Grrl Power #1483 – Rocky mountain high?
Okay, website seems to be humming along now, but I lost some time dealing with it, so the final versions of the vote incentive will probably go up next Monday.
One of the big problems with doing a huge arena battle in a comic like this is… well, there’s a lot less humorous antics going on, which is largely the meat and potatoes of the comic. The other problem is that if this were a Shonen manga, none of these competitors would really go down this easily. They’d each all be big fights that lasted dozens of pages, if not spanning multiple volumes, in which the protagonist has to learn some new ability or apply an existing one in a suspiciously flexible way. Or just flexed his power slightly harder. It would probably involve a flashback. For instance, Zerathax (the obsidian golem) would definitely be able to use his fire side to create thrust, Iron Man style, and fly around setting the battlefield on fire. Being broken in half really does very little to threaten his life, it robs him of his ice powers, but is mostly an inconvenience. And he can melt sand down to make new obsidian to reform his body, which may or may not be quite how it works, but is close enough for a 13 year-old Shonen manga main character to deliver an expository speech about while watching Zerathax convert sand and add it to his body, and most readers just go, “Eh, I don’t feel like searching for a refresher course on igneous rock right now. Besides, the person the MC is explaining this to is a stick-with-boobs who is inexplicably wearing a bikini top in this battle arena scene.” But I really don’t want to make each and every fight some hyper extended battle where the protagonist barely scrapes by but learns and grows along the way. Lore-wise, it’s because Max isn’t 14 and didn’t just get her powers. She’s a 20 year vet with them at this point, and all her fights have been against other supers. (And sometimes against foreign military hardware) It’s why she thought whatever she did to Eat-Chicken might have a chance of working the way it did. Non-lore-wise… uh, real world-wise, it’s because this UCBA storyline would take me 8 years to draw if every fight was done shonen jump style. Maybe if I could put out 5 pages a week, I’d extend the fight scenes a little, but instead I guess I’m going for something in between a typical Shonen and the one-punch fights of One Punch Man. It feels like half-measures either way, so I’m considering how to work the final round so that it doesn’t take 6 months to get through, but still have some cool moments.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
So are these guys (guys doesn’t seem accurate).. uh entities dead? I mean I don’t know how you’d even kill some of these beings like Kaboomoid which seems like living energy but I also don’t know how you’d survive any of what has happened so far. Just asking if this is a death battle? Maybe it’s a little too late and a bit naive to be asking that in an unlimited power ceiling class, no rules, battle royal but still. And Max seems pretty okay with that so far. Although maybe it’s fight now, worry about the ethical ramifications of being a ringer in an intergalactic killing competition later.
For many of these entities I’m not sure they’re even alive, or at least alive in a way we recognise or understand.
As such Kaboomoid and the golem Max split in two are technically incapacitated and will probably return, eventually.
Considering Max is a seasoned veteran with multiple confirmed combat kills, who threatened to ash Vehemence’s brain and gave him a VERY graphic amputation during the restaurant brawl 1300 pages ago, I would say Max is not the person to worry about accidentally killing enemies, especially not in an unlimited-class battle royale. She doesn’t want to kill innocents or bring bad PR to Archon by interring one of their rogue’s gallery in front of live cameras, but there is plausible deniability that the team is participating in the battle royale, so as long as the Ixah persona is not burned, it’s fine.
Though I do think that unless Cora’s ship has EXCEPTIONALLY good cloaking protection against scanning, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sydney opening her gateway in the middle of the arena landing pad has been detected by the authorities and there will be some tough questions to answer…
In the first battle, the sentient psionics guy she hit with her energy beam was able to say “yield” and was teleported away. The robot was either an AI (probably with a backup somewhere) or else was remotely piloted. Rambo-Barney was a lab-grown biological entity that was remotely piloted. Max made a point of declaring that she had super-speed cleared the castle of any sentient life before destroying it, then gave the pixie the opportunity to yield.
In this fight I believe the only truly living sentient beings are Max and Ryzyl, the magic elf she almost defeated before the detour, and will probably appear for a magical backstab attempt as she fights Mt. Atrocious. All the others were either declared or hinted to be constructs or golems. Eat-Chicken appears to be a non-sentient lab-created animal with near-zero intelligence and probably some hidden method of being controlled or calmed between fights. Basically just a giant chicken (who really are dumb mini-dinosaurs… they’ll eat anything they can fit in their mouths), and she’s treating it as such.
When it’s down to her and Ryzyl I predict she’ll defeat him (again) but give him the opportunity to yield before death. He’ll then take advantage of that “weakness” for one last stab attempt, forcing Max to deal the death blow. Which will blow up the comment section and lead to 1-2 panels worth of discussion of Max killing someone in a “game”.
I don’t know how many more rounds there are left until the final one, but I have a feeling that for the coming fights against ‘Ixah’ there will be a lot of surrenders or attempts to team up against her.
Only three total 8v8 “rounds”. Starting with 512 contestants (64 battles), then those 64 winners were matched 8v8 (that’s where we are now… everyone we see here has already won their initial round), then the final 8v8 championship match is still to come.
“ Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?”
I’m pretty sure that Eat-Chicken Noodle is going to act as an explosive cord; wrapped around Atrocitous’s thigh, this is going to get ugly.
Either that or Max is going to pull so hard on the Eat-Chicken Noodle it saws through Atrocitus’ thigh cutting that leg off.
“Eat-Chicken Noodle”! I love it, very creative!
Ok, you’re the author & artist, but theorizing what you are presenting is a big part of these comments. So I think you at least owe us some hand-waving explanation of what just happened to Eat Chicken once the fight is over. Make it funny, by all means, even if it’s just Maxima trying & erring many times at super-speed. Super powers do make things look easy, don’t they?
That’s an easy answer, Max force-fed the explosion golem to eats chicken and to contain the resulting explosion that was about to happen she used the wrap. Now all that fire and energy is in the wrap so she’s using it to take down the big mountain golem. It was dumb enough to think it could stomp her and she’s showing why it was stupid. Once the wrap goes boom it will get a confused look on it’s “face” and tople over.
Considering the general art and storytelling style of the comic seems to be closer to that of DC and Marvel crossed with Archie, a pacing and action density more akin to those than to typical shonen manga is definitely more appropriate. We don’t need three panels for a quirked eyebrow, or 90 pages of two opposing characters posturing while they “power up” for forty-five minutes while other characters look on in awe or fear. Maxima isn’t like Goku or Gohan or Tanjiro Kamado or Ichigo Kurosaki; fully kitted out like she is for this tournament, she’s like Superman, Batman, Iron Man, and Thor all rolled into one with a side of Luke Skywalker, so pacing her action scenes like DC and Marvel and Dark Horse would is absolutely the better fit.
This is officially just boring now. I expected this would finally be a moment where we would see Maxima having to fight a real fight.
Not just K; she’s setting him up for some Special K!