Grrl Power 1397 – Have a nice trip, see you next Seoi Nage
I’ve said it before, but Max is a surprisingly good martial artist in her own right. She’s not world class for sure, for two reasons. One, she’s never had the time to dedicate to doing martial arts for four hours a day (or whatever amount of time sounds like a lot without sounding like too much to allow for physical and mental recovery. I personally have taken like… 6 aikido classes and one self defense class 30 years ago so I have no idea what the “correct” amount of time is for an olympic judo guy to spend on something like that.) Being an officer, the officer in a new branch of the military has kept her pretty busy, and that was before she became a professional supercat wrangler full time. Two, she’s just never had anyone who could realistically give her that push that would force her to take it to the next level. Tamping down her powers to human levels is impossible as far as she’s been able to achieve. She can lower her strength so she’s not crushing doorknobs and the like, but she usually does that by dumping that power into armor. Even if she could drop all her stats to “fit human woman” levels, doing that while also trying to push herself to be a better, faster fighter is just impossible. Her super speed would quickly start bleeding into her stats, at a minimum, probably armor as well.
Still, she’s put a lot of effort into being a better fighter than supers who have a lot of strength or armor and thought they were some phenomenal Übermensch because they were the only super they’d ever met. Admittedly, that’s such a low bar. Knowing one wrist lock would make her a better fighter than 90% of them. Still, she holds herself to a much higher standard. Part of that is personal pride, but part of it is knowing that as the leader of the world’s first public super team, a lot of eyes are on her, and she wants to be an enduring deterrent that people take seriously, even if idiot incel dudes will always dismiss her for having big boobs no matter how many times she saves the earth and all that.
Anyway, for this fight against the Stygans, she’s using just the tiniest bit of super speed to keep ahead of things and plan her attacks. She doesn’t want to hurt these guys, and wouldn’t have done a leg sweep with the butt of the glaive hard enough to knock both of the house guards flat on their backs if they weren’t wearing metal boots. Stuff like that. Admittedly, trapping a thrusting glaive between your knees when it didn’t look like you were perfectly positioned to do so was really pushing the edge of straight up cheating with the super speed. I mean, she is cheating, but that one move might be a little suspicious if someone was recording the fight on some space camera that records at 120,000 FPS because advanced alien consumer tech can just casually do that.
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… what was her big idea aiming towards armored part of Maxima anyway? Seems like the worst strategy to begin with.
Even if armored, getting hit in the side or back of the knee usually staggers you pretty hard.
Back in the day Captain Britain was a simple brawler until he became part of Excalibur. When they had time Nightcrawler taught him some basic martial arts and the Captain became a much more effective fighter.
Some might think that someone of his strength wouldn’t need that, but as long as you are not Superman and you fight people with similar or superior strength martial arts training doesn’t just enable you to win faster, but also with less collateral damage.
Until new writers forget the continuity.
So Max being military it doesn’t surprise me that she has martial arts training.
Ok this is going from “memorable” to “Legendary!” All Stygans would likely know a Legendary ronin by name and wonder why they don’t know her. Bad move, Maxima! Even if they don’t wonder, there will be star-struck younglings searching her out for instruction.
Pretty much all of martial arts is footing and weight shifting, both of which become very different when you can fly, so martial arts training from someone without that power would be of limited usefulness. If the flyer wanted to hide their power, sure, it would let them fight a bit better while doing so, but that’s a pretty niche use case to spend hours and hours of training on.
An S.A.I* could be the most fearsome figther, it could use deiferent shell – bodies- as computer battle interface is not limited to humanoïd body , imagine maxima praticing grappling against a strength , speed and training, equivalent octopus …
And trainning to maintain skills is not a probleme for a computer … memory is muscle memory , reflexese is question of cash memory and registers , and a couch potato lifestyle don’t inder his performance.
And no sleep will put it with a lot of free time.
sentient – could assing new directives and coul reject directives , pocess free will – artificial Intelligence…
And he don’t had any hormonal reaction only intelectual ones … and a form of imortality
The inability to go down to human level stats is probably a blessing. Means she’s always minimally super in case of a sneak attack.
Or in case someone uses a very roundabout application of mind control to force Maxima to lower her stats and eat a bullet.