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.
If your goal is to kill or maim your opponent, sure. Pretty sure this was not intended to be a deathmatch though, at most blood.
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.
Have you seen how many times Superman got folded by a more skilled fighter?? I mean strength is good, but without proper technique, landing a hit is harder to do.
These days, there aren’t actually many characters that are more skilled fighters than Superman, he’s trained with the best and knows what a difference it can make, not too long ago he was trapped in Gotham with no powers for a full year, and did Batman’s job. He does just fine.
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.
She’s likely just assuming Cora can make her a new disguise after the fight.
I believe Max mentioned she would be getting a new disguise for the arena battles anyway.
She shouldn’t.
As someone involved in tracking supers of interest she should know, that one of the easier ways to track anomalous figures is to check for serial anomalous behavior around points of interest.
Fracture station is one of the two places in the galaxy where supers have been spotted before.
Looking differently in a galaxy where small paramilitary organizations have access to hard light disguises doesn’t say a lot, but displaying super speed(speed is negatively affected by size) at the same moment people with known connections to one of the few sources of super speed related anomalies are on the same location can be enough to raise lots of suspicion and further investigation.
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.
For somebody who spent several years in the military covering up that she and others have super powers it’s still a very realistic usecase.
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.
” 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.”
Ah, is this perhaps foreshadowing? :D
> 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.
Which begs the question – since she’s meant to be The Big Gun, should she *really* be supercat wrangling? Shouldn’t there be someone more… interchangeable, frankly, to do that?
That’s Arriana.
Kinda weird anatomy on the bottom left. Lower body facing the “front” while upper is angled towards max
The Wandering Taoist, describes the early life and training of a Taoist Monk. He was actually teaching martial arts and Taoism in California when the book was written and published. From what i remember 4-6 hours a day were spent on the martial arts training, the rest on learning Taoism. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested.
“… 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.”
Having played Dungeons and Dragons since 1E AD&D, “human female woman” stats can go pretty high. Even without gaming as a starting point, compare fitness models, bodybuilders, and other physical athletes as to what’s possible (and I’m being polite and assuming they’re doing it legitimately, not via steroids etc). I’d expect that at the top end (of non-supers) – think an appropriate analogue to Peggy – Max might actually have to put a couple points into speed and/or AC to compensate. That being said, given the option, I’d probably put the bulk of the rest into Perception or something else unnoticeable by most.
Okay, now give Math a Stygan disguise and throw him out as, “The guy who taught ‘Egoma’ to fight.” He’ll have an endless supply of people who *also* need no reason beyond, “You look tough, wanna fight?” and also might distract from Max’s suspiciously improbable speed and strength.
…Actually, now that I think about it, he’s gonna be *pissed* when he finds out this mission happened and he wasn’t invited. XD
Since you’ve noted that they all train regularly (even if it’s “off camera”), I’d say that it’s almost a guarantee that Math, and lately Jabberwocky, have spent at least a decent amount of time training with her so that she knows how to deal with highly skilled martial artists.
I would say that she basically got the training level from the original Karate Kid movie (fundamental blocks, punches, kicks, and the like to make her combat more than just relying on pumping her stats)… plus a few special moves that are custom to her that they came up with. Trying to “trip the brick” so that it neutralizes some of their strength is a pretty common tactic… so a move like the one in this week’s installment to counter someone using a baton/staff/lamp post/steel girder to try and trip her rather than risk having a limb snapped off is pretty reasonable as a move they’d teach her.
Then there’s the fact that those with super speed also are pretty much required to have their perception and processing sped up at the same time so that they don’t slam into (or through) buildings/trees/vehicles/mountains on a regular basis. (The Flash processes so fast he he thinks in terms of attoseconds. There are as many attoseconds in a second as there are seconds that have passed on theorized age of the universe. Quicksilver isn’t quite as vast, but he can move fast enough that time is virtually standing still for him if he wants.) So if Max has seen enough martial arts in action, and she has her speed pumped a bit… she’s likely perceiving and thinking at about 10-100x normal speed in this fight, which gives her a lot of time to even just adapt some moves she’s seen often enough since everything’s moving in slow-mo for her.
Some people CAN do things like that.
(As an example, I’ve only gotten the first couple of belts in Aikido, and about 6 months of Tong Soo Do… along with wrestling regularly with my friends back in high school. About 15 years ago my Tong Soo Do sensei told me to stop taking martial arts. This was because while I didn’t do well in our regular classes, when I was doing full contact sparring she saw me not only holding my own with the top students, but that I was also both pulling back on moves that would have done serious damage and was instinctively doing moves that I’d never actually trained to do. I’d just seen them in movies, martial arts documentaries, and pro-wrestling… many of which actually DO work if you’re not just putting on a show. She realized that I was an instinctive fighter and had made my own style… and didn’t want to see me ruin that by training it out of me. I can’t help but wonder if being on the Autism Spectrum has anything to do with that now that I think about it…)
Fun side note: With the necessity of speeding up perception and processing to accommodate super speed… I wonder how fast Max could learn about any given subject if she simply maxed (pun intended) her speed and used it to read 100 textbooks on the subject in the space of an hour. (I think moving the pages faster than that would ignite them from air friction.)