funniest with 3.
Yep. This was my thought as well. There’s going to be a LOT of cleanup before this quarry can reopen.
I’m not seeing much equipment around. Leaving that old dozer parked where it could get smashed would be a cheap way to get ARC to spring for a new replacement. There are a lot of abandoned quarries around the world. They tend to fill up with water if they extend very far below ground level though. There were once several large granite quarries around my home town and now the only active quarry is grinding one of the larger hills into gravel. As drawn this looks more like an open pit mine or gravel quarry. it’s not really relevant to the story, the illustrations just had me feeling nostalgic about quarries.
It’s probably abandoned. The West and Midwest are full of them…
That final image reminds me of the end scene of A Knights Tale where they stand over the villain after knocking him off his horse and say “you have been weighed, measured, and found wanting”.
Loved that moment.
Was just coming to comment on “A Knights Tale” :D
The filename of the image is “12” but this is October.
Intentional “A Knights Tale” reference? “You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.”
Vehemence must have enjoyed that little jolt of power/energy, after forcibly draining himself
At this point, he may be enjoying it in the Bahamas. Thothogoth provided a diversion and food, and if Kevin was able to get out of sight, then he’s gone.
More likely, though, he stayed to watch the fight… and there wasn’t one.
Just a thought, but according to Sydney’s orb, the earth is the last place visited and all fuzzy, meaning that something happened here, all that Nth tech DNA may be the reason that supers are around. The complete transformation of Max, and think of what would have happened if SHE had found the orbs. Would the being that controlled the orbs then manifest as a symbiote in Max? As her power now exceeds even what the aliens in the story arc are aware of, this just sounds like somehow the Nth something is responsible.
The DNA thought came from one of the Alien movies can’t remember what one.
The movie would have been the prequel ‘Prometheus’.
I guess the people who said it would be ‘Down in one hit’ and subverted the idea that a boss level character would be any sort of challenge were right after all!
Good on those who guessed correctly!
Question is, is he really a Boss level character, or just playing up the bit for intimidation factor. Just because a villain claims to be all powerfully, doesn’t exactly garontee that they actually are.
Dabbler suggested he was just trying to intimidate. But I don’t think Max, Halo, Dabbler, Hiro, or Kevin are the sort to be subject to that sort of intimidation. I think either the others would probably be intimidated, but still not knuckle under like he was hoping.
Basically, regardless of who was there, he was getting owned. But because Max was there, and he tried to go that route, he got owned by Max.
He’s a boss level character based on the splash page, at least. And according to DaveB at least.
This may be the last page for me
Why? You weren’t the one beat up by Maxima there. Were you?
Ok, bye
do it. seriously. fucking do it.
I think I can understand though id definately appreciate an explanation.Seems the more the comic goes on the less capable the advertised big threats seem to get.At this point Ive stopped expecting serious stakes in things and am just here to see where things go.
It’s a character-driven comedy.
Why do you expect anything else?
Because one note storys are boring as hell and quite frankly the character drive is more a two wheeled go cart that only Maxikins and Sydney “monkey with a gun” get to use most of the time.
Zack Tilly!
Where are the big threats that can last longer than Sydney’s attention span?
Serious treats doesn’t mean the webic has to stop being ‘character-driven comedic slice-of-life’
I don’t think DaveB intended for the parking lot fight to take 80+ pages and ~9 months, or even the fight with Vehemence to take 30+ pages and ~4 months. It was an early aberration that he did not intend to repeat. The arc with Sciona is considerably longer, but it’s not just one big fight. The final fight with her is only ~7 pages. Sydney’s fight with the “world eater apocalypse demon gods” is about 17. The other major fight in the whole comic is the aliens in New York, then the super villains, and that stretches out a bit, about 45 pages, but there are multiple plot threads and scenes running through there.
This is a comic about people who punch people. That almost necessitates that some portion of it is spent punching people, but that does not mean that it is a comic about punching people.
I suspect it’s not Thothogoth himself that’s the boss-level challenge, but the forces under his command. Whether he’s leading the invasion himself, or they’re pulling a ‘no demon left behind’ extraction mission on his behalf, there’s only one Maxima and DaveB-only-knows how many of them.
This encounter isn’t over, although it may not erupt into a fight. Though I’m not sure that’s off the table, V’s debut started off with some slapstick.
I’m hoping Tommy boy is a quicker thinker now that he realizes he’s dealing with potential peers instead of serfs, and offers to form an alliance instead. Which Archon won’t accept, but Deus will gladly run as their contractor.
Brichins does bring up a good point.
Each time there’s been a boss character, it didnt START with him or her trouncing everyone. It started with them getting injured or humiliated or cut down to size in some way.
Hope so, Maxi (and specially Sydney) still need a damn heaping helping of humility, stat
Sydney tends to get herself into trouble and injure herself already, though. :) Plus she did get her butt beat by Concretia quite thoroughly, and had to resort to psychology to get Concretia to turn on them (after she was saved by Cora). And she does know when she’s in over her head sometimes, like with the Squidwards where she only levelled up enough to be able to escape, then once she did, she realized ‘If I keep trying to fight them, eventually they’ll figure a counter to my ONE move that works against them and I’ll be dead.’ She also got her pretty trounced by the multi-armed demon hunter woman.
Maxima… doesn’t quite have that much growth, if any, from a humility standpoint. She’s lost a few times – once by Vehemence (but she seems to have learned nothing from it humility-wise), once from Hench Wench (who I honestly don’t care that Maxima hasnt learned anything humility-wise because I can’t stand HW), and once from Sciona (but instead of learning anything humility-wise, she blamed Sciona for destroying the bridge that Maxima herself actually destroyed). It’s all in character for Maxima, admittedly, because Maxima is arrogant, but I can see how that would get a bit annoying after a while.
Oh Maxima did also get shown up from Sydney as well at the bank briefly when she tried to pull the tube to get Sydney out from under the van, and wound up finding something that she was NOT strong enough to do, and landed on her butt. On national television.
But yeah Maxima could use some bigger doses of humility thrust upon her. :) Mainly to give her something to overcome, since that tends to be an important part of the whole ‘Hero’s Journey’ element of storytelling. In particular ‘The Ordeal’ – even though the main protagonist is actually Sydney, and Maxima is more like the Mentor in Grrlpower. Sort of like Yoda. But with punching and general butt-kicking and much easier on the eyes.
Sydney is still as far from being humble as you can get
She has learnt
manysomea few things, humility ain’t one of themI didn’t say she’s humble per se, but she does learn from her mistakes and tries to grow from them.
Like when she helped the Alari refugees (or initially when she did nothing with regards to them since anything she would have done could have made things worse).
Or how she dealt with Concretia when she was thoroughly beaten, first using her gun when her powers were not available, then trying to radio for help, then using psychological reasoning to get Concretia on her side, then stalling when Concretia’s handlers arrived until help would arrive.
And Sydney does apologize sometimes when she realizes she’s been a jerk about something. Soooo at least she has some character growth. Although yes, she’s still often very full of herself. But less so than she started. Which is fine. Even Luke Skywalker started as a whiny teenager who wanted to join the Empire and skip work with Uncle Owen to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters *whiiine* and described his home as ‘If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.’ Character growth is a key part of the hero’s journey, and you can’t have character growth if you START perfect.
Oh or for a more modern version, take Ahsoka Tano. She started as a knowitall arrogant and frequently WRONG teenager who didnt learn from her mistakes that she repeated over and over again, until she had a point where she finally started learning from them, had some real growth, and became… pretty awesome.
Never said she didn’t learn or grow
Fair enough, G.
Lets just wait for this particular arc to finish before making a judgment though.
You might be right but we can’t really tell just a couple of pages into the arc.
Why does she need to be humble?
Do you have something against justifiably arrogant women?
I think Guesticules’ main problem with Maxima’s arrogance and lack of any humility (especially given that she HAS had a few losses now) is it CAN get a little annoying, and some people might argue that it does not show any self-awareness in the character. Sometimes ‘justifiable arrogance’ can be done in a way which is fun to read, like M (Monet St. Croix from X-Men/Generation X/X-Factor Investigations). Who is EXTREMELY arrogant and, even more annoyingly, usually CORRECT and justified in being arrogant. Her arrogance is part of the charm of the character because it’s sort of a subversion of ‘the arrogant good guy’ character, because she frequently hangs a lampshade on the fact that she KNOWS that she’s arrogant and other people refer to her openly as ‘little miss perfect.’ She tends to own it. And every so often, a little peek that she actually DOES have some humility peeks through, like when Synch dies, or how Layla Miller (“the girl who knows stuff”) treats her on a regular basis.
The other type of arrogant is like Captain Marvel in the MCU movies, who was was just annoying because there was no self-awareness of her being arrogant by the character or other characters, and sometimes Maxima does get into that territory. Where you wonder ‘well if she’s as freaking powerful as she constantly claims to be, then there’s no reason to bother having the rest of the team around. I personally don’t mind it with Maxima because I see her more as a mentor character and there HAVE been examples of her getting pwned (rare but still there) but I can understand how other people can get annoyed about it.
While I’d argue that Grrlpower has more of an ensemble cast, rather than following the Hero’s Journey, if this story does belongs to any one character, it’s Sydney. Max’s journey is in the past, because she’s a supporting character. While I’d love to see more growth from the other characters, and more time spent on them, Dave is only one person, and can only write and draw so fast.
I agree. Like I said, Maxima basically is the role of the Mentor. She’s a much younger and sexier (depending on your tastes, who am I to judge) Yoda who speaks better English.
Dabbler has the BEST shit-eatin-grin right now.
Maxima is probably using her flight power to produce several tons of negative lift on Thog’s head.
Reminds me of the Corbin Dallas school of negotiation:
https://imgur.com/7kFiQzw
Yeah, pretty sure this was her diplomacy check.
Dave said there would be less monster text soon. There were 2 solutions: make the monster smaller or as you can see… “diplomacy”
So he’s artificially buffing his size. How big is he exactly? Something tells me that slam probably has shaken him a lot more given he’s made himself apparently massively larger.
I think he’s really about four foot eight.
“Hctib Elttil, is that you?!”
You have been weighed
Measured
And most definately
Been found wanting
I wrote this same thing before I saw that you wrote it as well before me. :)
A Knight’s Tale callback ftw :)
Thot should be glad his finger is still attached.
Previously (2 strips ago) Pander ponderously pondered, poorly:
Care to rethink your position there, kiddo?
I’m not going to claim that just because we now have evidence that Maxima can indeed beat Thothomoth that she is the most powerful being in the Grrlverse. Just that we have absolutely zero evidence, notwithstanding your prior incorrect assertions, to the contrary.
She just flipped Thothofroth by one finger so fast that he didn’t remember it, and so hard that he was, if not unconscious then at least stunned and out of it for a few seconds, minimum. Long enough that had she wanted to Thothobroth would be dead instead of “inconceivable!ing” about how impossible the thing that just happened to him was and rethinking his life choices.
Deus ex Maxima.
Trying to troll Pander with allitterations? She is too cool for that. Try puns instead.
More pertinent to the point, perhaps, is that an opening move does not decide the battle. Yeah, she rang his bell, but we haven’t seen him actually try anything yet.
Where’s the alliteration?
I mean, Oberon is being arrogant and a bit rude but that’s how he usually is and I don’t really mind it. It’s how he argues. He hasnt really called me names much, except kiddo, which I guess is an improvement on what he calls other people when arguing. I responded with a ‘buddy boy’ :)
THAT’S alliterative. :)
Oh… Ponderously pondered.
I admit I enjoy some good allitteration myself now and then but ”ponderously pondered” was just repeating the same word. ”Pun-derously pun-dered” would have been better.
And I guess he did say ‘Previously Pander’ and ‘poorly.’
Which make me think maybe he wasnt being rude, but just trying really hard to be alliterative like you said. Oberon did NOT use a pun, so no ninja hit squads for him.
Now I remember we did this allitteration joke back in GP # 953. He stole our joke! Send out the ninjas!
My ninjas are specifically for puns, not alliteration or plagiarism. :)
I will give you the number for a different ninja hit squad agency tho if you want to take up this as your cause. :)
Yes I guess you have gained some valuable knowledge about the ninja hit squad market by now.
By necessity!
A potentially profitable profession to pursue. Pander the professional punster punisher.
You’re realllllly tempting me to expand on my use of ninja hit squads, buddy.
But… that was pretty good.
Ah pondering ponderosa tree related forrest falls, and did tom make a sound?
“Ah pondering ponderosa tree related forrest falls, and did tom make a sound?”
I have no idea how to respond to this.
I wanna see “Panderously Pandered” … or perhaps to go through the entire conjugation:
“Pandering, Pinder (the poet) ponderously punned.”
You should throw the word pontification in there somehow. Or pedantic. Or both.
Previous poster (Rewinn) produce peculiar poetry.
I managed 5 words starting with ‘p’ without breaking typing stride, and that was all the effort I intended to put into it…
Despite their similarities ponderously and pondered are two very different words with completely different meanings. I’m no etymologist, and it does look like they may share some roots, but sharing a root doesn’t make them synonyms.
To be fair, not remembering being flipped after landing hard enough to lose consciousness isn’t a function of how fast you were flipped. It’s a function of your brain being forcibly rebooted before you can log the memory.
“Care to rethink your position there, kiddo?”
Nope. Everything I said is still accurate, buddy boy. :)
“I’m not going to claim that just because we now have evidence that Maxima can indeed beat Thothomoth that she is the most powerful being in the Grrlverse.”
Good. Because there’s still nothing to suggest that she is.
1) She started the fight with Vehemence by thoroughly beating him as well. And we know how that turned out.
2) Even if she can beat Thothogoth in physical strength alone, it does not make her the most powerful anything in the universe, just powerful. Thothogoth also likely has a lot of other methods of fighting
3) Thothogoth was not prepared for Maxima to do that, because he was underestimating her, because he thought she requires leverage instead of her zero point telekinesis thing.
“Just that we have absolutely zero evidence, notwithstanding your prior incorrect assertions, to the contrary.”
Actually if you read my post, and you probably didn’t, because you tend to only gloss over stuff in my experience, I actually gave two different possibilities on how this would turn out. This was possibility #2. You just focus on possibility #1 (which still might happen, mind you) because you don’t really read other people’s posts carefully.
“She just flipped Thothofroth by one finger so fast that he didn’t remember it, and so hard that he was, if not unconscious then at least stunned and out of it for a few seconds, minimum. ”
I’m assuming I’m not as strong as you, but if I sucker punch you in the face as hard as I can, or flip you when you’re not ready for it, I’m pretty sure you’d be stunned for a few seconds at least.
“Long enough that had she wanted to Thothobroth would be dead”
How exactly do you know how long it was? IT could have been anywhere from a second to a minute later that he ‘recovered’ from the flip. However long 3 panels takes. You make an awful lot of assertions without anything to back it up. You also have no idea how resilient he is to injury. Especially if he’s not taken by surprise.
“Deus ex Maxima.”
Really hasnt happened yet. So far it’s just the equivalence of an impressive sucker punch from someone not expecting it. Sort of like how Sydney flipped Mr Amorphous when he was the bank robber.
Soooooooooo no. Not rethinking my position, since my position makes quite a lot of sense, and is only one of two positions I was holding anyway.
Thank you. Try again :)
> Not rethinking my position, since my position makes quite a lot of sense
You never do, and you always think that.
“You never do”
I sometime do. I just don’t often on this forum because I tend to think out my arguments very well. And very often the people who argue against my points don’t. Although there are some who do argue quite well, and I tend to point out when someone’s made a good point, or when I change my mind based on someone else’s argument. Don’t be salty.
“you always think that.”
I always think my positions make sense because my positions just… tend to make sense. And when there’s a possibility that it might be wrong, I usually add in qualifiers or steelman my arguments with the opposition’s possible arguments.
Perhaps you can read my original post from last strip, and you’d have seen that I took both sides of what might happen with Thothogoth. I only really got pushback on one of those possibilities, so most of my arguments were about that. Mainly because I tend to not assume to know the definitive future. Just what would make sense or would work well narratively, based on what we already know in the story from its setups.
> Don’t be salty.
I’m just reminding you that you’re scared of answering a couple of simple questions.
To refresh your memory, here they are again:
Is “the happy merchant” an antisemetic dogwhistle?
> Law isnt always about or in sync with morality.
> The law is the final arbiter of right and wrong
Is a 17yo having a one-night-stand with a 25yo wrong?
“I’m just reminding you that you’re scared of answering a couple of simple questions.”
Oh for crying out loud, not this again
i wasn’t scared of answering any questions. Your questions were more attempts at making tangents though. And I was trying to not let myself get drawn even further into obvious trolling done by you. I think you feed off of my attention.
“Is a 17yo having a one-night-stand with a 25yo wrong?”
Tell you what. I’ll answer this one. Only because it’s a legal question.
No, a 17 year old having a one night stand with a 25 year old is not necessarily wrong. It depends on the state, the existence of Romeo and Juliet law exceptions to the strict liability elements of statutory rape laws, the age of consent in that state (in the overwhelming majority of states, the age of consent IS 17, not 18 as you seem to be incorrectly assuming), and whether the minor, in the few states where 17 is a minor for statutory rape laws, is an emancipated minor. In most cases, therefore, a 17 year old having a one night stand with a 25 year old will NOT be wrong.
Can you even tie your question into the initial argument from that thread? Probably not.
You don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a tangent, a dunk, and showing you the logical consequence of your position when applied to another situation.
The question about the happy merchant (and your refusal to answer it with a quick and simple “yes”) demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of how political dogwhistles work. Either that or you’re an antisemite who doesn’t want to show it.
The question about morals is to demonstrate that your moral compass is totally crazy, because the logical cosequence of your line of reasoning about the folks having the one-night stand is that the holocaust wasn’t wrong in Germany in 1940. Because by the laws of the jurisdiction *at the time*, it was legal.
Your lack of a consistant moral compass probably does make you a very good lawyer, but this isn’t a courtroom.
And again you don’t bother to read my post or respond to it and try to go off on tangents, insults, and general name-calling, and repeating your arguments which were already shown to be incorrect. I literally just gave you what the law is on a statutory rape question you asked me from MONTHS ago as part of a tangent…. and you somehow decide to call me an antisemite. You’re a sad, lonely little troll, looking for a fight rather than a debate, and everyone else here already sees that.
Back to ignoring you since I have no reason to engage any more with someone as hateful as you are when there are so many much nicer people on this board. :)
> I literally just gave you what the law is on a statutory rape question
No, you equated what the law is currently with what is morally right.
*THAT* is the crux of the argument I’ve been having with you since you brought up that little bit of lunacy. And it’s a tangent *you* brought up and keep blaming me for.
—
And you could have disspelled all thoughts in my mind of you being an antisemite if you’d just said “Yes, the happy merchant is an antisemetic dogwhistle” back then. But you didn’t then, and still refuse to today.
Which is rather suspicious.
“Wrong” implies a moral question, not a legal one. The law has very little to say about morality.
We literally have had weeks of arguing this over a month ago, Torabi, to an EXTREME length, mostly spurred on by Illy. Let’s not feed the troll.
Yup, and you kept saying that the law defines morals.
Which is why I asked the moral question, not the legal one.
Pander then answers the legal question that I didn’t ask, and claims that it is also the answer to the moral question. Also, he implies that the most permissive set of laws is the one that defines what is moral, since he didn’t argue that it depends on where you live, just that in some places it is legal, therefore it is moral.
Do I need to go into the details of how bad that take is, or is it obvious to everyone except Pander?
The law is at least codified. Yeah, no system really manages to get things right, but it is still codified. That’s a hell of a lot more than you can say for the phrase “morally right” since you could get 100 different opinions from 100 different people.
You asked a meaningless question and then complained that you didn’t like or understand the answer you received. Learn to ask better questions.
Oberon:
Answering an easier question isn’t a valid substitute for answering a hard question. And people can have different opinions on the law, including those responsible for delivering judgement on the law. Just because different people have different opinions on what’s morally right doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t an objectively correct answer.
I wonder how many people think their own positions don’t make sense.
Probably not a lot, but I’m pretty good at making coherent arguments that make sense. Got a degree and a business that capitalizes on that fact and everything. :)
And yet you believe that the most popular law at the moment defines what is morally right.
Maybe you’re more convincing in person.
I think I’m pretty darned convincing both in text and in person actually. :)
Sweet Jumpin’ Jehosophat – why are people being so nasty?
This is a webcomic. Lighthearted disagreements can be fun, but being nasty to each other is just farting in an elevator.
I think we should try to be polite just to help Dave B get more readers. I think a friendly and relaxed forum could make this comic a little more popular. It’s the least we can do for Dave.
Roger that!
It’s amazing how much entertainment DaveB delivers. We should (collectively) try to be helpful.
Also fun community is best community.
Also pun community is best community.
Ninja hit squad is best hit squad.
Biggest rock is best rock.
Yes I already posted that clip earlier :)
But +1 for you anyway because SMBC Theater was hilarious.
Illy’s just like that. No biggie. The last time she got all argumentative and started ignoring my posts when she’d respond to them (repeating the same argument over and over again before going off on tangent after tangent), or making insults in lieu of an actual argument, I wound up just ignoring her and apparently she thinks this is round 2. :)
In response to your very mature post, in the spirit of all of us being mature on the interwebs, I’m removing one ninja hit squad from those that have been sent out after you for past puns. :)
I was repeating questions because you weren’t answering them.
I don’t think that’s an unfair debate technique.
My cats thank you. They need me to open food cans!
That’s the primary use of any of us cat owners to our cats.
Shouldn’t his finger have ripped off before it managed to flip him like that?
On another note. It makes Vehemence’s ability to actually nearly win against her that much more impressive.
It took a lot of build up. And a lot of Max’s arrogance (understandable, most of the time). But in the end Sydney and several others were required to take him down.
Maxima’s “strength” is telekinetic in nature, which is why she can lift things regardless of leverage and doesn’t cause things to fall apart when she does. it’s the same with her durability, which is why her clothes don’t get atomized whenever she stands in massive explosions.
This trope allows Superman to lift ocean liners despite known laws of physics.
They should break in half from their own weight.
It also allowed a giant robot to wield a ship like a katana to beat up kaiju.
It’s a good trope.
except this comic *and at one point a superman writer may have explained it too*, actually bothers to point it out and give the hero the specific power to do just this. the zero range telekinesis.
This writer also had Maxima tell Sydney that using the Lighthook to swing a car at some enemy was a dumb move, for the exact reason that anything you can use to pick up a car with is going to be able to hit directly for more damage than a mostly empty car can possibly do to said enemy.
Even the Marvel movies have Hulk using cars as weapons. I guess you could use the excuse that he’s pretty dumb. But I’m fairly certain that Iron Man has also used cars as a weapon, when he can certainly either hit harder or use a beam weapon if he wants to keep the range up. And he’s supposed to be pretty smart.
This comic also used a car as a weapon, with the added trope of “cars always explode”. Except that was then called out and the owner allowed that he just might have been transporting a bunch of grenades (or something, I don’t recall exactly) in his trunk. Except that most explosives also don’t just explode due to being involved in a car crash, either. It takes specific, deliberate mechanisms to make a grenade or a nuke “go off.” A bunch of old dynamite, sure, but no one was driving around with a bunch of old dynamite in their trunk…
the MCU movies are not as self aware as people give them credit for. They still forget that vehicles in motion require things like a driver and possibly passengers and aren’t just moving on the road on their own, so the heroes have used them as stages in their fights without concern for the civilian(s) inside them (see Captain America in Age of Ultron for example surfing on an upside down car), and also the addition to this trope that real (sane) people would stop their cars and pull over if they saw a bunch of supers, robots, aliens, ect…fighting in the street. its just like horror movies where the car doesn’t even slow down or try to swerve from hitting the person they had to have a good thirty seconds at least to have seen in the street..Hellboy was especially bad like that car was trying to hit him or something.
On that note when was the exploding car in this comic? I don’t remember it.
It was in the Fight at the Steakhouse™ or possibly Terminate with Extreme Vehemence™. Same fight, just different names being suggested.
From memory, which is sometimes (i.e. always) faulty so do your own archive diving for the actual facts: Someone (Telekinesis Guy™, partner of Opal the Portal Maker™) flung a car (Leon’s?) at Vehemence and it blew up. Why Leon would have access to or carry grenades as an IT guy, dunno. But again, memory…
It wasn’t Leon’s car, it was the ex-Seal’s car (still remains why he had the explosives in the car)
Telekinesis guy is named Vekter. The owner of the car is Shawn, not Leon. Leon’s the tech hacker guy, while Shawn is the non-powered ex-SEAL ARC-SWAT member (like Duke, Peggy, Seneca, etc).
(btw I realize that Duke’s actual name is Goose, but I say Duke because more people will know who I’m talking about then)
I feel like I should make a Duke Duke Goose joke. But the wordplay seems too close to a pun.
Good, good, let the wordplay flow through you.
Ooooh, so close to a paronomasiac slip! Maybe next time; we’ll be watching…
“Good, good, let the wordplay flow through you.”
Never! I’ll never fall to the dark side!
I think he’s referring to this:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-250-its-only-overconfidence-if-he-loses/
To be fair, the car exploded because Shawn has explosives and grenades in his trunk.
to make a note, Maxima told Sydney not to use a car as a weapon because its not logical,
this doesn’t prevent the telekinetic bad guy from doing that, or anyone who wasn’t told not to; in fact having superhero comics and movies in their world actually makes it make more sense due to individuals being influenced by media…kind of like those idiots that try to duel wield guns because it looked cool in that movie they saw.
-also it was a telekinetic doing it, so it makes a little more sense that way too, he couldn’t have hit harder really so used his power to lift something heavy to throw at someone.
Maxima didn’t get a chance to say “Puny Demon!” what with Sydney and Dabbler stepping on her lines. P.S. -I still think Kevin is escaping.
I think Kevin slipped back to play more Kirby
Maybe, but with 260 some odd tons being slammed into the earth, Kevin just got one Hell of a power boost.
Why would Kevin want to escape, when there’s all this yummy Vehemic energy right here?
Because sticking around for all the yummy Vehemic energy means going back to Archon jail. He’d probably prefer to be in some other country where he can roam as he pleases.
That said, he might be hoping for parole and possibly joining up with Archon. I think they’d need to be crazy to let him on the team, but then they were crazy enough to allow the training exercise leading up to Tom’s arrival, so it’s possible.
He already pulled the “What if I don’t wanna stop?” BS, and Halo just thoroughly embarrassed him. Given that Thothocloth isn’t shaping up to be any kind of real threat, with Maxima being able to handle him just fine without breaking a sweat, Halo is free to embarrass Vehemence again if he is dumb enough to decide yet again that he might not wanna stop. I think Kevin is a smarter person than that, but you never know. When 50′ demons start popping in for comedic relief maybe everyone just loses their minds.
The risk isn’t him trying to fight them again, it’s him quietly booking it while everyone is distracted by Tom.
It occured to me that Maxima could probably use her flight power to be activity pressing down on anything she’s standing on with far more force than just gravity.
Kind of like have mjolnir standing on Tom’s forehead.
Probably depends on if her ‘power juice’ is being placed mostly or at least more in flight than other areas, from what we know about how her powers work.
She actually allowed his body to remain intact?
I’m gabberflasted!
Either Arianna’s lectures on diplomacy are starting to have an effect, or perhaps she’s feeling a bit sorry for him.
=====
LATE_BREAKING_THOUGHTS:
She’s speaking politely.
She’s not making boastful threats.
She’s not making extravagant promises.
She’s not backing-down.
She’s not demanding submission.
She’s simply saying that her boundaries WILL be respected.
“Diplomacy” is NOT the art of “rattling swords” & “flaunting your power”.
“Diplomacy” is the art of showing others just how much power you are willing to RESTRAIN.
> She’s simply saying that her boundaries WILL be respected.
Yup. And demonstrating that she is capable of enforcing that.
He would weigh more than 270t as at that size he would not be the same as a human. Once a human gets to a certain size their bones can no longer hold them, even if you scale the bones up. It’s the reason why you don’t see 120 floor wooden skyscrapers very often.
If you stack enough bricks one on top of the other, eventually the weight of the bricks on top will crush the brick underneath. Thus you would need a bone structure that is much more dense, cartilage more refined, the muscular structure will have muscles we have never seen before. You would also see other organs, extra circulation systems (because pumping blood up 6ft is one thing, pumping it up 60ft entirely another).
I looked into this more than I should have previously. At any rate, I’d guess that the true value would be somewhere between 2500t (which is bloody heavy) and 250t… also aren’t whales more fat than muscle?
Yeah, George RR Martin made a good stab at covering this in his SoIaF novels, describing the giants as having stumpy, very broad legs and feet.
Whales have the buoyancy of water to support their massive weight. They also simply need to be large in order to retain body heat more efficiently.
The main problem with giants isnt actually the musculature required (although that is one problem) – but the square cube law, because of heat diffusion and energy requirements, plus how cells are designed to accommodate specific sizes, and over a certain size, the cells can’t work low-powered enough to actually, yknow…. function at all.
Musculature is definitely an issue. But regarding heat radiation, recall that the giants live North of The Wall, in the land of always Winter.
Fair enough point that I mainly didnt bring up because I barely watched or read anything about George RR Martin, so I didnt know that. :) Heat and waste dissipation (rather than just heat radiation) is actually another reason why creatures can get bigger in the ocean than on land, btw. Diffusion does work better in a large liquid medium, I think.
I’d think that even in a land of perpetual winter, there would be a problem with the cells getting the right balance of enough motion to work and not so much that they cause cellular decay into organic goo. It would be a very intricate balancing act. :)
All the organisms in the ‘huge’ category do seem to be sea creatures. The dual reason of less work for musculature + easier heat dissipation would make sense that the largest animals would live their lives in the water.
We are going the comedic route for this fight.
I noticed that landing on his back has driven his inner set of horns into the ground. The next comic should show him trying to rise and finding his head nailed to the ground, followed by him saying ‘a little help here?’.
The last couple of panels sort of remind me of ‘A Knight’s Tale’
“You have been weighed.”
“You have been measured.”
“And you absolutely…
“Have been found wanting.”
“Welcome to the New World. God save you, if it is right that he should do so.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOsAqP4PNto