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.
My assumption was that she was trying to use the glaive to hook one of Max’s legs and pull her off balance. Knocking her down would count as winning a round, and the weapon has a concave point on the back of the blade that could help with a hook maneuver.
That. This is actually something that HEMA people do, mostly with pole axes. What Max did is straight up impossible without some super speed and strength. Personally, were I one of her opponents, I would start getting suspicious about now.
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.
I recall the bit in the first Marvel Secret Wars where Titania (recently empowered after life as a small and weak — in both literal and figurative senses — person) was taking out her resentments on the world and came across Spider-Man. She thought he’d be an easy target because she was so much stronger and tougher. She thought wrong — stronger and tougher doesn’t really help against someone with such massive advantages in speed, agility, and skill that you can’t hit them but they can keep hitting you…
Not onlythis, but the writers used that even as a defining point for her character for literally years.
Titania was *afraid* of Spider-man, who not only whipped her butt easily, but talked down at her in a most uncharacteristically vicious fashion. I mean, he’s a wise-cracker, but he rarely puts people down so hard they fall apart over it.
To be fair, it was in the special Secret Wars series, so it wasn’t Spider-man’s usual writers, and one could argue he himself was on edge and irritable, but yeah. He not only took her down with ease, he terrified her.
Was Spidey wearing the black suit at the time? That was the first version of Venom, so it may have been influencing his attitude.
Also got to remember one of her team mates is known for being such a good martial artist it blurs the line of if he is just that good or has super martial arts who likely taught her additional tricks during sparring or other physical exersizes
Superboy in Young Justice literally got folded by Black Canary. It’s what actually got him to learn how to fight.
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.
Or they could just follow her to Cora’s ship.
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.
I wasn’t an armchair artist until my car accident, but that’s a common move, and a simple one to boot. I trained heavily with the staff (Bo) in my youth, and that can be both a bad idea and a good one. In Max’s case, a very good one since she has her super strength and speed without going full power she’s still WAY better than these shrubs. In human terms these kids are barely into the shaving stage. I never thought much of the combat honor thing, I feel honor is won by actions, not by how many people you can hurt/main/kill for a deity or ruler’s name.
Weight distribution is a major part but it’s not “most”. What you’re thinking about is leverage. A flyer with super strength is going to do more grounded than not.
I think it’s been establilshed in cannon that Max’s “super strength” is actually self-directed psychokinesis? If so, then she can hold herself rigid in place without any muscular effort at all, and balance is no longer a priority.
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
I have a mental image of the fight videos on the Space Internet with a string of comments like the ones attached to “Golden Superheroine and Crazy Chick Foil Bank Robbery” back when Sydney was first recruited (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-108-the-passion-of-the-pr-lady/).
> 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.
SanityOrMadness sez: “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?”
It doesn’t BEG the question; it INVITES the question. The only BEGGING involved is BEGGING that the question be raised.
(This pedantic nitpickery presented free of charge by the Pedants Council, in association with Prescriptivists Inc., LLC)
Should she? No.
Will she? Yes, for a couple reasons. The first is that supers, in general, respect power most. It’s natural for someone who is physically superior and empowered in some way to feel like they have rights others don’t. It’s just how human mental processes work. Having someone they KNOW can take them one-handed without even trying in charge of them, directly, keeps that in line (somewhat; the whacko personalities that have been collected makes “control” a nebulous concept). The second is… well, the military tends to be stupid, especially when you introduce something new. For example, the Army fought tooth and nail to keep airplanes as part of its branch, despite lacking the capacity for aircraft logistics, truly separate training, and all the rest. It was plain that an Air Force needed to exist, but there was massive resistance Just Because. So, since ARC is a new pseudo-subset of the military (and just wait until the fights about who gets to claim them start…), they’re organized in a “throw enough sh!t at the wall, and see what sticks” fashion. Maxima should at the very least have two specific subordinates, one for field maneuvers (ideally Super Hiro) and one for the logistics/paperwork. It should NOT be in the purview of Arriana, who has purview over legal and merch matters.
They have Zephan Zeong overseeing the supernatural side of things but also need a manager for the weird/high technology branch. This would be even more true as they are exposed to more off world technology. Rather than this all falling under Max such people would be her peers. IRL I worked under a dual supervision model. Administratively, I supervised psychiatrists, medical doctors, psychologists, social workers and nurses but in terms of clinical practice these people answered to their discipline directors. Max does need designated subordinates but there would need to be other organizational structure. Logistics and paperwork would pretty quickly become its own thing and you wouldn’t want to tie a practicing super up reviewing time off requests. Even if you have just twenty or thirty actual supers it wont be long until you have an organization of couple of hundred people. The point being Max, is a tactical commander. Along with having designated subordinates there would need to be a cadre of people who are her organizational peers even if they aren’t all supers. They might call in Max for the heavy hitters but pretty soon Ii expect there would be an entire department for herding cats.
Obvious: She leads public facing ArcSWAT. There are other specialized divisions of Archon. Logistical Support seems to be Arc Light. Administratively General likely has a fair sized staff of his own.
Apparently they’re rehabilitating certain former villains. If the super in charge is also the most powerful one you’ve ever met, this job is easier.
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.
Teaching others can be an effective part of training. Teaching others to do it well leads you to focus on doing it well yourself.
“… 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.
The She-Hulk trained in her human form so that when she transformed she’d be proportionally stronger.
Wait, wasn’t she permanently in her green-form? When did she get the ability to switch?
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
He could fulfill the traditional role of “pervy sage master.”
Doesn’t he already do that? Hehe
“he’s gonna be *pissed* when he finds out this mission happened and he wasn’t invited”
Maybe he could commiserate with Dabbler (who missed out on Maxima and Hiro getting their clothes blasted off)…
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.)
She would learn the parts of that field that you can learn from reading books on that field.
Depending on the field, that might be only a small part of it. The rest would come from actually doing things in that field, and she might have problems.
Take IC engine repair. How fast can you do things without setting the lubricants on fire?
Given that IC engines literally work at thousands of RPMs while burning stuff inside them, you can probably do things pretty fast. Not tens of thousands of time faster than normal, but a few hundred times faster may be pretty reasonable.
The lubricants don’t catch fire during normal operation because there’s an active cooling system designed to ensure they don’t.
If you’re repairing the engine that cooling system isn’t working. See how long an engine works after you get a hole in your radiator or a plugged oil pipeline for instance.
Now I have this image of Max walking around with a cooling system strapped to her back. “I’m on my way to the library, why do you ask?”
Wonder what Math would be like in these games? Besides being a giant horndog that is.
Yeah, it’s not like she’s limited to sparring normal humans. Math is faster than normal, so is Goose or Jabberwokky, there are many strong individuals she could train grappling against.
She’ll still have to downgrade herself some, but that seems much more achievable than being forced to go to human levels.
Goose is a former Seal, not a super
Goose can hang with a literal speedster in a knife fight – WoG is that this is due to his reflexes: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-290-after-action-action/comment-page-1/#comment-293207 So he may not be specifically a super, but he isn’t a normie either.
… That may have been an oops. This may not be the best of the field that she’s moping the floor with but she’s doing it too well.
If the glaive wielder had been a dan level up, she’d have been in a good position (forearms up, guarding the upper body, and palms forward for grasping) to grab her weapon and continue the fight.
Except… Ego was faster and not only caught the glaive before it made contact with her, but manage to toss her on her back before she could react
Doesn’t matter how skilled you are, if you are sparring against someone who can fire a projectile-weapon and catch the projectile before it reaches its target
Yeah, armor seems the most harmless thing to dump unwanted points into, assuming it doesn’t change her mass.
Strength has obvious problems, as do flight and energy beams.
Speed has some obvious problems. Moving fast enough to cause hurricane winds in the cafeteria is not good. Though you could make a career out of martial artist films and provide your own sound effects…
Anyway, there are also subtle problems. Listening to anyone speaking at human speeds becomes “Will you get to the bloody point?” Which eventually will show on her face, and make her a much less effective leader.
FYI, MIT has developed a trillion fps camera that can capture light waves.
You mage my evening sir, thank you! It’s.. Not to surprising that on a low level ur physics look like computer games, right?
Just as a BTW, this move wouldn’t work with any armor we know how to make. The backs of the knees end up mostly unarmored since they involve, you know, knees bending. Rather like the insides of the elbows.
You could have hanging pieces, like are used in tassets, though you’d have to be careful about moving around if you don’t want them to lock up.
OTOH this is a society where force fields are common tech, so I suppose it’s just which bits are covered by the sectional force field and which aren’t. Which has more to do with the rules of the game they’re playing than anything made of atoms.
“Man catchers” tended to be blunt on the inside since they were designed for capturing. But if you have a hook like that weapon, then you likely sharpen the inside somewhat just so someone has a hard time grabbing it. Yeah, it will be covered by a blunting field in this fight…
“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.”
For this, I point to Schlock Mercenary, December 15, 2009:
“EBBIRNOTH: So those stupid glasses you two wear are actually good for something?
REVEREND THEO: Flash-reflex, full-spectrum protection, with constant U.V. blocking, baby. Better than most EVA visors.
KEVYN: Mine are giving me a frame-by-frame replay of the explosion, and mapping the non-visual spectra onto an overlay.
REVEREND THEO: Mine also have designer frames.”
But it is possible Fracture station puts a legal limit on retaining recordings.
Germany allows Dashcams – but Dataprivacy does not allow recording the open road 24/7.
So you only get to “keep” recordings that happened around a incident (button press or accelerometer). Everything else is dumped.
As always, the footage retained will be what someone can get away with and has the storage capacity for.
And once it’s out on the space internet, it’s out there forever.
We’re pretty sure there’s no united government here. Fracture Station probably does the “don’t let primitive screwheads buy advanced tech” dance, but only to the extent that it doesn’t make them too much of a stink to their neighbors.
Panel 2 confused me. The glaive turned into a hand? (No, it’s not a hand — parts of it are now blocked out by Maxima’s leg.) The glaive now belongs to Maxima.
How come the ‘who’s who’ has Sydney and Harem’s alter-ego names listed but Maxima’s just says ‘a stygian’ rather than ‘a stygian named “Egoma”‘? Small thing but it bugs me. xD
That’s Stygan, not Stygian. :)
There’s a trope for this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrongAndSkilled
“Y’know, most folks see me, an’ hear my “It’s clobberin’ time!” and figure I’m just a one-trick pony. But I’ve picked up a few tricks here an’ there, like this hip toss, and fightin’ with finesse comes in real handy, lemme tell ya.”
— Ben Grimm, Fantastic Four
120k is unlikely and shows your human bias for base 10. Far more likely are values such as 38880, 233280, 27720, 360360, 98304, or 196608.
Missed opportunity of having the glaive smack Punkawan in the back (not the back of the head, or the head might go flying) making it a complete strike :P
Some level of super strength is also required for this move too, because the leverage advantage is way on the opponent’s side to hold onto the glaive.
This move demonstrates both speed and strength exceeding Stygian physiology. And of course any Stygian martial-arts instructor worth their salt will be recording every bit of a duel for review, the same way every commander reviews AARs and every football coach reviews footage of every bit of every practice and every game, to go over, analyze, review, and learn from.
And then s/he’s going to notice no Stygian in all of recorded history has demonstrated capabilities on par with what Egoma has just done.
Speed exceeding the maximum twitch rate of muscle tissue.
Reflexes operating faster than Stygian nerves can even conduct signals to and from the relevant somatic ganglia much less the brain.
The sheer strength needed to move at that speed.
The shear strength of the supposed tendons and bones that would have to support the muscles producing it.
All not just in excess of normal, but in excess of the theoretical maximums Stygian physiology can produce.
And they’re going to reach the obvious conclusion. Egoma is clearly cybernetically enhanced and heavily augmented. It probably breaks dueling rules for her not to have warned anyone about it before cleaning the kid’s clock, or not to have dialed her implant advantages down to “reasonable” levels the same way honorable duelists put a blunting field on their blades.
Considering how natural she looks, heavy implants would mean either hard-light tech is in use, or the bodywork was done by someone pretty advanced in medical technology. I don’t know how advanced that would be in terms of what’s available at Fracture Station, but it’s clearly not the work of backwater barbarians somewhere on a pre-contact planet.
Gotta say, you conclusion was not as obvious for many, but still logical :)
Spock would approve (if he approved of such things :P )
The bottom 2 middle panels seem to be swapped to me. I would expect the EEK esponse just before being smacked by the staff that had just been yanked out of her hands.
No, the glaive isn’t getting yanked, she is: the blue blur is Ego reaching for her next trick
Also high on the list of moves that require safe search to know more about
I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days, (maybe because it meshes with my fantasy life scenario) but they planned to bet on Max and win big! Won’t happen now. Everyone who sees THIS fight will bet on her. So the odds will not be as good as they would have been. In fact I’m betting she will be the favorite. You might have to bet 100 Quatloos to win 1. (My apologies if this was brought up already and I didn’t see it.)
I was just thinking this exact thought. Maxima either doesn’t know a lot about gambling (given her participation in the military and casual bets around the base, unlikely) or got caught up in the drama and has tanked her mission.
Max isn’t going to wear this disguise for the tournament.
Given “space camera that records at 120,000 FPS because advanced alien consumer tech can just casually do that” isn’t Maxima tanking her odds for her upcoming gladiatorial debut? What was going to be a 1000:1 unknown combatant just became the odds on favorite. Betting on herself is going to make a lot less Quatloo now and I doubt she will take a dive.
Go back and read some comic and comments would you. Please.
It has been stated many times that this Stygan diguise is NOT what Maxima will be using in the gladiatorial arena.
“…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.”
One superhero RPG I ran was set in a “superpowers are a new thing” setting. One thing I established was that 12 supers had been known to die before the start of the campaign:
One in the brawl linked to a number of inmates at Kingston Penitentiary getting empowered.
Nine discovering the hard way that “superpowered” does not always mean “bulletproof.”
One discovering the hard way that “bulletproof” does not always mean “invulnerable.”
One learning that picking up a building tends to result in said building collapsing into a pile of rubble, which can knock you unconscious and cause you to suffocate. (Well, technically he didn’t actually learn that—but everyone else did.)
When Astra passed through this reality {in “Teamups and Crossovers” even she was not up to Max’s level – and I’d back Astra against Superman.
{Incidentally, I fully recommend the entire “Cape” series by Marion G Harmon; bit more serious than this comic, but it has its moments – when a new “breakthrough” asks Astra what’s the worst part of being a Cape, she doesn’t even hesitate – it’s easy to imagine her expression and tone as she says “Fanfiction!”}