Grrl Power – Dabbler’s Science Corner #1
So the holiday was very busy and I didn’t get the usual amount of drawing time in*, so this week let’s try something a little different. Dabbler’s Science Corner! As she explains in the first panel, it will be a chance for some exposition and humor, just like EGS’s QA comics.
To make up for the lack of a full page comic (I know the story doesn’t need to go any slower) I’ll be posting one of these every day this week. Actually I’ll just be updating this page with additional strips so if you’re following via RSS you won’t see each new post each day. I’m not sure why I’m doing it that way. I had a reason, probably to do with keeping the archive clean and all the comments in one place. Anyway, remember to check back each day.
*Also I got married.
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Strip 1: Not too much to add to this one, though I’m not sure science would be entirely stumped by her bangs.
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Strip 2: So Harem’s brain isn’t completely identical, particle for particle, there are bits that are entangled and bits that aren’t, allowing for incongruent actions and learning that are instantly replicated out to the whole. Really though, don’t fret too much about the biology of it – just remember, 5 brains, one mind.
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Strip 3: Yeah. Didn’t expect that did you? We’re really jamming along with the science here aren’t we?
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Strip 4: Hey look, science. And violence. The two great tastes that taste like copper until your face stops bleeding. Although Dabbler’s blood probably tastes like ambrosia or something.
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Strip 5: As mentioned on the cast page, Dabbler is a mixed breed. That’s not a standard succubus power she’s using there.
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Well I hope you guys enjoyed this little interlude but it’s on with the story next time. In the end this turned out to be only slightly less work than a regular page. Flat colors and almost no backgrounds, but then 15 panels in all. Still it was fun to experiment with. Thanks for all the well wishes on the nuptials!
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.
WooHoo married! Keep up the good work as well.
Congrats on the marriage! I’ve enjoyed this since I found it about 10 pages in, never disappointed by a single page. Although I was surprised by this one…forgot just for a second it was Dabbler’s skin that was purple in the last panel, not thigh high boots. Or it if you’d prefer in Meme format: At first I was all like: O.O but then I was like XD
Grats on your nuptials! You prove that comic artists aren’t all lonely introverted nerds. BTW nerd is not a pejorative term as I consider myself one.
Haha Dabbler looks adorable in the first panel!
~znort~ HAH! Science? Fail. Sorry Sydney…..
Married…. And he says it all ‘Oh by way’ style….. In a footnote no less. :p
Well congratulations nonetheless. I wish you temperance. Also I demand more Anvil. :D
Congratulations, to you, Dave and your wife. My missus & I just celebrated our 30th. Yep, there’s a few of us old farts that enjoy a WELL written story like what you give us. Thank you for it all!
Hey Dave, congratulations on the marriage. Been following the comic since the beginning, I just don’t post, well there was that one time. I like the pacing of the timing and can’t quit laughing at the antics of all of the characters. I also agree with several comments made from others. Get off computer, give attention to new wife. This is by far one of the best webcomics I have read. I plan on collecting them and putting each page together and making a comic book on my computer.
Congratulations on your wedding, I hope your wife likes web comics! :)
Well she helps me ink this one, so I’m pretty sure she does.
Congratulations on the marriage!!! As an avid reader of both LICD and LFG I think either format would fit your comic. One thing that may also work is the “Sillies” style that is provided by CTRL ALT DEL
SCience loosly defined indeed dave old buddy
oh dear you went with “school girl” harem… and a late congrats on the marriage. :D
Yeah it seemed like a good option for her would be “co-ed” with can really be anything sort of non-specific and casual sexy, but also includes school uniforms. :)
EGS! YEEEEESSSSSS! ^.^
Congrats on getting Married! 20 years for me, God bless you and you special “Better” Half! :)
Congrats on getting married! Hope she knows what she’s getting into! ;P
I’m not sure if anyone has said this about Dabbler already, and she hasn’t had much screen time, but something I always find entertaining in more than two armed individuals is their ability to show several entries from the body language index at once. I havn’t seen any of that on Dabbler. For an example of what I mean you can look at Spinnerett https://krakowstudios.com/spinnerette/
In almost every panel where all her arms are showing her emotions (and sometimes subconscious) are much more apparent thanks to her six arms.
Just throwing that out there, love the comic either way.
Oh big wishes on your marriage! I hope everything goes well ^.^
Congratulations on the marriage and a great comic.
When Harem mentioned that her brains were entangled, I expected the next box to show 5 Harems in the corner.
I just now noticed Dabbler has 4 arms!
I know, can you imagine the hugs she could give. MMmmmmmmmm…..
Also for strip 2: It would be more like a network of computer running a distributed application. Each “node” is available for common tasks, but can also run individual tasks (1 watches TV, another reads the newspaper, a third teases the poor hacker). Is it something like that?
Yeah I wanted to say her brain is like a quantumly entangled mesh network, but I’m trying to edit myself a little. I could spend pages on exposition really. I could actually do a field manual thing, like how Masamune Shirow would do 80 page reference manuals about his worlds like Appleseed.
Oh, and congratulations on getting hitched.
I *wish* I had her ability! I could work two or three jobs, study and play video games all at once!
You would also have to feed and house all the bodies you have. How much does a three bedroom house rent for these days? Well at least you wouldn’t have the effect of not being able to stand your roomates, unless you can’t stand to be with yourself.
Now there’s an interesting supposition for Dabbler. If Harem un-summons her extra bodies she would only need one bed to sleep in naturally, though she probably has to have a second bedroom set up just as a five person closet. Would she also be able to combine for meals to save money?
A moot point on base since the government is picking up the tab but whenever she’s not on base it could save money. Even better in a way if she can’t though. Can you imagine being able to eat literally as much as you can hold of the richest food and divide the calories among 5 bodies? Talk about a diet plan.
But how does her five brains in one operate? Does her duplicates need sleep too at the same time? Does she have a network set up with her duplicate brains can work independently like ganglions but still slaved to her controller brain? So that way she doesn’t have her attentions divided among five. Humans can’t seem to multitask. They try but they can only truly concentrate on one task at a time. (Any who can have exceptional minds. Could be said for Harem too.
covered in earlier discuss babe
what’s wrong with sleeping in the same bed?
Since she can telaport to almost anywhere she could set up a nice house or apartment where it was realy cheap and safe to live in and just telaport to wherever she worked or have one of her bodies work where the wages where realy high. Great way to save money and have a nice life at the same time.
And one more web comic artist getting married. Hmmm, I think there might be something in the digital ink.
Congratulations! Many years of love an happiness to you both.
This “Science corner” is a good way to formally explain harem’s powers. You can only find that information by reading the character bios, either on the side of the comic or through the link at the top of the page.
That bothers me because I know many people won’t bother with such things, especially as the comic goes on, as new readers read through the archives. They will get confused because they just won’t know that all those girls are one person.
That’s what my Who’s Who box is for. I’m really guilty of not hitting up cast pages even on webcomics I like. Partially my feeling is that the comic itself should tell you everything you need to know about the characters. Also with the nature of webcomics, people drift in and out all the time, there’s no guarantee they’re going to read through a whole story arc or anything. And also, it used to be that comic books would open up with a splash page of some big action scene or a locale setup and around the borders of the page would be little circles with a portrait, name and one sentence about the character in case someone’s first exposure to a comic was issue 145. It also avoids problems like Rogue reminding Wolverine not to touch her bare skin cause she’ll absorb his powers, for the 87th time that week. Some X-men comics were really bad about that if you stopped to think about how often they told each others about their powers. Admittedly it was helpful in the first X-men book I picked up when Wolverine was thinking to himself “luckily I have adamantium bones and a healing factor.”
Yeah, but I think a lot of people are not going to read the who’s who box, is what I’m saying.
It’s a brilliant idea, to be sure, but personally if I had just found this webcomic I would have started with the first page and read through all the archives. I would have never read the who’s who box; it would have teetered close to being a spoiler; and I would be expecting for these things to be mentioned naturally in the course of the comic.
I don’t read character bios when I have not read the comic yet because that can easily spoil events and jokes that I have not read yet. And the who’s who box feels the same to me. Sure, I can read it and see that Harem is one person who teleports, but how do I know that this isn’t going to be revealed later in some hilarious joke that plays on the reader’s ignorance? As a reader I expect the information to be given in the comic itself. Even if it just comes in a brief narrative text box or another bottom-of-the-page chibi conversation or any other “non-story” element, I would expect the first explanation to come from within the comic itself.
The “Who’s Who” box just seems to me like a quick reference, a reminder of what you should already know.
That’s a good point about spoilers, but I took that into consideration. The badges in the who’s who box update depending on what comic you’re looking at. I’m using a plugin that pulls the tags on a post and pulls the appropriate graphic for it, so I’ve got tags for Syndey01, Syndey02, Sydney03, and Max01, Max02, etc. So as you read along the who’s who won’t spoil anything, obviously once I get the tube open and this person hates that person and these two are dating, that’ll be more relevant. This is a high tech operation here!
Now, the random images in the header block will probably spoil some stuff eventually, but really once I’m 10 years into this venture, the pre-reveal will just be a blip in the story so that’s probably fine.
As far as I know I’m the only one doing this. I got frump (one of the developers of ComicPress) to pull the plugin that manages it from another Easel I think? It’s another WordPress CMS skin, but I think the intent wasn’t to have it pull images, I think it was to populate a “related articles” box or something, but a little hacking and CSS and it works great for what I’m using it for. I’m surprised there isn’t more call for it. I like having that “I’m the vanguard!” feeling but I could really use it when reading other comics when the main character’s boyfriend’s third cousin shows up that we last saw 200 strips ago. :P
I had no idea that the who’s who could display different info depending upon the date, or rather, that you had set it up for that.
Yeah I can think of a number of comics that could really benefit from having that on their page.
I had mentioned Quantum Entanglement for how Harem’s mind could work last week, guess I was right! :D
BTW – anime hair (Sydney has it) does often defy the laws of science!
I’ll comment this comic (in general) again. I’ll start with quote from The Complete Hammer’s Slammers Volume 1:
Second, a good science fiction story gives us a place to stand on, something that checks with our own experience. At some point in the story, we need to say to ourselves, “Why, I’ve been there!” Or, “I knew her!” Or, “That’s just how it was for me!” – Gene Wolfe
I say this comic (Grrl Power) delivers just that! Characters seem so real (exceptions: Maxima & Dabbler for obvious reasons), like we could pass them on the street without second glance, much less any idea that they are superhero(in)es. That alone doesn’t make comic great, but it sure helps a lot. Fine, Clark Kent and Peter Parker could be there, except for their silly costumes and dual personalities. And I like Wolverine much better in jeans and t-shirt than in his Marvel comic yellow-black costume. “Costumes are for pussies” says Viki from B.I.T.C.H. Squad, and I agree. For these reasons my favourite superhero movies are Unbreakable and Hancock.
Am I onlyone thinking like this? Discuss!
I dunno, I like all of the above, including Hammer’s Slammers, Clark, Peter, Sydney, Max, Wolvie (jeans or costume), Hancock, and Unbreakable (despite a general dislike of M. Knight). But then a whole lot of people think I’m weird, especially the ones that know I listen to Horrorcore Rap, Christian Metal, and Weird Al… among many, many, other things (my Dad was a radio dj when I was a kid 30 years ago, music is big for us, also SciFi, and reading in general).
About Hancock, I thought it had great potental but hollyweird got ahold of it and five diffrent people started saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if” and the wrighters didn’t have a backbone enough to tell them to leave the story alone damm it!
Just remember that for the latter half of the film Hancock had a uniform. Simple and subdued but still a kind of costume. I liked the idea of a certain subset of super people created who couldn’t get emotionally close and stay powerful was a nice touch. The last set of god-people constructed before the demise of the Gods of Olympus.
Some of the costumes looked good like Big Daddy and Hit Girl on “Kick Ass.” I wish the film had been centered around them.
Zap: Some really…. SEXY science….
Congratulations on getting married!
Congrats on getting hitched! So will there ever be a cameo of your or your spouse?
Bill Nye. How did they get max into that suit?
Also Congrats on getting married……..
so is Anyone else thinking of the Assorted “your married?” Jokes?
many and varied jokes as a matter of fact. But than again i’ve been married for 18 years and have two teenage daughters.
Congrats Dave.
It wasn’t a shotgun wedding was it?
Does anyone know what pop culture referance Dabbler meant about the rat costume exactly?
Beakman’s World! It was a science show for kids. One of their main characters was Lester the Rat, a dude in a rat suit.
Honestly, it was an awesome educational show. It was crazy and silly without being corny. I loved it when their topic was about fake movie glass.
Ohhhhh yeah!
I totally forgot about that show, it was awesome!
I always wondered though; there was a comic in the Sunday paper called “Beakman and Jax” that explained science stuff to kids, and I always wondered if the two were related. The comic lacked so much character that the show had though, and “Jax” never appeared on the show, so they might not be related.
I remembered the exposition scenes from Martian Successor Nadesico. before Messenger mentioned Beakman’s World.
“The ears….wear them tonight.”
Took me an amazingly long time to realize that was supposed to be Maxima in the rat costume. Y’All excuse me while I stand waaaayyyy over here so as not to get any blood on me when she finds out who put her in it…
Yeah in case anyone was wondering if any of this DSC stuff is cannon in story, there’s your answer. That would NEVER happen.
God i remember beakman’s world,Lester was my favorite!
Congratulations on the marriage; best of luck and I hope it all works out.
You got a gift list on Amazon?
Heh, it never occurred to me to do that. It wasn’t a traditional wedding, we haven’t even had a reception (party) for it yet.
Love the Beakman’s World reference!
So, is all of Maxima’s strength derived from the no-range TK?
Reference above, none of this is canon. Basically Dave’s way of saying this week is for fun but the answers may or may not be real. At least as real as comics get anyway.
I should clarify, actually – the answers are canon, but the activities going on while that text is being delivered isn’t.
I could totally see Maxima as the sort who would secretly collect stuffed animals or ponies, or maybe want to on some level. She sure reacted to Sidney’s ring tone. Besides, if she *wanted* to put on a rat costume for whatever reason, who’s going to say “no”? She can lift trucks on a whim… “haha… That rat suit’s so silly!” *WHAM* “never mind…”
Congratulation on getting married. GOD bless you and yours. And thank you for your wonderful comic. I am still is stitches over the overconfident Maxima falling on her butt, and the ever poking Halo! Good Luck and Bod bless
Damn, wish I would completely look at the post before hitting the submit!!!
—GOD bless—-
Congratulations!
so Maxima has tactile telekinesis? That is the proper name for “zero range Telekinesis” … it would explain her strength to move objects but kinetic energy impacts (punches and kicks) would require a bit more… probably where her super speed comes in.
Tactile telekinesis (Or Zero Range Telekinesis, both terms are as correct as the author wants them to be.) is perfectly valid as an explanation and powersource for all of Maximas powers as seen yet, including superspeed (Although that one gets a bit iffy when it comes to reaction speeds). She can use her ZRTK on a cellular level to reinforce her resistance to damage, she can use it to zip her body about at amazing speeds (literally the speed of thought), including through the air, and she can extend it throughout objects she is touching so she wont rip them apart when lifting them.
LOL, Max asks why she’s wearing that, I wonder why she hasn’t puched Dabbler in the face yet.. xD
*punched
I somewhat agree that things seem to be moving fairly slowly in my opinion. While it is full of laughs and jokes, it may hurt you in the end because Sydney is slowly gone from eccentric, quirky and silly to down right insane. As the story goes on her level of rediculousness has gotten to extreme levels. This is okay for now but she may end up with character inconsistancies once the comic gets more serious and Sydney has to actually make rational decisions. This is just my opinion, you may or may not agree but I think it is time for the story to progress and for Sydney’s powers to be exposed.
Keep in mind that the entire strip has only covered a single very stressful day. She was shot at during a bank robbing and saved by a superhero. Not really surprising that her state of mind has deteriorated.
Yeah, from start to present only about forty-five min. have passed.
well from leaving the shop to now I’d say about an hour and a half, maybe two hours. She did have lunch after all
True, and she fear-vomited it up! So, will she now be hungry again? I’d love to see Maxima’s reaction to what Sydney eats! :)
I dont think you’re hungry right after a bank robbery, that kind of thing usually would ruin ones appetite. However, I also believe (and hope) that Sydney is going to be exposed on public television so at some point in the next 5-10 pages we should learn her powers to some extent hopefully. I just feel that Dave has squeezed every last ounce of character development he could have gotten out of this scene out and that it’s time for another major development to occur.
Naw, we can milk this for a year more. Harem’s reaction, and the crowd will somehow be able to watch it and react, and the girlfriend likely has the power to be when she is most desired not to be, and to have some words to say, and we need a few scenes of our girl being picked up and hauled off, and …
That’s overdoing it a little….but hey i cant complain yet its not like its the longest scene since the comic began!! Okay its only short one page from being the longest scene BUT STILL!! I do love the comic though.
#3: Tactile telekinesis? TK field extends & envelops whatever the person touches for a perfect grip for lifting?
It could also be used to heal ,If they had the right power set, like faith healing laying on of hands. I think that could be a subset of tactil-TK. Would explain a lot about healers and such. You could also use it to climb walls and maby walk on water.
You’d need incredibly precise control, though, and an ability to sense what you’re doing possibly down to the cellular level. While holding large pieces in the proper position would help, a splint or cast could do the job just as well. It might be useful if your patient has a very fast healing factor, but otherwise it won’t make much of a difference.
WOOHOO BEEKMANS WORLD