Grrl Power #1438 – Pop goes the Gralien
The UCBA Party Barge and Recovery ship is large enough and custom built to pull even something/one the size of U.M.B.Rage off the surface. The ship is roughly the size of the Fhloston Paradise, with slightly fewer pools and more space dedicated to kaiju sized med-bays. But it still is a party barge, and is generally considered a premier location to view the battles.
Sydney’s still wearing a bra, by the way. You can see part of the strap under Frix’s fingers if you look close enough. I drew her, then added him because I have a bad habit of drawing only the people talking in a scene, since each character I draw adds to the time to pencil, ink and color. But I figured I’d just be drawing neck to waist, and how hard can that be – oh right, even after all this time I don’t know what humanoid bodies look like, so naturally it took me like 30 minutes to pencil his torso, cause the arm position and the inside of the elbow joint looked weird and I finally had to go looking for reference, but of course, there are no pictures of really muscular guys on the internet standing in that position. They’re always flexing. Or maybe standing casually, but try to find a picture of a muscular man or woman lounging, or talking on a phone or resting their cheek on their hand and now you’ve got a challenge.
You know, sometimes I complain about my job, but then I remember that I have never once had to use Excel or sit in a Zoom meeting that should have been an email or had to sit through an embarrassingly outdated HR video. I mean, not at this job. I’ve done that stuff at other jobs. Well, Zoom didn’t exist back then. It was probably Skype, and there was never a point at which Skype didn’t suck a to a surprising degree.
Also, I should mention that Sydney is still sporting holo-boobs. Even still, she’s self conscious about exposing fake boobs so long as they’re attached to her.
Do you realize it’s 02-26-2026? If you reverse the order of the month numerals, you get 20262026! And if you’re a numerologist… that means you’re stupid! It has nothing to do with the date. I’m just throwing shade at one of the saddest pseudosciences just cause the date is almost a meaningless repeating number if you change the numbers so that they repeat how you want. I dunno what’s up with the drive by. Just feeling sassy tonight.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
And I was just starting to speculate on the odds of two supers entering in disguise to make a fortune. I suppose we may never know, now.
Max…?
Learn different fighting styles.
As many of them as your body and brain can assimilate.
‘Cause that energy blast is getting to be … creepy.
As Cora pointed out, this is a different energy blast
That’s like telling someone with a firearm to “shoot differently”, or someone with a knife to “cut differently”
I should have said: learn more ways of CQC that allow you to get the job done without leaning on your powers so much, and keep the creepy beam attacks as a very last resort, rather than a reflex.
Exactly
learn to do contact point energy blasts, so it can’t be dodged and it only passes energy to what you touch.
re firearms, to an elementalist, every bolt/ball/blast is an energy blast they just have X many types of elemental ammo.
“cut differently” Dozens of schools of sword fighting and at least two schools of knife fighting would like to have a word with you. I would let them all go to voicemail, because these guys don’t know how to stop talking about it once they have gotten started.
“The voice mail is TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES LONG!”
Yes, but, they mostly teach the same basic cuts. Some emphasize one or more broad categories of cuts over others. After all, there are only so many ways you can move the human body. It’s really all about biomechanics.
Fast and shallow, but emphasize placement. Slower but deeper. Extremities versus core placement.
All about if you want to incapacitate or kill, draw it out or finish fast.
It can be complicated.
Shotguns can fire a wide variety of projectiles with very different effects. Even rifles can have combinations of incendiary, frangible, expanding, and armor-piercing ammo. Sometimes explosive, too. And you can stab with a bayonet or the barrel, and bludgeon with the buttstock in a variety of ways.
Knives can cut, stab, strike with the back edge, and bludgeon with the pommel.
CQC would not be effective against an opponent that can warp space.
Relying on superpowers to counter superpowers when traditional strategy doesn’t work is actually a very good idea.
I initially misread the guy’s name as “The Gray Anomaly”, then got confused why the announcer called it out until I went back and re-read it.
Why *did* he name himself that?
He’s been watching Earth T.V. for years and has an impish sense of humour.
The Grey Anomaly would have been a better name.
I distinctly remember Max forming an energy sphere, casually tossing it behind her, and looking cool with the resulting massive explosion behind her. She mentioned it wasn’t her full power.
Speaking of cinematic shots, what’s with Max’s hair? In every panel, no matter what she’s doing, it’s in a “wind blowing it up” position. Did she cut it off/bind it tight and everything we’re seeing is a hard-light projection?
I realize from a real-world perspective it’s so we as viewers can see her boobs / body better, but is there an in-universe explanation?
That under comment reminds me of a group of weapons from Star Munchkin. You could combine them and get for example a lazergazerphazerbadazer.
add ‘bobazer’ and you have most of them
Was there a “Bananafanafofazer” or did I dream that one?
Yup, I came down here to see if anyone else had mentioned it.
That exists, also the Goawazer.
I knew the song, “The Name Game,” so finding that one for the first time made me laugh.
*Gets the Duct Tape*
I was about to comment about Sydney being topless when I read your comments.
But now I’m fired up about excel. Excel is awesome. You can do really cool things with it, like making character sheets that automatically calculate any messy math (if you are playing a game with a lot of math).
That honestly would look kind of weird, as Sydney’s earlier attempt to get her holo-boobs spinning in opposite directions would imply that her hard light G-cups are covering her bra.
So HERO System, then. God, I wonder what point level Maxima is built on….
All of them. In one large multipower.
Contemplate Champions III as an alternative.
No Chazer beam?
A blazer beam would be good. Imagine the savings on having to buy new jackets!
Mr. Piccolo: “CLOTHES BEAM!”
Or Mazer beam.
Subtle way to tell the opponent to get lost…
Useful with some dates, too.
Is that what Circe used when she turned Odysseus’ crew into swine?
Only in US in europe it’s the 26-02-2026 , dd-mm-yyyy, in Japan it’s 2026-02-26…
That last one is the ISO 8601 standard, one I (in the USA) have used for decades for naming computer files so they sort properly.
I never knew the identifier for the standard, but I use YYYY-MM-DD date format everywhere I possibly can.
I also encourage everyone I know to do the same (typically to no effect whatsoever).
I use YYYYMMDD on anything that a computer will parse. Makes it super easy to sort by date.
Honestly, unless I’m actually writing the name of the month for aesthetic purposes, I use YYYY-MM-DD for everything, physical paperwork included. It’s highly confusion resistant, as somebody would have to work particularly hard to interpret it as YYYYDDMM.
As best I could find (by checking Wikipedia), the only two countries in Europe using this date format are The Netherlands and Greece (kinda, very rarely used). Most European countries used either dots or slashes – 26.2.2026 or 26/02/26 (or some variation thereof, sometimes it’s DD, MM, or YYYY, othertimes it’s D, M, and/or YY) – and quite often use the full name for the month (e.g. in Czech, it’s quite common to write the date like “26. února 2026” – “26th [of] February 2026”).
In Germany the nn. notation is read as the ordinal of nn, i.e. if in English 1. were read as first. 26.2.2026 would be twenty-sixth second 2026. It’s (sort of) similar to how in English we read the names of royalty with roman numerals as ordinals, i.e. Charles III as Charles the third.
(Yes Germans can say second instead of February. And in Japanese they don’t even have common names for months, just ni-gatsu two-month for February. They used to have month names for their luni-solar calendar, but I think if you asked a 100 Japanese people you wouldn’t find one who knows them. Kind of like looking for someone in the US who can recite a Shakespearean sonnet.)
When I came to the States I thought it was weird when I learned that in the US the day and month are switched around. Fifty years later I’m apparently still struggling with the order of month and day, since just the other day I wrote a date starting with the day and had to be corrected.
That Japanese time format is also ISO 8601. So it is a very international format.
I was a Y2K programmer. International companies were a pain!
Well, there’s the Dazer, which confuses and befuddles the target.
The Hazer, which makes the target feel embarrassed and humiliated.
The Spazer, which sterilizes the target.
The Stazer, which paralyzes the target.
And of course, the Wazer, which guesses the target’s weight.
That blue ring around her hand during the energy attack is new.
Either that or it’s part of the glamor.
StarGazer, but no StarBlazer?
Or StarGrazers, but that involves dragons
Or StarGlazers, for fleets that insist on having transparent windows on their ships instead of just using external cameras.
Windows are a structural weakness, geth do not use them.
StarGlazers = Galactic donuts? Cosmic Donut holes now in “White, black AND Grey(s)”
I’m gutted that he mentioned ‘tazer’, but didn’t take the opportunity to add ‘face’ to the end…
I think dave went on a weird -zer trip and fotgot that som of thes are electricity based. Admittedly when you are shooting plasma it doesn’t really matter how you got there.
Also is the Fairy still on the field? I don’t think black hole lite hit her and no ‘one trick pony’s’ are winning a tiered contest like this. Max using the energy beam here probably pissed her off as her overall strategy seems to be keeping the attacks against her defensive in nature.
Heading for a distant star?
If she can choose energy type and use them in multiple ways then Giggawat basically has a sub set of Max’s powers?
No, I can not see the strap. ergo there is no strap! :)
Under his left paw, between middle and ring digits
That looks more like the line between her chest and arm.
Is Sydney wearing a bra or a holo-bra covering her holo-boobs? If she’s wearing a regular bra, would we be seeing it, given that it’s probably insider her holo-boobs? And wouldn’t Sydney get distracted by them and stare at them every 5 seconds?
The only way it could work to correctly apply the weight to her body, get the jiggle physics right, and have them physically fit under the clothing, would be if she were fully topless. Everything we saw in the earlier panel (#1433 “How do you get them going in opposite directions?”), and are imagining in this panel, is a hard-light projection. Boobs, bra, shirt, all a simulation. This is based on what Cora said about her hard-light limbs and clothing when we first met her way back when.
Also, although she is wearing the same general undershirt/shirt style in 1433 as she is in 1431 with her regular boobs, there’s no way that much volume would fit into the same clothes. Even if the shirts are extra-stretchy there’s no way the bra would even come close to fitting.
Schrödingers strap.
*adds ‘on’ to the end of your sentence*
Physics themed porn, now that’s a concept.
Is that Venom?
In panel 4 (the one where they show Grey Anatomy with a hole in the chest), Max looks surprised. Guess she either didn’t expect it to hit, or forgot that people are made of meat.
Yeah that face looks like “…I thought I wouldn’t have to pull my punches but it seems even these people are too squishy for me :(“
Or she was aiming at a nonlethal (assuming roughly human anatomy) location and the deflection moved it to the center. The commentator’s “Maybe he tried to bend it the wrong way?” suggests that the deflection made it worse.
I was thinking that the Grey Anatomy’s anatomy was on full display to Max as he was being beamed up to the recovery ship.
Kevin/Vehemence will be so sad that he wasn’t allowed to participate here.
On the other hand, it could get scary out of hand when he’s going full power-up when fighting. After all, we don’t know his upper limits, only that Maxima can output a bit more and faster than he can handle in a short timeframe.
Kevin and Maxima working together would be a wrecking crew.
I don’t think he would have done well. He need a certain amount of energy to reach these levels and the participants seems to go all out from the start.
He did talk about using football (soccer) matches to power up, this seems like a logical upgrade. It’s whether they allow Vehemic Energy users to participate.
I think he would need to go through the preliminary trials so he can start slow and power up on each bout before the big fight.
Entirely depends on if he’s allowed to warm up just before the fight starts.
If he cann’t warm up, he dies instantly. If he can warm up (with Max), he wins as quickly as he wants to.
I think dave went on a weird -zer trip and fotgot that som of thes are electricity based. Admittedly when you are shooting plasma it doesn’t really matter how you got there.
Also is the Fairy still on the field? I don’t think black hole lite hit her and no ‘one trick pony’s’ are winning a tiered contest like this. Max using the energy beam here probably pissed her off as her overall strategy seems to be keeping the attacks against her defensive in nature.
I am so confused… in the part under the panel, why is he naming all the members of the Globo Gym Dodgeball team?
Okay I think she was surprised with that attack if you look on her face in that panel about “cored himself” also… is everyone in the room with Syd, Frix and the rest, naked now?
Topless. You can see the waistline of Frix’ pants. Cora mentioned Topless Tuesday, and Harem ran with it.
Gotta be that guy…
Inertial damping, not dampening. You’re lessening the inertia, not trying to get it wet.
I disagree. You absolutely want to get inertia wet, to reduce friction and improve T-shirt sales.
I was hoping that somebody would mention this before I had to. It’s a common misuse, because it _feels_ like you should be “-ening” something. But … not.
Maybe it’s me but Max appears a bit surprised in that one panel. Either because it worked or that he could still talk afterward.
Hobestly Dave, building an Excel file of useful, rare art references might not be a waste of time. Not that I’m saying you need it to be excel but building such a tool for your own use could actually save you some time later down the road.
So, you mentioned how you could probably fill up a planet with women shaped like Maxima, so when is Dabbles going to invite Max to the Maxima-shaped-women planet?
If you use day-month-year (a more sensible arrangement), it’s 26022026. Twenty-six oh-two two-oh twenty-six.
Yeah, not more sensible. MM-DD and DD-MM is just a matter of preference / used to it (Feb 26th vs 26th of Feb, etc). YYYY-MM-DD is better in general when dealing with computers, since it sorts properly.
Both Big-Medium-Small (i.e., Y-M-D) and Small-Medium-Big (i.e., D-M-Y) make sense, they’re in order. Medium-Small-Big (M-D-Y) makes no sense.
Month Day Year ordering originates from when dates were written in long form. The same can be said for Day Month Year. Both are shorthand for the long form date. Year Month Day was selected exclusively for shorthand use and planet-wide recognition. As others have noted, YYYY-MM-DD is also better for electronic sorting.
February twenty seventh, in the year two thousand and twenty six.
Twenty seventh of February, in the year two thousand and twenty six.
First month eleven, year of the horse. (I had to look this one up.)
Awww. I was hoping to see more of the Grey Anatomy. He seems fun. Ah well.
Attributing *meaning* to it is dumb, but I think it’s fun to look for odd patterns in numbers. Grocery bill that’s a palindrome, for example, is worth a little bit of a grin. Or when all the numbers are the same modulo 3 (for example, 2s, 5s, and 8s all have the same remainder when dividing by 3). Mostly, that’s just practice for doing variant Sudoku with teal Modular lines.
Again, none of it means anything, none of it tells the future, or bodes ill or bad. But spotting amusing numbers amid randomness? I think it’s fun.
With that attack line-up, it’s like Max is starting her own professional dodgeball team.
So good!
I really like the Sydney headshot in the last frame. Can it join the title stack where you rotate headshots next to the main character’s names?
At least it wasn’t a cancer ray. And someone has learned the difference between reflection and refraction.