Grrl Power #1353 – Memento petite mori
This is another page that would have benefited from me having a bunch of assistants that do backgrounds for me. The “ball” that Dabbler is at is supposed to be in a big room with fancy chandeliers and about a hundred other alien/fantasy characters standing about. Instead it looks considerably smaller. But, you know, just pretend I drew that.
It’s a good thing Dabbler is only sharing the audio and visual portions of her memory, and not other senses. What a succubus considers delightful might be sensory overload for an unprepared, non-succubus mind. Even if it was just a brief slip.
“The mind’s eye” is a common expression in English, but in reality we have a mind’s every-other-body-part-and-function as well. The mind’s ear, the mind’s stubbed toe, the mind’s sneeze. The mind’s sex-with-a-rock-guy. Dabbler’s memories aren’t as high-fidelity as an Aetholith’s, but you can be sure certain events are filed with more clarity than others.
Oh look! The vote incentive has an update!
It’s not quite where I wanted it for this update. I kind of skipped over posting just the flats and started shading Heatwave, but hadn’t gotten as far as J-Watt. But I figured I’d post what I had.
I’ll hopefully have more progress soon as things here are kind of slowing down. Still putting the house together after the move, but there’s still plenty to do. The Patreon version is updated as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Boulder of her to do a rock guy.
No schist.
Gneiss puns.
He rocked her world.
or did she just roll with it?
No moss on a rolling stone…
Unless her name is Kate ;)
He may be good in bed(rock), but I hear he has an abrasive personality.
And a gravelly voice.
All these mineral puns and not one of you has brought up cummingtonite? I am disappointed.
This angel needs to be a vote incentive
Ditto. Daaaave!
Let’s hope she didn’t take him for granite.
I don’t think so, she is a gneiss girl.
Don’t get all sedimental! This story’s already off to a rocky start!
Don’t expect it to hit rock bottom when it have just started.
This comment section is as bad as Jeph Jacques’ Patreon comments, and that’s pretty bad…
Now imagine a rock-lady with Tourmaline for her “sensitive bits” XD She’d essentially censor herself…
“imagine a rock lady…” and the music starts:
“well, she’s a BRICK…House! She’s mighty MIGH-TAY….”
Interesting how we can see the out-of-focus tips of her lower horns in the view.
I hadn’t even noticed that, but looking back, they were actually visible last page too, albeit not on the frame with her looking in the mirror. Looking back further at the other time we saw Dabbler’s POV, the training session with Vehemence (page 977), they were also present, and in fact were much more visible and a bit more in focus (although I’ve little doubt I missed them then as well, being more concerned with what was filling up a good deal more of her vision). I was going to comment that the horns should be transparent from Dabbler’s POV, just like your nose is to you (unless you’ve got a particularly-short nose – or a rather long one, in which case you’ve got a blind spot right near the middle of your field of view), but then I realized the relative locations of her nose and horns would overlap with each eye, which would make the part where they do so (basically the entirety of the visible part of the horns)opaque.
You can’t rule out the possibility that she has objective memories, rather than subjective, given that she apparently has total high fidelity recall. She also has an artificial eye; Maybe when she did the install she connected a data recorder to her sensory input.
Can also see her hair, or bits of it
And Dabbles does have a particularly short (butt cute) nose
Max had to put her foot down when Daz tried to project it up on the Jumbotron
Gives the phrase “ribbed for her pleasure” an extra gritty meaning.
Does anyone here remember when the comic was all about Sydney and not dabbler? I mean it’s getting to the point where every once in awhile a story beat gets thrown in and then dabbler does something else and we pay attention to her for a few months. Or Dabbler and her sister.
Yeah, Dabbers also possibly one of my least favourite characters at this point. Since, despite being a character all about dabbling into different areas, she is terribly one note.
But this has seemingly become the Dabbler show, featuring Sydney and Maxima.
Imagine working at Der Wienerschnitzel. Not only do you work there but it is what you eat three meals a day. You used to love hot dogs. It can get kind of boring singing a one note song and sometime we need a detour to get to the eventual destination.
So your diversion is having the same hamburger for weeks on end?
Just like when this webic was all about the action?
Dabbler is the “talking head”.
When we need something explained 90% of the time she has the answer and is in the place to explain it.
Plus Dave has a weakness to space babes.
The comic was originally envisioned revolving around Maxima, Dabbler, and Anvil, and even Jabberwokky, before Sydney entered the picture and took over the show. So while the comic largely starts from and follows Sydney’s perspective, other characters, including Dabbler, were intended to drive the story. Sydney is a viewpoint character, the newbie, that the audience can follow in order to learn about the world and other characters. It’s a mechanism for exposition, to have a character who things need to be explained to so that other characters can have someone to explain things to without looking silly.
Jabberwokky doesn’t work as the viewpoint newbie, or at least not without a different backstory.
At most she would be an Archon novice, but explaining the ins and outs of the military/police hierarchy and protocol would be a very different comic.
And not everyone has a Mind’s Eye. Look up Aphantasia
Why does “Flinty Dermis” sound like a “Star Wars” character?
because star wars ran out of good alien sounding names so they just started using a random name generator. sell more action figures.
I realize I clicked several read-throughs ago due to cheesecake, but, ahh…pew pew.
I guess that will have to tide me over for the other type of action while Sydney enjoys vicarious epic level friction dicking.
I admit I’m low key fascinated how often the punchline/payoff to every Dabbler joke and storyline is just “Sex. Trololol. Sex.”
That’s because Americans are prudes.
While being the first producer of pornography online (2021 %)
USA : 24;52%
UK: 5.49 %
Germany: 4.90 %
Brazil: 4.80%
France 4.01%
Russia 4.01%
Canada 3.19%
India 3.18%
Italy 2.64%
Spain 2.46%
Netherlands 1.92%
Turkey 1.82%
Poland 1.78%
Australia 1.55%
Paradoxes are a never ending classic.
We are less lecherous than the anglo-saxons according to the % even if we have as French a reputation.
There’s apparently specific areas of California where the rules are different. This supposedly makes p*rn much easier to produce.
Take California out of the calculation, and the US probably drops below Canada.
OTOH: My girlfriend hated to go to the beach. She complained how the sand got into “places.”
And this is a big part of the reason why women in beach volleyball wear that particular style of smallish and tight bikini bottoms.
(not that it prevents ‘places’, I had the rash and burns to prove it, but any other model is so much worse)
I’m with Max on this. This isn’t moving the story forward, and I doubt that this is needed for context other than using Sydney to derail the weird sex demonstrations into Max’s brain.
True, this interlude does not drive the story forward.
However, it does not have to. Not every word or image as the case may be, of a story has to be devoted to plot.
(e.g. those aerial or wide shot scenes in LotR of people walking through landscape did not drive the story, but I am fairly certain that nobody would have considered it an improvement if a white on black title card had been shown reading: the fellowships moves south).
Modern editiors, I have come to realise, push a rushed narrative style. short sentences, shorter words, removing most all poetic phrases. Rushed narrative structure. I do not feel it is often an improvement to the story telling, and I think literature is poorer for this ‘why use much word when few do’ approach to editing.
In this case, it is a small bit of narrative color to the story. Not the wide shot to show the grandiosity and scope of the scene, but just a bit of showing how Maxima and Dabbler interact, and how Sydney gets an involuntary education she did not know that she didn’t need. And at least some of the readers are amused by these antics.
If you are not, it is just a couple of pages, usually three at most – unless Dave needs to give us some exposition. (as was the case with the history of the succubae. After all, it is a big no-no to introduce a race of house elfs into your worldbuilding).
Besides … what really is the story you want to return to? There is no plot, no arc, no three or five act structure.
Slice of life (which Grrl Power is) and road movies do not have a regular structure. The story moves between more or less defined start- and endpoints and things happen among the way. This being a comedy, funny or at least amusing things happen. Dabbler riling up Maxima over something she has asked for herself is at least somewhat funny. Sydney getting a close up view of some of what being a succubus actually means also is somewhat funny. At least I would call it funny enough for the time it will eventually take to read these two or three pages in a printed format. Or in a couple of months when you read this whole side-track upon side-track chapter as a completed part of the web novella.
well. I’ll give dabbler credit. when you have awkward questions, she doesn’t feel awkward about them
ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch
nah, “flinty bit” NOPE
i feel itchy now
So, here’s the thing. One that joke will never get old and two if size is not a barrier I can’t imagine environmental conditions are either. The real concern is if conflicting energy types will cause problems.
So, very, very briefly, Sydney Maxima and Dabbler all experienced having sex with the rock guy as Dabbler. That’s now a thing they can all vividly remember doing.
Dave, have you made any web changes? The set of ‘favorite comic links’ on the right side of the page is missing.
(Firefox browser, Windows 10)
Yeah, noticed that too. A lot of the comic links were moribund, but I’d gotten into to the habit reading some of the active ones through this page. Oh well, if I can’t remember to hunt them up on my own they weren’t worth reading anyway.
I see Collective of Heroes is finally dead too, showing account suspended. More than half the links on that aggregator site have been dead for years anyhow, guess they finally stopped paying the bills for what was left. Hiveworks has people bailing left right and center too. Time to redo my favorites list, methinks.
I suspect that starting and maintaining a webcomic has a success rate even lower than the average small business. I suppose a lot of those comics stay on the aggregator sites on the off hand chance the author might come back. There seem to be many where the comic showed promise but the author got a full time job, or a lucrative free lance gig and just never came back from hiatus.
The rock guy with flames for hair was hosting the party. It was probably a diplomatic affair to commemorate signing the new legal charter for his planet; the Magma Carta.
The Magma Charta
Honest question: has Arianna ever had to lecture Maxima for going too far in restricting Dabbler? I feel that sometimes her prudishness crosses the line into disrespecting Dabbler’s culture and heritage.
…On the other hand, Dabbler once violated the absolute hell out of the sexual harassment guidelines with regards to Maxima in the shower. So they do tend to be a little laid back with regards to rules enforcement… https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-592-funhouse-funbags/
Arianna is not HR, she’s the team publicist. She wouldn’t be doing any lecturing of Maxima because I think they’re on the same page regarding the team image – except when Arianna wants Max to “lighten up”.
She does admonish Sydney for not thinking before acting *in public*. Although some of the recent issues are ones where there’s no good response and you just have to work your way through the bad publicity. Being filmed giving mouth-to-mouth to a demon after you’ve knocked him unconscious because he was trying to fight you comes to mind. At what point was there an Arianna-approved offramp to that situation?
There is an HR person for the team but we haven’t seen her in a while.
I get the feeling like this was an excuse to draw Sydney blushing, with out Maxima reminding her to save the irrelevant questions for after the important part.
Look, I’m not saying I want a rock dude, I don’t want a rock dude, but the way she makes it sound? I kinda want her life.