I wish I was the kind of artist that could draw a room with like, 60 people in it*, because these 7 to 12 person watch parties over the last few pages are a little sad looking. (*It helps that guy does 2 tone shading, but it would still take me 2 weeks just to pencil that page.)

Yes, it is, indeed a terrible disguise, especially when put in front of Super Genius or even just regular genius intellects who are very familiar with Maxima. Of course, the people who suspect what’s going on over the last few pages don’t know. They have the advantage of a limited data set, but also realize that there’s literally a trillion lifeforms out there, and a lot of them are humanoid and roughly half of those are female. So the number of them that could just happen to closely match Maxima’s dimensions could be enough to populate a planet. The number of them who have her dimensions and also fight quite a bit like her is a slice of that cohort, but the ones that match those attributes and can also hang with the UCBA competitors is a pretty small fraction of that original subset. That number could still be triple digit, but… it’s probably double or single digit. Maxima’s power makes her quite the outlier.

But they’ve all seen Maxima fight. Not just witnessed, but studied. Deus probably isn’t planning to scrap with her, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to review slow motion footage of her throwing a punch. For observational and scientific reasons, of course.

Realistically, there’s no way the UCBA would have as much attention as something like the world cup if the current fight that’s been going on for, let’s say ten minutes, is as much as has been broadcast. The world cup has (quickly googles cause I don’t know anything about sports) 104 matches, which is up from 64 in 2022. It takes time to build the excitement. The UCBA would have to have a bunch of preliminary rounds before it gets to the Battle Royale matches in order to cause anything approaching a “fever.” Personally, I felt it was a little convenient for Cora to mention the UCBA with juuuust enough time to get permission, make a few stops and arrive just in time for it to start. It’s like how people in movies turn on the news at exactly the right time to see “A Utahraptor has climbed out of the LeBrea tar pits and is thought to be at large in the Beverly Hills area.” instead of them having to sit through 3 and a half minutes of a soap opera and two commercials before the plot relevant news comes on. I personally didn’t want her to bring up the UCBA and then have to wait for seven weeks for it to actually start, because that would be another 8 years for us suffering here in non-comic time.

So instead, we can say Cora only brought it up because she new it just happened to be about to start. And as far as Maxima missing what must be an exhaustive series of preliminary rounds that exist to bring ratings and viewer fervor to a head, let’s say the UCBA allows entrants to test out of the class, as it were. Beat up a squad of doomsday robots, kick a volcano so hard it stops erupting, rip a shipping container sized block of reflexium in half, that sort of thing. They allow it, because having someone like Frieza or Boros or The Gunbuster compete in prelim rounds makes for some dreadfully boring and short prelim rounds.

Also, the challengers who fight their way up through the prelims usually make for a better story and garner a lot of fan support. Some ultra strong competitors moderate their abilities to barely eek through each round, because everyone likes an underdog. Also, if they juuuust squeak by each time, the bookies are far more likely to put worse odds on them than the guy who stomps everyone hard, and that can be a valid strategy to maximize one’s own winnings.

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.