Grrl Power #1394 – Sanity check
Sydney is looking at this from the same perspective she would if she read a Superman comic where he fights a mugger. And not the old, old, old, original incarnations of Superman where he could, indeed, stop a locomotive, but still spent most of his time going after bank robbers armed with a .38 special, or at most, a Tommy gun. That’s not a fair fight, nor was it intended to be, but there’s still many orders of magnitude between that Superman and more recent incarnations, who regularly fights apocalypse level threats like Darkseid and does stuff like towing the Earth, (which has apparently happened more than once because the first image result is the pic I linked of him towing multiple planets in a manner that would probably cause catastrophic weather events, at a minimum.)
Sydney is objecting to that souped up version of Superman battling a street level thug. Maxima can’t tow the Earth, that’s… well, that’s just dumb, really. What the hell would you attach the chain to? A continent? Which famously float on lava? (Yeah, I know it’s more complicated that that. I’m just saying it’s not exactly a solid anchor point.) And even if that didn’t cause civilization ending earthquakes, how would you maintain the rotational integrity of the planet? Just give that chain a tug every 24 hours? So yeah, Maxima can’t tow a planet, not just because it’s dumb, but because that’s simply not the power scale of the Grrl-verse.
That said, her fighting some rando like this is unfair in the extreme. And Sydney’s like, “This is like a power lifter who is also somehow a super agile Parkour expert fighting a baby with colic and polio. What exactly is fun about this?” I mean, if this guy was a straight up Nazi, then yeah, do all that and worse, but he’s just some guy who obviously overestimates himself.
As far as their disguises not having a brain-interface, that’s true. There is a version that can interface with certain wet or cyberware to allow conscious control, but the ones they’re using fall in the range between the advanced tech Cora uses and Maxima’s color changing collar. They’re at the higher end of that spectrum, since they include the “sonar-proofing” as well as a Virtual Intelligence that listens to conversations and pays attention to body language to adjust things like Sydney’s wolf-ears.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
So, the kid has enough self-awareness that he’s figured out he’s totally outmatched. But there’s a cute girl watching, and it’s better to get beat than to bail.
I Still think she’s older than him. But yeah, he’s definitely showboating for his hot date.
Huh. Kid really is making an ass of himself to impress the girl.
‘Something memorable’ might actually propel him to first base.
Huh. I hadn’t even guessed about the peer pressure bit. Do you think Max noticed that little quirk?
She must have noticed a sudden shift in tone this page and the fact that he’s a showboat(showboating without peers serves little purpose).
Also in #1390 she notices the insigma on the peer, which is still of high status as she would’ve learned from Detla.
She at least must know that the girl is a peer and that he’s showing off.
The question is whether or not she managed to connect the dots(and cares).
She appears to be of at least a bit lower status. While they have the same base insignia (his is longer, but that may be an embellishment or just a consequence of the viewing angle), he has three pips (two below the line, one above), while she only has one (above the line). I don’t think we’ve been informed of exactly what those mean, but it seems likely that more = higher status to some degree. That may be victorious sanctioned duels – or just duels in which the foe formally acknowledged the warrior’s skill, even if they lost (or maybe pips below the line are honorable losses while those above are honorable victories?). But I do agree that he is very clearly trying to impress her. Now that the wind has been taken out of his sails a bit, I’ll be interested to see how he fights – he appears to recognize her as being superior in skill, so he should be taking things more seriously and toning down the showboating. I’d imagine he will learn several valuable lessons here and be a better duelist for it, but we’ll see.
That… just makes him worse: he’s trying to impress someone who is societally inferior? o_O
He must really want to get into her pants (to show off how slim his butt is :P )
The fact that he *has* to impress someone of lower status and can’t just order her into his bed is a good thing.
Meant that he has to try and impress someone lower… and still failing at it
The fact he can’t just order her means there are rules in that culture that not even he can get around
Yeah, he’s totally doing this to impress her. So far I don’t think it’s working all that well. Though since she’s not saying anything it’s kind of hard to read her expression through the mask (“Is she not impressed, or just able to let the mask hide being impressed?”). It’s a good thing for us he’s able to read it and react expressively.
Larry Niven had one method to tow the Earth worked out in A World Out of Time. Move Jupiter and have its gravity affect Earth’s orbit. Moving Jupiter involved using a (really big) ramscoop to fuse Jupiter’s atmosphere and use that as a propulsion source.
I’m not up on the math involved. It seems at least sort of plausible; much more so than putting some sort of chain around the Earth. But it would take years to do, is much less dramatic, and doesn’t require Superman’s strength.
You don’t want to make mistakes with that though. If Jupiter gets too close you end up with Earth breaking up…
The Pierson’s Puppeteers liked the concept. Given they’re some of the most cautious (cowardly) creatures in the Nivenverse, the fact they moved their whole solar system to escape radiation from the exploding galactic core suggests they worked out the math and improved – or probably perfected – the method.
IIRC, the Puppeteer’s improved method consisted of saying, “screw it. We’ll buy space engines that can do the job from the Outsiders and make payment installments for the next few millenia.”
Properly moving a planet with water requires being gentle, which means using gravity, and not a lot of gravity unless you have really good control. Tides are a thing, and 500 foot tides, while nothing on a global scale, will upset a LOT of people. Pretty much everyone, really.
Quite a while back, I actually worked on that as a thought problem, and figured out that parking a sizeable asteroid above a planet, with huge drives to keep it stationary (not in orbit or free fall, but parked) would cause the planet to move towards the asteroid. Doesn’t sound like much acceleration, a thousandth of a gravity or thereabouts, but the tides would be minimal and you could move the planet quite a lot over a few years. IIRC (NOT doing the math again this early in the morning) it would take about 20 years to move to the orbit of Pluto. Doesn’t matter what kind of drives you use, ion drives, electrostatic “repel the very fine powder” drives or whatever, as long as you stick enough of them on that asteroid to hold it stationary above the planet you can move a planet very safely. (BTW, passing a planet close enough to move a planet in a few months will cause horrible tides. Niven avoided that issue by having an Earth that had no real oceans, and the only people were in Antarctica.) Again of course, you’d want emergency drives that could throw it into orbit temporarily if there was some kind of problem with the main drives.
Space engines are basically all (not counting solar sails, as they aren’t ‘engines’) in the business of throwing stuff away from the thing they are moving. Whether they throw cold nitrogen gas, the combustion products of some fuel and oxidiser, or highly accelerated ions that’s all the same basic category. Which is where the problem with your system arises. Stuff ‘thrown’ off your asteroid to keep it in position is going to hit the planet below it and transfer momentum to it. Just as much as the asteroid attracts the planet with gravity, it also pushes it away by hitting it with that crap.
I guess you could have multiple engines whose exhaust is aimed sufficiently away from the planet and with sufficient velocity to miss.
If you do repeated slingshots with a massive object making a fairly close passage by the Earth, each pass can provide a bit of impulse, while you can do all the actual rocketry fairly far away from Earth.
The Jupiter trick Niven came up with didn’t require Jupiter to get very close to Earth at all, because Jupiter is so massive, so the tidal effects were minimal.
The problem with moving a massive body is how do you move it? First of all, if you have some sort of engine pointing up, the reaction mass having to overcome the escape velocity is going to greatly reduce the specific impulse (not even considering reaction mass being slowed by the atmosphere). Secondly, for a gaseous body like Jupiter, what are going to push against? So, an engine accelerating a body is going to be less efficient the more massive it is.
So instead you use swarms. You find a metric gigafuckton of asteriods in the 5-10 km range, attach solar powered ion engines using the asteroids’ own mass as reaction mass, and steer them into a close call of the body you want moved with periapsis in the direction you want the body moved. Each pass will have a miniscule effect, but with enough bodies and enough repeat passes, you can get the job done.
For gas giants, there’s actually a really cool design based around a fusion ‘candle’ which you burn at both ends.
First, you build a HEAVILY reinforced pair of fusion rockets pointing in opposite directions, with the hydrogen intake systems in the middle between the two rockets, and a VERY strong superstructure holding it all together.
Then, you launch the candle into the gas giant, and use the lower-facing fusion rocket to get it to ‘hover’ at the ideal altitude for your desired temperature and pressure. Once you have a stable hover achieved, you throttle up the upward-facing rocket, while also throttling up the downward-facing rocket an equal amount. So you’re still hovering, but you know have two huge fusion rockets applying (almost) equal pressure towards the middle from both ends. The bottom rocket exerts slightly more pressure, because it’s also counteracting gravity at the same time.
And now you’re shooting mass away from the gas giant at very high velocity, while also keeping your candle at the same constant distance and bearing from the gas giant’s core, which means net propulsion must be acting on the gas giant.
And you can sort of ‘slide’ the candle’s hover to different locations on the gas giant in order to change the direction of thrust the gas giant is experimenting, thus permitting you to steer.
Those tidal effects are also going to stress the Earth’s crust, so you’re going to have every faultline on the planet giving way at once. Might trigger a supervolcano or two as well.
I believe the method is referred as a “Gravity Tug” or “Gravity Tractor.”
You place a large heavy object (T) near another object you want to move (A). You use engines on the T to keep it from touching A. The gravitational attraction between the two moves A without causing surface damage, atmosphere destruction, etc. It tends to be slow, but as long as there is propulsion, the acceleration would be constant and barely noticeable on A except for tidal changes. If you had the energy you could use our moon to do it to Earth.
At the end of the “Manifold Trilogy” of books by Stephen Baxter he describes a giant solar sail being constructed above a star. The light pressure from the star keeps the sail from falling in, but the gravity of the sail pulls the star. The intention is to stop the star from falling into our galaxy’s core black hole in millions of years causing a Gamma Burst that will sterilize most of the galaxy.
The problem with Niven’s method is attaching a ramscoop to Jupiter isn’t going to move Jupiter, it’s just going to drive the ramscoop into Jupiter’s core, where it will stall out. Any body over about 100 miles in diameter is going to act like a fluid. That’s why they’re all approximately spherical, allowing for tidal and rotational effects.
Niven posited a very-long-period pulsejet. After the scoop stalled out, it was covered over and acted as a hot-hydrogen balloon to float it back to the top of the atmosphere.
I’m pretty sure Niven’s gravity tractor used Neptune as the tug. The engine was a massive ramscoop powered by a fusion reactor. With the top end closed, the gas within heated up and it floated to the top of the atmosphere. Then you remove the cover, light the torch, and the ramscoop blasts plasma into space and forces itself down into the depths, stopping just before the pressure would wreck it. Then you cover the top and wait for it to float up again.
Sydney’s mistake is that she’s looking at it from the perspective of her comic book-saturated nerd brain rather than Maxima’s “strong independent woman” brain, which says that showing up arrogant douchebags is fun regardless of threat level. And while he didn’t go so far as to proposition her, randomly demanding a duel with that smug smirk is about the same level of rudeness.
Also the whole “It would look more sus to not fight him” thing.
You forgot “military mind”….
Max is professional and distinguished military. Their *job* is to show up and humble smug, arrogant douchebags who try to throw their weight around without first carefully estimating an opponent’s strength.
Preferably from a position that’s as superior as possible.
And Max is doing so at the moment, while taking extreme care to hurt the kid no more than bruising his Ego and bum a bit..
Another thing Sydney completely misses.
Yup, combine both, and she is perfectly positioned to play a wise master who can’t help but use a presented opportunity to teach a lesson.
No, that is not the job of a military mind. A military mind asks how to achieve the mission objective, at the smallest possible cost in lives, treasure, and long-term capability.
In order to do that they need to humble smug, arrogant douchebags within their own ranks – they are bad for order, morale, and discipline. They will ignore training. They will screw up and endanger mission objectives for the sake of their egos. They will cause resentment that leads other people screw up their mission objectives just in order to stay away from them. They will cost long-term capabilities and increase long-term costs by driving away experienced and trained personnel, by exposing the organization to later lawsuits and by directly reducing the ability of those they victimize.
Putting smug douchebags in their place is not the objective, it is the means. Smug douchebaggery cannot be permitted within the ranks, but there’s no military reason to give a damn about it elsewhere.
But once someone gets into the habit of humbling arrogant douchebags it’s easy to carry that with you elsewhere.
Sydney skips the option that she might be the only one affected by the brain altering effect.
Also Dabbler has proven that it’s deeply within the ethical boundaries of the people she interacts with to accept the use of mind control from their friends.
There could even be reason for this. Mannerism can be a very clear indication of somebody’s identity.
Superman is an interesting example of power-scaling.
When first introduced he wasn’t that powerful, nor did he have his classic weaknesses (Kryptonite, etc).
By the America’s Golden Age of Comics (I specify America as other countries have or are having theirs at different times) he was the classic OP character, flying across the universe without needing air, towing lines of planets between galaxies, and his only weaknesses being the light of a Red Sun and various flavours of Kryptonite.
But by the 80s most writers for Superman realised weaknesses and limitations made superheroes more interesting (coincidentally it was around the time a lot of UK writers started working for DC and you got the likes of Vertigo and Helix comics from DC), so Superman couldn’t fly ithrough deepspace without aids, he gained a weakness against magic, without enough sunlight he could weaken if not lose his powers (he was even de-powered for a while), he could be concussed and suffer from amnesia, he even temporarily died.
Now though, it seems he’s getting overpowered again. Which is kind of boring.
I wonder if thats why many of the more well-regarded Superman story arcs have been ones where he cant just super-punch the opposition into oblivion.
That’s the trick with OP characters, and the really hard part. You need to come up with interesting ‘problems’ or situations for them to solve that do not require just punching the problem away, where their OP power set can be a tool to help in solving the problem, but just that a tool, where the whole situation does not rely on the drama of the big bad fight between the hero and the villain.
There are good morality tales to tell with the powerful versions of superman. It just means you can’t have his challenges be ones that are solved by taking the awesome power of a god and putting it to the same use as an especially sharp rock.
Roughly translated, Kal-El means “voice of god” and his latest movie is very much leaning into that. Not killing *anyone*, being willing to sacrifice for others, saving the squirrel, being frustrated at them killing the kaiju… The movie is definitely portraying him as “what if god walked amoung us, and was actually a good man instead of the monster the bible shows?”
Of course Maxima wouldn’t tow the earth.
She’d push it, changing position as necessary.
Fun fact: in Superman’s very earliest appearances, he couldn’t even fly. He could only jump very high and far — hence the tagline “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” — but not fly. It was actually the Fleischer Studios cartoon shorts that introduced his power of flight. The first cartoon, “The Mad Scientist”, still shows him jumping rather than flying, but after that cartoon aired, Fleischer decided that the jumping looked ridiculous and asked Action Comics (which would later become DC Comics) if it would be OK to just have him be able to fly instead. They agreed, and from then on, Supes could fly in both the comics and the cartoons.
I believe he was still just jumping in the B&W TV serials I watched as a kid. OTOH, he did pull off some stunts I never saw in the comics, like walking straight through a wall intangibly, by sheer mental effort. His mind being super, too.
Just jumping is kind of problematic for a superhero, actually, because once you jump you’re committed to land at a specific spot, regardless of whether there’s a mother pushing a stroller with triplets at it when you arrive. And, no, Spiderman, doing flips on the way down doesn’t change where you land…
Spiderman can alter his trajectory using his webs. But it is probably best to not think too much about how his webswinging actually can work.
You absolutely can modify where you land by adjusting your posture to affect how aerodynamic you are – the less aerodynamic, the more air resistance will slow you down. It won’t let you change it by a lot, of course, but depending on the distance of the leap and how long you have to adjust, you could probably avoid a stroller or similar. You can also adjust the posture when you land to potentially avoid a collision, but as your center of mass will have to be in the same location regardless of posture, this will only work in fairly limited circumstances. Supes might be able to generate a bit of lift by using his cape as an improvised (and very crappy) glider, allowing a further adjustment, but it’s still not going to be a particularly large one. Supers typically need some sort of in-air maneuverability – essentially a weak version of flight that isn’t enough to defeat gravity but will let you “fall with style” – to make a super jump feasible. That, or an ability to predict the future that also accounts for people’s reactions to what you’re doing – jumping where that stroller shouldn’t be won’t help much if the lady pushing it misjudges where you’re landing and winds up pushing her stroller to your landing spot thinking she’s getting out of the way.
tell that to a squirrel/cat
The “wandering master” story is suitable for the kid, but it’s also kind of an issue for Maxima.
The last Stygan who dealt with a clearly superior opponent ended up following them around.
Maybe Maxima has the freedom say no.
Oh! Very good point!
I’m old enough to have seen that “towing planets” panel when it was first published in the comic, and even then as a kid I immediately recognized about five major problems with it, science-wise. Young me went, “OH COME ON!!”
Yeah, and lifting huge objects where his hands would, realistically, just push right through them, or his feet sink into the ground.
I believe they actually gave Superman Maxima style zero range telekinesis eventually, in order to explain that.
Not exactly. They did that for Superboy, but not Superman, Supergirl, or Powergirl. With them (full blooded Kryptonians) they have what is called a Kryptonian Biomatrix. Its not telekinesis – its a field around every kryptonian cell that allows resists certain physics forces around them and a very thin layer around them, which is responsible for their ability to fly, their invulnerability, resistance to poisons, ability to survive in space or underwater (according to some writers), ability to lift/punch/push huge objects without them breaking apart under their own mass, ability to move at superhuman speed (flying or running or moving in general) without friction setting the atmosphere or ground or other objects on fire), ability to catch people falling or move with them at superhuman speed without yhe peopke dying from whiplash or basic gravity, and the ability to not be budged unless they allow it (with basic rute force rather than leverage and using their own strength against them) despite and mass differences. The kryptonian biomatrix requires solar energy or a particular wavelength to function at maximum efficiency, so different solar wavelengths affect the kryptonian biomatrix differently. Its also why kryptonite, which is radioactive, uurts and ususlly starts to depower them – it disrupts the kryptonian biomatrix’s frequency (which messes with the ability to use their powers), and thrn the radioactivity itself starts killing them (depending on the type of kryptonite). Also additional solar energy that dies not get used for the aforementioned powers wind up being stored gor things like heat vision or (in the case or supergirl) a solar flare which expends a lot of solar energy quickly). The kryptonian biomatrix is very difficult to clone even if you can clone the rest or the body sibce its not a physical organ per se (only Dr Sivana ever managed to do it once, with Divine, the clone of Power Girl). Usually pure kryptonian DNA will start to break diwn when cloned because or the biomatrix not duplicating correctly. When Superboy was cloned from Superman, to get around this problem, his kryptonian DNA was spliced with himsn DNA as a stabilizer (from Lex Luthor). But the boomatrix did not dyplicate there because of that. So the scientists gave Superboy “tactile telekinesis” in order to mimic most kryptonian powers, similar to how Matrix mimicked most kryptonian powers with her own telekinesis during the Linda Danvers Supergirl comic book arc. Although that didnt allow superboy to have certain powers like heat vision, and the TTK was not at the sane level of power as a kryptonian biomatrix either.
Seriously this is the actual comic book reason behind how kryptonian powers and superboys powers work :)
Sorry for any spelling mistakes – wrote this on my phone on the stupid virtual keyboard while waiting in the court hallway and I didn’t have time to spell check everything.
Mind the old superman mention/ George Reeves tv show version. He let the opponents shoot and swing fists. I know I know. that’s how shows rolled. headcanon- he gave them that feel they had a chance
Then for some reason he would duck when they invariably threw the empty gun at him.
Well, it’s probably better that they think his weakness is to empty guns than Kryptonite, right?
As the actor explained, the gun was a solid piece of metal, thrown respectably hard, and if it hit him it might do damage or at least be unpleasant.
Maybe the best time to have a reality and goals check discussion isn’t in the middle of a duel, while infiltrating a highly advanced society in order to test yourself against the galaxy’s best war machines.
Which is actually a different point: If Maxima is going to keep this disguise while entering the fighting contest, I can see Mr. Ego there watching his favorite war machine fights and going “Wait, that’s the woman I dueled on the streets!”
It has been stated, many times, that these disguises are not the ones that will be used once they (eventually) reach the location of the Tournament
The kid’s girl looks decidedly unimpressed.
Hopefully there’s not some more nuanced outcomes to these duels, like Delta needing to become a student after she was defeated.
It occurs to me that if Maxima makes a name for herself as Egoma in the tournament, this kid will be able to look back on his beating here and brag considerably if they really believe getting their arse kicked by a wondering master is a feather in the cap.
She isnt going to be Egoma in the tournament. She is considering some sort of ‘advanced battle robot’ disguise for that.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1387-anatomically-suspect-advice/
(Panel 5)
The fact that “Egoma” will drop out of sight after this visit will enhance that effect.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1387-anatomically-suspect-advice/
(Panel 5)
The fact that Syd is not I,mediately looking for the hottest food source in her vicinity is a really big step up for her! She has learned! ✨ding✨
In your tagline below the comic, the word you want to use is “counsel”, not “council”. From Dictionary.com:
counsel
[koun-suhl]
Phonetic (Standard)
noun
plural counsel
advice; opinion or instruction given in directing the judgment or conduct of another.
I assume the VI used in their disguises also affects things like Max’ mask, since they’re supposed to be emotive. :)
Stop with the nazi crap. Nazis exist, and you people who want to kill them for being nazis are absolutely no differnt than them. I’ll bet my fortune you’ve never spoken with a real self-proclaimed nazi in your life, because The Party doesn’t allow you to. I have, and we don’t keep nazis in check by killing them. We do it by continually keeping their ideas, their propaganda, their pathetic stupidity on the public stage for all to see and ridicule. WE DON’T KILL THEM. We certainly don’t justify assassinating our political opponants by merely CALLING them nazis, yet recent polling has 60% of democrats under 40 saying it’s OK to do exactly that. Stop inciting political assassinations.
In the Netherlands there was just a massive nazi riot where they trashed the offices of the blandest political party in the country (D66) while sieg heiling and all the populist and right wing parties are saying that this isn’t political. Get the fuck out of here with your weak symbolic resistance to nazis, they have literally taken over several right wing governments in several countries and you’re still pretending that literal nazis are not a real physical threat? Fuck all the way off. We shouldn’t have stopped at mocking them, their entire ideology is an existential threat that needs to be rooted out at the jugular.
I agree that you can’t just call someone a nazi and then kill them, you need to confirm it first, but if I ever read about someone killing a literal nazi I will check their victim was actually a nazi and then raise a toast in the honour of the killer.
Depends on exactly what you mean by “Nazi.” Holding – even espousing – absolutely horrible beliefs shouldn’t be punished (aside from refusal to interact with them, or opting to argue with and/or make fun of them), at least so long as that espousing doesn’t include things like an incitement to violence (just as you aren’t allowed to use your right to keep and bear arms to shoot someone you disagree with, you also aren’t allowed to use your right to free speech to incite others to do so). I’d imagine a lot of people here above the age of 30 have had some pretty bad beliefs in the past that would make them cringe now; that doesn’t mean they were worthy of being slain while they held said beliefs.
Now, someone who has gone out and beaten people to death in the street for being “subhumans” or similar? Yeah, they probably deserve a bullet or three.
To be clear, I don’t think Dave was talking about Nazi’s in terms of “people who hold abhorrent views” but rather more “people who have performed abhorrent acts.” Although I will admit that, if someone with abhorrent views challenges you to a fight (or accepts your own challenge), you’re well within your rights to thrash them to the limits of what the rules of said fight allow, and I won’t fault you for enjoying every second of it.
Remember the first issue of Captain America?
I don’t think that remark actually had anything to do with the recent trend of labeling public figures “Nazis” and then shooting at them. I think he meant literal space Nazi.
Who said anything about killing Nazis? A solid beatdown, sure, but you’re the one who brought up murder. And what’s this “The Party” crap? Are you one of those who thinks anyone to the left of Franco is a Communist?
Funny you should mention the Nazis, because there is something very strange about them: They should no longer exist. And I don’t mean that in the edgy cringelord liberal commentor way of wishing death upon them. What I am talking about is that throughout history, when an authoritarian organization rises to power and subsequently faces defeat, they do not rise again. Those who aspire to their ideals might try to start anew, but never under the same banner. It goes against an ideology based around strength to support a group that has proven itself a failure. And yet for some reason these traits do not apply to the Nazis. It’s almost as if they are being propped up by some force that does not agree with their ideals. So I ask you, the reader, this: Who could possibly stand to gain from the continued existence of Naziism?
I get the feeling we’re talking to one right now, or you wouldn’t be so upset about an Indiana Jones grade comment.
“That sounds like something a Nazi would say.”
If he is so eager perhaps a rendition of the monthy python black knigth could be a valuable lesson.
The fisrt question is ” Did you have a medical emergency messures and acces to a spare limbs ? Because if he is so serious about it I must inflic serious wounds.”
It occurs to me that with such advanced med tech, the crew could possibly help Sydney with her ADHD problem. Probably not fix it but maybe a hormone therapy body adaptation that wouldn’t leave her dependent on drugs to regulate.
ADHD isn’t necessarily a “problem”, and can be an advantage in some situations. It did evolve naturally in humans. Someone who can hyperfocus on solving a problem, but still be easily distracted by an approaching predator or enemy, would have an advantage in the past. It’s only with modern society where people are expected to stare at a computer for hours on end that ADHD is seen as “bad”.
You obviously attach the chain to one of the poles. You’ll need one heckuva overengineered swivel snap, though.
Anything big enough for its own gravity to have packed into a round shape (okay, an oblate spheroid if it’s spinning) has approximately the shear strength of water. Which is to say, approximately none.
You can’t penetrate it deeper than your momentum divided by the product of its mass density and your frontal area, you can’t tow it by attaching something to it and pulling, you can’t cut it into neat parts that retain their shape, and you can’t fire it out of a great big cannon.
Not least because any cannon having the necessary mass to fire it would just be a bigger sphere, also with the approximate shear strength of water. And if it were made of steel with anything approaching normal isotope ratios it would also have a molten interior, driven by iron-60 decay.
… is this guy puctuating his demand with a raspberry, or does his native language just have a particularly wet pronunciation of “five”?
No, he is opening his mouth wide (to show Egoma where to insert his foot) and showing his tongue
So Dave: you don’t regularly re-draw the Orbs, do you? I imagine since they’re (almost) always supposed to look the same, you just copy-paste them as needed?
Sydney -“… so you need to win convincingly without really hurting him in a permanent “now this is clan war, way?”
Maxima- “Basically. ”
Sydney- “Naruto. Kancho stealth attack. 10,000 years of pain. Unless that means you’re engaged and have to fight his fiancee too.”
Max – stiffles a giggle. “I’ve seen that episode.”
Sydney- ” You work that into your fighting style, I’ll go butter up the suspected missus-to-be. Convince her to get him to try to break ‘that human’s’ (Soto voice – meaning me) Grak consumption record. Tell her she can make him beg her for relief. Especially if she’s the one holding the ice cream. ”
Max- “be sure to talk in third person and not directly at her. She’ll grunt if she agrees. Be sure to insist on payment of some sort, not favors. She probably will drop it. Just pick it up and walk away.”
My headcannon on what’s coming.
Sorry to be reacting more to the author’s commentary than the comic, but this caught my eye:
“That’s not a fair fight, nor was it intended to be, but there’s still many orders of magnitude between that Superman and more recent incarnations, who regularly fights apocalypse level threats like Darkseid and does stuff like towing the Earth,”
If Supes is always towing the Earth, won’t that interfere with the alignments of the stars. If those get screwed up, we’ll probably NEVER get that visit from Cthulhu and his pals that the prophecies are always going on about. Bad thing? Good thing?
The whole thing about “towing the Earth” reminds me of a particular SuperFriends episode that has always stuck in my brain. I don’t remember the full details, but there was a future space-faring civilization, or maybe the equivalent of the Marvel Watchers, whatever – that found a desolated, destroyed Earth. Piecing together parts of archived videos and events from both sides, the problem was some sort of solar flare that the Legion of Doom was trying to use to destroy the Hall of Justice, and then there were some shenanigans with shields and other things that eventually destroyed all life on Earth.
The alien group “fixed” this by using their powers to travel back in time, and… MOVED THE MOON INTO ECLIPSE POSITION, thereby blocking the solar flare from ever reaching Earth. Even 6-or-7 year-old me knew that there was something completely wrong about this.
Wouldn’t it have simply been easier to stop the flare itself?
What Maxima wants here is not to be challenged again. So she has to beat him rather decisively, without doing him permanent harm. Kinda like the bank scene in some ways.
The Superman cartoon I remember where he towed the Earth had him wrapping the chain around the Earth, rather than binding it to a single point. Even though I was a kid, I wondered at the untold damage that chain would cause. Also, while the chain was thicker than Superman, it seemed like it was woefully thin to be towing 6 sextillion tons. (To be clear, the Earth weighs more now, but this was back in the day when that was the proper one significant digit weight.)
I could not view the link you provided for Superman towing the Earth. My search for Superman towing the Earth did not result in him towing multiple planets including the Earth, at least not that I saw, but it did include https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/User_blog:Stefano4444/Superman_move_all_habitable_planets_from_a_dying_galaxy, which features him towing a whole mess of planets with a super slender chain of unimaginable length. His narration thoughts indicate he’s moving these planets from one “dying” galaxy to a new one.
Regardless of however the chain is affixed to any of these planets, pulling them hard enough to travel between galaxies quickly enough for their inhabitants to not all die in the cold emptiness of intergalactic space would demolish everything on them. I’m not talking just buildings here, I’m also talking mountains. If the chain was wrapped around the planets in the fashion I mentioned having seen in a Superman cartoon when I was a kid and it did not break from the force, rather than pulling the planet it would rip through it like a monofilament wire. I have not done actual calculations on this, because the numbers are so immense, calculations aren’t needed.
In order to make this work, Superman would need a Maxima-like shield that extended through the chain and enveloped all of the planets, as well as individually protected each and every being on those planets. Everything impacted by his towing that was not covered with the protective aura would be demolished. This includes anything that they encountered on their journey.
At the speed they would need to travel, the color shift would be so hard that despite the fact that Superman apparently can see some ultraviolet and infrared colors, all colors he could normally see would be completely shifted out of his visual range. The only light he would be able to perceive would have such incredibly long wavelengths we probably don’t even have a way to detect it currently. Galaxies are so far apart he would need to be moving in the parsecs per second at his fastest. I’m not sure how he would even see the destination to know that he had arrived.
But somehow he does, so the next question is stopping. This is another real killer here, because that long chain of planets is more or less a whip. A normal person can get the end of a normal whip to move fast enough to make a really tiny sonic boom. If the planets bump into each other, or even come significantly closer to each other than they’re depicted to be, their gravity wells would interact catastrophically. So he has to stop it like a whip.
To be clear, I’m not trying to say that Superman cannot do these things. I am just marveling at how amazing he needs to be to do them.
Superman has towed the earth a few times. The one you are showing was from silver age, where sny sense of logic took a holiday. The other times were once with green lantern, which prevented all those potential problems with moving the earth, and once with the help of martian manhunter and wondercwonan ysibg her lastcwith a magic spell on it, as well as Batman using tech creating some sort of gravity field so the planet would not have massive environmental effects. So magic plus super tech
Superman having tactile TK started after the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot, as a way of showing how he could lift a cruise liner that was sinking without it just folding around him. The cloned Superboy effectively had a more versatile, but far weaker form of that (or Superman never practiced it to be that ‘light’).
Effectively, Superman grabs onto an entire object at the same time with his TK. All of it. And holds it steady. IN the case of towing planets, it extends along the chain and he’s grabbing everything at the same time with his TK. The world doesn’t fall apart, get mashed around him, chains don’t break, tides don’t flurry, atmospheres don’t burst, because he’s holding on the entire thing, all at the same time, and they aren’t moving.
Any more than that hotel in the justice league movie didn’t fall down around and above him. He’s grabbing ALL of it at the same time.
The first time I saw him push a planet was in world’s finest, where he teams up with Adam Strange, and has to push Earth just a few inches to get it into a zeta teleport before the planet Rann materializes in the same place and destroys both planets. He pushes the top of a mountain, but of course should have just shoved himself through the stone like it was air against that much weight.
But, no. He pushed the entire world from that mountain that should have just parted before him. And the only way to do that was to grab the world with TK and give it a shove.
Pretty much all his powers are psionic based like that. Power Girl developing more mental powers, and some of the Phantom Zone villains developing alternate powers leans ever more heavily into the trope.
His grabbing objects is why they don’t suffer inertia problems with his moving and stopping: once he grabs them, they are effectively as tough as he is for purposes of overcoming such forces. He grabs every cell in their body, the kinetic energy is wasted, and life goes on.
Reminds me of the British hero, Miracle Man. (Alan Moore version) Almost all his powers were, explicitly, mental in nature, even if they manifested as super strength, speed, invulnerability, flight…
That’s not Superman who has the TTK, it’s Superboy. Superman has the kryptonian biomatrix. It’s different and a lot more effective for his powers. TTK was the closest Cadmus / Luthor could get to it.
zrrt. Tactile TK just means TK that is conveyed by touch. That whole effect started with Superman as a way to explain why he could lift buildings and cruise ships, as I directly mentioned above, after Crisis on Infinite Earths when he was rebooted.
The biomatrix stuff came literally DECADES later.
Superman’s TTK is potentially planetary in scope, but all he’s ever seen to do is ‘grip’ stuff with it. Superboy Conner Kent could ‘manipulate’ stuff with his touch TK as a young teen, which is probably because of its dilution with his human bloodline. By the time of Young Justice et al, the cartoon dropped all signs of him being able to do that.
aaaaaaaawwwwww
he just wants to get laid
Tow the Earth? A mere nothing. In one 1950s comic I read at the time, Superboy noted that a red sun was going to pass through and destroy the Earth. He also discovered that flying into the Red Sun was incredibly painful — this is when he discovered Red Sun rays — so he grabbed a half-dozen yellow stars put them in the correct places, and used their gravitational forces to tow the red star away from Earth.
Keep up. Punchy, punchy IS sage counsel
Last panel – the thing manning the booth kinda reminds me of Pilot from Farscape. Maybe this guy’s name is Frycook?
Anyone else get the feeling that the girl he’s trying to impress might be far better in combat than he is?
There was a Superboy comic from the fifties or sixties where a newspaper challenged him to perform some special feats to show how powerful he was. For the last of them he stands on his hands for a few minutes then says that if they print the photo upside down they’ll see that he was actually lifting the entire planet – astronomers confirm that he changed Earth’s orbit. I think he put it back at the end but I’m not sure. Even then (aged 10-ish) I wondered what the ground in Smallville is made of that he didn’t simply bury himself in the rock exerting that much pressure, later I realised that unless he was super careful he had just screwed up positional astronomy forever. Annoyingly this doesn’t seem to be on line anywhere and I can’t now remember which issue it was.