Grrl Power #1445 – Pinocchi-oh no!
Maxima obviously has extraordinarily strong bones and ligaments and tendons etc – like, “make a space elevator cable out of that stuff” strong, so when she cracks her joints, it sound a bit like the 1812 Overture. The version where they fire actual cannons to go along with the symphony.
Fun fact, in panel 2, I had planned to draw Cora with her arm somehow extended out so she was covering herself from “4th wall camera angle” POV, but… there just wasn’t a natural angle that didn’t either look like she was intentionally being modest, which she wouldn’t be, or didn’t look like I had grabbed a 3D model by the elbow joint and just yanked it into position with no thought to how humans actually move their limbs. So, poor planning on my part. Instead I’m pretending like she put up a modesty filter than only Maxima can see somehow.
Technically, they’re on P.T.O. – I know it’s called “leave” in the military, but they’re a domestic branch, so a lot of people on the team call it P.T.O. – so Maxima can’t officially get upset at Sydney or Harem for having a topless watch party with “friends of the team.” Honestly, she’s not so much a stick in the mud that she’d even care, especially while coming down from her battle royale adrenaline high. If Harem and Cora sit down at the dinner table later with their knoks out (which is British slang, I assume for “knockers” that I heard once on… Blackadder? Or Red Dwarf. Definitely one of the two.) then Max might at least tell Harem to go teleport a shirt on. (She can’t teleport things to her, but she’s trying to learn to teleport small things that one of her is holding to another her. No luck yet.)
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently. The new one is underway. I should have a draft ready to go for the next Monday comic?
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.
I think disney’s lawyers are ringing at your door lmao
It’s fair use (Satire) So he probably shouldnt worry too much. Although it is Disney. At least it’s not Nintendo.
King Ludwig II of Barvaria countersues, suing Disney for misappropriating Neuschwanstein Castle, seeking damages and legal costs.
Il est vrai que ce n’est pas Disney le premier coupable, mais nos voisins Allemands .
“It is true that Disney is not the primary culprit, but our German neighbors.”
But the mistake is understandable, german origin is the most common origin of US citizens.
“Fun fact, in panel 2, I had planned to draw Cora with her arm somehow extended out so she was covering herself from “4th wall camera angle” POV, but… there just wasn’t a natural angle that didn’t either look like she was intentionally being modest, which she wouldn’t be, or didn’t look like I had grabbed a 3D model by the elbow joint and just yanked it into position with no thought to how humans actually move their limbs.”
Aren’t Cora’s limbs holographic? She could bend them however she wanted, or even stretch them out into hentai noodle tentacles if she really wanted to, since they’re programmable light and force fields, not flesh and blood.
Yeah, but she spent a majority of her developmental life functioning with static physical cybernetic/prosthetic replicas of human anatomy. And her general base level neurology would still be tuned for “normal” human physical movement, though being born with no arms and legs would obviously throw that off some. While her limbs may be holographic and subject to configurations of her whims, notice how her default “comfort” state is standard human normal.
Is Cora intentionally teasing Maxima, just like Dabbler does?
Because, if she can plop up “Maxima-dependent modesty bars” just for M’s vision, she could also just display a regular top.
…
Or is that modesty-bar the compromise for the comic readers, who gets to see neither “Maxima’s vision” nor unobstructed vision?
Sure she can put her holographic limbs in whatever position she wants. But not all positions are attractive, and I think she wants to be.
Or at least not hit the uncanny valley unintentionally.
I think you’ve crossbred the slang – both knockers and norks are slang for breasts, but not knocks. We norks as slang off the Ozzies decades ago (it was common enough in my childhood, so must’ve be stolen pre-80s).
Fun fact – I live near to the village of Nork (sadly singular). I definitely do not snigger every time I drive past signs for Nork Park and Nork Clinic.
To be fair, in Britain /everything/ is slang for either breasts or drunkenness. It makes me so proud…
Shades of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or Climax, North Carolina. No one ever snickers at those either
“much of time” should probably just be “much time”.
Oh, yeesh. Yeah, just the image of a kaiju robot dropping inside of a castle filled with people is crazy.
I’ve been mulling that “black hole” a bit, and really, you’d get much the same effects from a few million tons of neutronium, and a whole lot less hassle to manipulate, presuming you had some technique to stabilize it for at least a short time. It surely would be an energy drain to push that much mass around, though the mass would be a lot less than any size of black hole that produced visible distortions. This would be “grain of sand” size vs essentially zero for a black hole, but similar effects and much less work.
Neutronium is ‘neutronium’ because the gravitiy of the star (itself) keeps it compressed. Take a part of it away and it won’t be neutronium anymore very quickly.
Yeah, at that point, it essentially becomes an enormous fission bomb.
“You were close enough to hear a neutronium pile let go?”
“It makes a very distinctive SKOOOM.”
“I’ll buy the beer.”
One of the many many ways that fantasy and science fiction fail to use logical applications of teleportation.
It is the rare exception where a story visits the horrific results of teleporting the core of a star a few seconds into the future. To name one weirdly specific example.
That’s why it takes magic?
“I am somewhat preoccupied with telling the laws of physics to sit down and shut up.”
— Vaarsuvius (Order of the Stick)
I’ve heard some theories that neutronium may actually be stable once it’s formed.
Obviously a neutron star is stable, and I’m not sure the layer of compressed matter on top is actually what keeps it stable. But there’s an open question as to how small the smallest stable mass would be.
Finding out through experimentation will have to wait some time though.
I was expecting the magical healing potion to give Maxima a severe case of the giggles, minor hallucinations and perhaps temporary muscle weakness. You wouldn’t want any of those during battle but it would not be a problem otherwise.
Naw, being left exhausted makes perfect sense. Healing is something your body already does – and it requires energy as well as time. Not only will she need to rest now, but she may need a very large meal as well.
I presume it’s less energy then her body would expend healing her wounds naturally. I’m not sure you can eat that much food at once.
How much would Deus pay for panel 1?
He has already drawn it in his book.
No, not that book, the other one. But not the other other one. He does still see her as a prospect, after all.
How much WILL he pay for a Gaxgy original?
Nothing, he will find some douche-y way to get Gaxgy to give him the original (and destroy all other copies)
Wow. You literally made the castle uninhabited. That’s almost as sad as the wall of text you used to reassure your readers. Are they really so fragile? Or are you just that afraid of the ones who are? Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where you can just create awesome works of art without fear of the most fragile among us? But I get it, if you don’t bend the knee to them they will literally threaten your life and liberty, and they have that power over you because the Party gives it to them. And the Party has the power to give because those who see their victims are too afraid to speak (or vote) against them.
…what the heck are you talking about? Do you seriously think there’s some organisation that gets litigious about fictional off-screen deaths, of all things? Do you realise how commonplacethose are in fiction?
Or some sort of public outcry? Where was that controversy when Star Wars: Episode VII decided to out-do the Death Star’s destruction of Alderaan by blowing up a star and killing over a hundred billion?
In fact, here’s a random and extremely incomplete list of body counts in fiction, which (despite that incompleteness) doesn’t dip under a billion until entry 37:
https://listofdeaths.fandom.com/wiki/Highest_To_Lowest_Body_Counts
A more realistic interpretation would be that neither Maxima nor Sydney would be happy with the mass killing of innocents (though Maxima, at least, is somewhat more accepting of the deaths of non-innocents).
Some people’s worldview is just so dominated by their politics that they can only process things through that lens, regardless of how non-political something might be to anyone else or how much of a square peg it might be getting forced through a round hole.
Not that I can decipher what politics this guy is dominated by to begin with. ???
Any long-time reader of this comic knows that there is no way Maxima would commit mass-murder just to win a contest. The only unknowns were the actual details of how she knew the castle was empty of sapient life. A speed-run scouting trip followed by Cora’s reassurance with the rule explanation provides us with those details. And Max would have already known about the no-endangering-sapient-life rule, since that rule would have been explained to her (and Nightwing) pre-fight, so the speed-scouting was her personal verification that Nightwing was following the rules.
I did think she would have noticed Sydney’s gigantic hooters right off, broken ribs or not.
She did, she was just too occupied to inquire about it
I’ll, considering she didn’t know if it was or wasn’t inhabited ‘It turns out it was okay and you didn’t commit murder for the sake of making some money in a tournament’ is…thin comfort. It does kinda still leave ‘Okay but you were willing to take that risk’, which is a level of risky I feel like she’d absolutely chew out any member of her team over.
At least she attempted to confirm it wasn’t. She just had to admit that she wasn’t absolutely sure about it in retrospect because there could have been hidden or enclosed spaces that housed sentient beings which she didn’t have access to in her speed-run search.
Not a great fan of ‘censorship steam’ but if you have to do it, you at least make it a funny 4th wall joke.
(but it still shows in my opinion a fundamental writing issue :( If you cannnot show (partial) nudity for legal or personal reasons, why write it into the story at all? Drawing is a bit more subjective, but there generally should be a way to stage and frame a panel so that the need for censorship team does not come up.)
Then again, I am not an artist so what do I know?
Because it is funny.
The whole greatness of the censorship team bit is the running question of what wild thing he is going to toss onto the page this time to protect us from the thing we obviously want.
He is such a tease.
And on this page it lands even better, because Maxima, the long suffering rational one, is the supposed target, but we are the real target. The joke is on us for wanting the shot in the first place!
(And we still do!!!)
Please do not misunderstand me :) I love the way that Dave turns the censorship into funny wall breaking jokes.
I just do not like the concept of censorship steam.
Because this is a “PG-13” comic for general web viewing. Almost “SFW” even.
If you want R-rated, contribute to his Patreon.
I will always be most impressed by how tough Máxima is. Not the Indestructibility, but her ability to function while in incredible pain. Like when she fought Vehemence, got her nose broken, and didnt even flinch. THAT is the impressive shit.
You could have had Cora hold a tray with the empty potion vial on it, off to the side towards the camera. That would have covered her for the panel, but left her wide open for Max.
Glad Maxima’s ok and that nothing sapient was harmed in the castle crush, Cora’s explanation of the fae made sense too
Also the explanation of the relevant rule — they’d necessarily have a rule against sapient collateral damage or they’d get shut down.
Maxi in this outfit, with only her golden face visible, reminds me of someone, but can’t figure out who, and it’s driving me more nuts than usual
She looks like Queen Grimhilde from Disney’s Snow White. Both the original animation and the live-action with Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen.
“with no thought to how humans actually move their limbs”
I mean Cora isn’t limited to Human limbs. Or even limbs that are used by a real species.
But to keep the art simple, that filter also works.
Pretty sure ‘knoks’ isn’t any form of British slang. This may have changed tomorrow, it seems the selection process is mostly whether it has satisfactory pronunciation, and/or absurdist effect, without any care for standard meaning of the words (if any).
You’re probably thinking of ‘norks’.
Snap, Crackle, KABOOM!? I love that breakfast cereal!
Ya gone and unlocked an old Amanda Show memory for me. We’ll done