Grrl Power #99 – This is how you tug on Maxima’s cape
Dabbler obviously enjoys pushing Maxima’s buttons, but in her defense, Max’s buttons are pretty easy to push if you know what you’re doing. There’s obviously some history here. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to work that into the story. At the rate the pages go up, I don’t want to bog stuff down with back stories, even though I think they’re interesting, they’re maybe not quite as funny as the regular comic.
Some of you might have been aware of #comfycon this weekend, especially if you hang out on Twitter. Basically a bunch of webcomicers that didn’t go to SDCC this year did panels via google hangouts/youtube streaming. I sat in on a few, and even figured out how to do one of my own, so I have a few videos up here, if you’re interested in a screencast of me drawing parts of this page. I say parts, cause there’s maybe a total of 3 hours of video and it took something like 12-14 to get the page done as usual. I make no claim that they are exciting videos in any way, I just wanted to make you aware of their existence in case you’ve got nothing else to do for a few hours.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Must be ridiculously easy for someone of her intellect.
What’s up with Sydney in pannel two?
Oh yeah, Maxima is leaning forward and yelling into the phone.
Had to look at it a few times to get it.
when it come to come to agravating her.
me guess you made made a mistake there :)
Gah. It’s fixed now.
Panel 3, should that not be ‘I want you TO take a look at something’?
God what is wrong with me? It’s fixed.
Would it be a DaveB production if we didn’t get to do some “wabbit hunting?”
just remember, wabbit’s tend to eat the hunters……
not if they’re carrying the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch
Lord bless this holy hand grenade that with it we may blow thine enemies into little pieces … in your mercy.
only after the feast
Heheh, Holy Hand Grenade. “Halleluiah”… BOOM!!!
Anybody know what kind of orb Sydney is calling down to her hand?
I guess that answers the questions put up in the last pages forum.
that looks like the sheild orb :)
Good idea. When someone as super strong as Maxima starts getting as mad as she looks and starts moving around a lot, she could accidentaly knock someone over or even break someones bones without even trying.
Defense against cellular shrapnel.
i’d have to say..it would have to be the shield orb that she calling down to protect her
The purple one is the shied orb. Can’t blame her for summoning it, either.
apparently this page answer one question,, wheter sidney has to reach for the orbs or if they come to her,,
Old news.
Heh heh. Sydney is summoning her force field orb to her hand in the last panel.
Finally! Some Dabbler time! She’s so pretty, and I’m super curious about her
The original drawings for her had 4 boobs.
Syd still hasn’t told Zeph exactly where she found the orbs.
as the joke goes “I would tell you, but I’ll have to kill you”
She didn’t say the exact location, but she did say that it was underwater off the Florida Keys. Zeph was about to ask for a more precise location when Harem interrupted the meeting.
There are tons of sunken ships down there dating from the early 1500s on, a goodly number of which bought it on the long Spanish run from South America to Spain and back. Of course, a lot of the smaller keys were purchased by wealthy settlers early in Florida’s history. Some were pirates gone straight, as long as no one was looking. Others were doctors and botanists who needed isolated places for research. Several were actually owned by insane occultists. I’ve since lost the book, but I used to have an account of several massacres by local Indian tribes. These are pre-Seminole groups that don’t exist anymore, unfortunately, and the only accounts we have of them were made by priests and missionaries who were taken prisoner and managed to escape. Because of that, it’s tricky to tell the superstition from what they were actually like. Even so, if you believe just a fraction of the stuff that was said about them, they were extremely hostile, kept slaves, and worshiped a pantheon of some very strange gods.
All wonderful grounds for storytelling.
They sound like an offshoot of some of the central american tribes.
Not too far fetched, a tribe that lost a war moving to where people wern’t trying to kill/ sacrafice you to their gods.
Any of the Central American tribes really tall? One consistent thing is that the what bones have been found, and the little clothing they wore, suggested most of the men were in excess of 6′ 6″.
Not as far as I Know.
Was this the tribe with people who could put an arrow through a horse and a man? The one that has the first recorded case od biological warfare with the blankets?
I believe that was the Karankawa who lived along the Texas shoreline, though there are certainly some similarities. The tribe I’m referring to I believe were called the Mayaimi. The Calusa had some dealings with them as well.
Looking forward to seeing Sydney meet Dabbler for the first time :)
Not to mention seeing if Dabbler knows anything about the orbs.
Is anybody else going to follow the conversation of two ADHD geeks?
I’m pretty sure most of the followers of this comic are well versed in the ways of ADHD.
Well, the one’s who read the comments pages anyway.
Check!
Rodger that. :)
I’m well versed because I do speak ADHD :P.
But are you fluent in …… hey, is that a Hawaiian Punch drinking box?
We’re using hippos. :D
No, <__>, it happens to be mountain dew.
<__>. not
did some one say waffles
Squirrel!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSUXXzN26zg
Oh look, a chicken.
I have ADHD, but when I get on a topic I like and know a great deal about I don’t get distracted, instead I end up talking really fast as a thousand thoughts all want out at once. Sometimes tangents occure but there is a logical connection between them, and if I feel I got off topic I’ll backtrack because I wanted to discuss another point related to something I said earlier.
Although I have had moments where I was trying to be friendly and actually bored myself by what I was saying (customer friendly banter type stuff), not a good sign when the elderly person is talking and you speak back knowing what they are talking about but not really careing and yawn at your own words.
Ooooooo! Look! A water-weathered rock!
Yes strangely enough one symptom of ADD can be hyperfocus where the rest of the world just fades away. I would be reading a really good book and a gunfight could be going on around me but I wouldn’t even flinch. It would take several bellows from a parent to even get my attention.
That’s because you have real ADHD, not Hollywood ADHD.
The super focus thing happens to me when ever I’m reading a book or reading on the internet.
But I don’t have ADHD so I can’t use that as an excuse, it’s just the way I am.
Um…
Hay….
I was like reading this comic, and wondering, like,
ummmmmmmmmmm….
where was I …..
errrrrrrr.
YEP. Need to fix the ship…….
once I start reading, I cannot stop. I even forget to eat and sleep.
Gods, I do love that woman!
I wonder if they have a budget account just for Maxima’s phones. Would seem to be prudent. Someone somewhere has to be keeping track of how many she goes through. I can see one of them hanging a sign in the break room “XXX days (or hours?) Since the Colonel broke a phone.”
Make a good betting pool idea.
Makes a GREAT betting pool idea. Daily, weekly and/or monthly scores. Plus, keep tallies of whom she was speaking to when breaking said phone(s).
Maybe award a proze to whomever gets the high-score at the end of the year. I can just see Arianna being the unintentional winner, and being totally surprised when the others give her a trophy for a contest she didn’t realize existed or that she was in.
Proze? is that like Prozac, or like really good prose poetry… Or a typo :P
Typo.
Dabbler gets #100 ?
Is her super power tickleling?
And I thought it was just Harem Max was referring to in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/398.
Maxima: Sydney, people aren’t required to register their powers, but then, you don’t have any powers do you?
Sydney: Does my confusing and or aggravating personality count?
Maxima: Those are both pretty relative terms in this building.
And Math. And occasionally Omar, who we haven’t met yet, and I’m sure one or two others.
I think while Maxima wouldn’t include herself everyone else would consider her personality aggravating. Confusing less so which is why she’s often the stooge. You can aggravate Maxima and know what’s coming.
How is Dabbler talking to Maxima? I don’t see her holding a phone (all four arms are down in the fourth image) or is she wearing an ear piece? And speaking about that, are those things growing out of the side of her forehead her ears or does she have ears hidden underneath her hair?
Anybody ever heard of this thing called a bluetooth?
Well, Dabbler is a supergenius space alien/ succumbus/ a whole lot of other things. I would guess she looks at our technology the way we would look at the teck from the nineteen twenties.
wouldn’t surprise me if Dabbler has a bluetooth (in a mouth full of white teeth pr shoud that be whitetooth’s?)
damn typo monster
wouldn’t surprise me if Dabbler has a bluetooth (in a mouth full of white teeth or should that be whitetooth’s?)
Dabbler has some cybernetics built in, so instead of carrying around Earth tech, she replicates its function in her existing hardware. She has some way of projecting sound out if she needs to put you on speakerphone.
Given Dabbler’s sense of humour, probably best we NOT know where her implanted speaker is.
Or what area of her she tells people to speak to when using her communications.
“Hey, it’s dark in here!” “No Coins please!”-Jeff Dunham-Peanut.
That guy in the front row didn’t get it. Hey dude eeyoowwww (makes motion over head).
I just now thought of a comeback that Maxima (or Sydney) could use to Dabbler’s comment about wearing “Minimum security pants”:
“They’re minimum security because they’re not guarding anything of value!”
Though that would probably start a war!
That would probably elicit the equally-juvenile “That’s not what you said last night” response.
Do any of you recall my use of the moniker “Minima” when Maxima is in building? When she is supposed to use her “indoor” powers. Looks like it is an iffy proposition. And with the general admonishing her not to crush another (every expensive specially made) phone where will she vent now? And with the addition of another aggrevator like Sydney what will she do? We don’t want to see her get too angry do we? Don’t we?
I do! ;-)
don’t make her angry. you wouldn’t like (or survive) her when shes angry.
LordViking
July 16, 2012 at 6:41 am | # | Reply
How is Dabbler talking to Maxima?
Ah. It’s that ring-thingy on her ear. Look at the dialogue balloon for where Maxima’s voice is coming from in panel four.
I’m not sure if that’s an antenna, or a strange type of ear.
But I think they are some type of antenna.
DaveB can you answer this mystery, since you are the one who created her in the first place.
The ear clasp is just jewlery, clipped on to her fairly large ears. The ears contain retractable… antenna? She inherited that from her doppleganger parent. The antenna give her 0 range telepathy, which is how dopplegangers copy someone’s memories if they need to impersonate someone.
you mean skin contact telepathy or has to be like forehead to forehead?
I always imagined the ends connecting with the other person’s temple or the back of their neck.
Like in Dabbler’s Science Corner. Ooh you could use that to add more background without breaking up the pace. In that style copy and paste wouldn’t be too bad and you can fit in lots of text.
Yay. I has new lols!
“I don’t want to bog stuff down with back stories, even though I think they’re interesting”
Even so, write them down immediately, the ideas, the connections, the threads, rough scetches, silly stuff, even just a few scribbled lines on the edge of your panels. They may not come back again.
You are getting better at this (cue cheers) one page a week now, doesn’t mean one page a week forever. If you’ve got it, catch it.
Also, “extra content for the book”.
I agree. If nothing else you can make mini-cartoons of something that happened, like the chibli pages if you wanted. It dosn’t always have to be realisticly drawn, just informative and entertaining.
Heck, the extras can by just line drawings or pencils just as long as they get written down somewhere.
You can always go back and redo them at a latter date BUT write that stuff down.
I know what their back stories are to some degree, and I’m definitely going to show Dabbler’s and probably Peggy’s at some point, I just need to figure out how to work them into the pacing. I’ll show Max’s too, really all of them eventually. Dabbler and Peggy will be done as a contiguous chunk of story, the others might be shown a little bit at a time.
Well you’ve already let us know Max & Dabbler have history so now we can start guessing : My guess is that Max was on the Air Force’s “Blue Book” team when they found Dabbler.
Recently declassified documents indicate that project blue book’s true purpose was a cover story operation as 99% of all UFO sightings (that weren’t mis-identified everyday occurences) were military test air-craft. Blue Book operations actually were in communication with several air force bases double checking what was happening, including Area 51, and when it was a military operation (no further details given to Blue Book) Blue Book had to come up with a cover story.
It was also to double check that any sightings were not Soviet secret planes.
I read a book called “little green men”, it’s about this bloke who’s job was to come up with UFO conspiracies as a cover for what was actually going on.
Oooh! Does she know Cobra Bubbles?
(Extra interwebs for those that get the reference)
Ohana means family, family means no one gets left behind, or forgotten.
Then, if you ever get to be as famous as J.R.R.Tolkien, your kid has a career for life!
OK, I have no idea how those tags are supposed to work. Without weird tags:
“Even so, write them down immediately, the ideas, the connections, the threads, rough scetches, silly stuff, even just a few scribbled lines on the edge of your panels. They may not come back again.”
Then, if you ever get to be as famous as J.R.R. Tolkien, your kids have an available career for life.
man for a minute you had me thinking those two were an item. well played. dabbler is now my second favorite character after sydney, messing with her boss like that
Who says they arn’t?
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
DADT is still in effect, last time I checked.
Anyway it would make some good doujinshi.
Check again. DADT has been legally defunct since september. Even had a couple on-base weddings IIRC.
Not sure about on-base weddings, but check this from today (Saturday).
https://news.yahoo.com/troops-march-san-diego-gay-parade-uniform-204528956.html
Active duty US military personnel marching, in dress uniform, in the San Diego Gay Pride Parade.
And this: https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45753034/ns/us_news-life/
Still loving each and every installment of your story. Definitely the webcomic I most look forward to each week!
Dabbler still got the edge… probably, but Sydney will give her a run for her money!
You’ll have to feel sorry for Maxima should those two ADHD-heads team up :P
Did anyone else imagine Dabbler’s ear-thingies perking up just a moment before panel four?
Also looking forward to seeing what Dabbler looks like when shapeshifted into a human(-ish) form.
Unless Dave’s changed his mind, she can’t shift, probably uses a Holo-disguise outside the base.
really? and here I was thinking the cubi and Doppleganger shapeshifting power would be the perfect excuse to explain away her not having four boobs normally, but able to shift into them when she wanted. With two shapeshifting races in her DNA how can she not have some shapeshifting? Unless of course her cybernetic require bio-feed nanites that have to lock her in that form to operate her cybernetics or something.
if Dabbler was male do you think she have the quads?
ahh typo’s galore today
“….he’ll have the quads?”
She’s got like a half dozen species in her Chromosome Soup.Not hard to imagine that she didn’t get the Shifts. It may be where she got the extra arms and Intelligence. though
What if she has a diminished form of shapeshifting, something F-class or D-class (like those who could only change hair color, eye color, skin pigment, type stuff), like changing stripes, shade of color, eye color, fingerprints, and maybe grow extra boobs here and there for fun LoL.
and I just remembered what the name of what I was thinking of is. Chromamorph, the ability to alter colors, and possibly to a lesser extent texture (real world examples being some cephalopods and reptiles) in a more advanced for just below actual shapeshifting being altering normally unchangible things like eye colors, or things that are dead (like hair and nails).
A more complex form would be retracting/tightning, and inflating muscular and fatty tissue (no actual mass change) to give the apperance of more toned muscles, fatter build (possibly inflate certain areas to give the apperance of more boobs with out actually having them *lift the shirt and no nipples*),
(the muscle thing would naturally be only for show in this regards like puffing up to scare off a predator).
It has been mentioned that Dabbler can disguise herself;
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/323
. . . but yeah, the bio page does say she can’t shapeshift – so I’m thinking her ability to disguise herself relates to her knowledge of sorcery.
Or a good holo projector.
Or her Psionic talent. I.e. she doesn’t *actually* look diferent, people just see her diferently because she’s messing with their perceptions.
I predict that one of the unknown power orbs is a pokeball for Dabbler
HA!
So Dabbler gets to inspect Sydney’s balls i don’t think she is going to let Max off the hook for this one easily.
I think you mean orbs!, she a girl she doesn’t have balls
She does have some nice orbs. :D
While she has nice orbs they can be refer to as balls as well I was dabbling a pun this morning.
As was I.
Very much looking forward to the meeting between Sydney and Dabbler, although I still say if the folks in that boardroom were thinking straight they would try to keep those two as far apart as possible at all costs. Seriously, Sydney and Dabbler? If they became friends, the sort of chaos they could wreak together is unimaginable!
It would be great fun to watch. :D
Oh, and I like that Sydney’s going for the force field orb. Always smart to be on the safe side.
I saw the same thing …
SHIEDING UP!
This one was worth the wait.
looks like Dabbler and Halo could become great friends, planning on how to Aggravate poor Maxima
Dabbler definitely likes to jab at someone like Maxima who is “stiff” in her estimations and needs to be “let loose” upon occasion. I had and experience like that. He bothered me for quite awhile so I figured he wanted me to act so I did. Had him against a wall and gripped his shirt demanding him to explain himself. He coolly replied he got me to act by saying “finally.” I let him go, both of us getting what we expected, and I went back to reading puzzled at human behavior. (I wasn’t angry at all and played a part he expected me to react as.) I see similar needs in Dabbler and others to be such to people they find not part of their crowd. I feel sorry for Maxima.
Somehow I think that the cell phone data files for the Archon crew are likely to be stored in a local ‘cloud’ configuration so that tempers and accidental exposures to powers (such as heatwave’s not entirely well thought out use of very high temps) don’t create a major inconvenience in always having to re set up preferences and such for their phones whenever one is broken.
I imagine that most people would have a single backup sitting on a secured cradle, while certain people such as Heatwave and Maxima may have a small rack of phones. So far as data backup is concerned, they simply do backup/updates on some schedule, which could be automated, with sufficient hacking or updating to the programming of the phones.
You could save back-stories and side-stories for vote incentives, I suppose. Then if you ever decide to bundle these into books, they could be used as bonus filler or “omake.”
Heheh, and there’s my favorite character even though she hasn’t really made an appearance yet!
anyone else notice Sydney reaching for the shield orb
buhhahaha. just get her a Nokkia. amazing.
Dabbler is awesome.
Hmm Should I mention that Harem/Thing 1 is missing her freckles? Or are they just more visible in certain tele-clones than others? (or bleached out/medicalled–teched away(I’m sure Dabbler has a cream for those…and just a Dab will do yah?)
Oh- Just a Dab will do yah? insult to guys in ARC building…when no other female there will give them a time of day? But you Dabble at your own risk. (Puns brought to you by an nigh invulnerable Dwarf!)
*Launches OBPS at Brodder’s place of buisness*
Aw man, I didn’t need to see a naked invulnerable dwarf sitting in a crater, lol
Yeah I forgot them. :P I’ll add them back in when I get a chance.
Did you go back and add them in panel 6? If so they are still hard to see.
Yeah, freckles are surprisingly difficult to get the right size. Too small and they’re invisible, too large and they look like moles.
Well don’t I feel like a dunce. I’d heard something called comfycon was going on, but the webcomics I saw mention it I do believe are relatively close to each other, so I didn’t pay anymore attention to it as there isn’t a single con within a 10 hour drive of where I live, and I can only afford a 1 hour drive (one-way travel distances). If I’d read enough to notice it was going to be an online con I definitely would’ve checked it out, not even wild horses could’ve kept me away. That’s what I get for not reading complete updates.
Randy over at https://www.somethingpositive.net/ has a link to all the “official” webcasts that were done on his page if you want to catch up on them.
Seems like every one likes to push max’s buttons.
Mainly because there are so many and they’re easy to find.
Morbo does not understand. Is Dabbler a parody of Mary Sue characters?
Not an intentional one. Her ultimate origin was that I was rolling up a character for the Marvel RPG, the first edition one, and we had a rule that we had to keep everything just as we rolled it, cause it made for some hilariously mismatched teams, but under the origin table I rolled really high a bunch of times which meant “roll additional origin” and she wound up as a mutant alien cyborg or something, and it sparked the idea for what Dabbler eventually became, which is that she’s a little of everything. She’s certainly not an author stand in though.
YES! The “Marvel Superheroes Role Playing Game” rocked, especially with the “Ultimate Powers” expansion book. Though, yeah, you could get weak, overpowered, oddly-balanced, or wacky origined characters sometimes. Still, lots of interesting power options once you got past all of the typos and table/text mismatches in the rulebook.
When I used to play with my friends we had a rule that when it came to the powers you could either randomly choose the power categories and then pick your preference within those categories, -or- you could pick the power categories and then be randomly assigned one of them from the categories you picked. That help cut down on some of the wonkiness that you’d get from purely random rolls.
Man, I miss playing that game. (I still have the rulebooks though!)
Morbo feels that you should use the opportunity to mock mary sue characters.
Hey I know this is random but when are Math and any other new characters bio’s going to be added to the cast page. I seem to remember it coming up like a couple weeks ago but it hasn’t happened. I understand u don’t have all the time in the world just curious if they are still going to be added
Yeah they’ll definitely be added sometime. I should make a point of doing that this week.
Sydney’s pose in panel 2 reminds me of Leon’s in page 57.
Sweet Georgia Brown! I knew Maxima was a stuffed shirt. I had no idea she was that uptight.
I think Syd’s been causing her to edge ever closer and Dabbler’s a safe target ATM. Considering if she took a swing at Syd the orbs might have a self-defense reaction.
It can also depend on WHO they are talking to. A joke made by one person you know could be taken as an insult by someone else. Likewise we’d need to know Dabbler and Maxima’s history to get the reaction fully. Like what if their first encounter (like so many super being first encounters) was a conflict, in which Dabbler was also intent on seducing Maxima. For all we know Dabbler was like one of Maxima’s villains/frienimies from before Arc Swat was formed, or its earlier (earlier than this) days as a much more top secret group than it is now.
Or maybe Dabbler started flirting with Max on Day 1, was told Max doesn’t swing that way, but still does it just because she likes to tweak her nose.