Grrl Power #1403 – Matrioshka brains are the ultimate man caves, right?
There’s a lot of stuff I have yet to reveal about the Grrl-verse, and there’s this weird temptation to just sit on canon secrets forever, so occasionally I have to remind myself that, oh yeah, I’m telling this story, and un-revealing stuff is part of the storytelling process.
I would have to say I’m not a huge fan of Jack Kirby’s art. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the hell out of the guy and I more or less assume that he’s the single most prolific comic artist of all time, and his art style basically defined all modern superhero comics. It’s just that if I was looking to emulate someone’s style, he wouldn’t be my first choice. I do kind of like Kirby Dots though. Do an image search for that or Kirby Krackle. That’s why I threw a little in there on the first panel.
That said, when trying to draw large amounts of nebulously high tech stuff, I can easily see where his distinctive tech noodling arose from. When you’ve got to fill a bunch of space with “tech,” and you’re not some insane manga artist who has a staff of background guys who you can assign to draw gears and wires, certain designs kind of happen without too much effort. Not that this page in particular has a lot of high tech noodly design work on it, but I mention it because this page kind-of-should-have had lots of tech that’s so high-tech that it’s barely identifiable as tech. But the other way to go with insanely high tech stuff is to say it’s unobservable. Not invisible, but more that it resides in another dimension or in a microverse or is otherwise beyond normal perception.
Now, taking all that into account, when designing this guy, part of me was tempted to give him a high tech looking outfit. Some kind of armor or holofoil spandex or something, but then I thought, is there any tech that would be better than a nice sweater? I mean, yes, probably. Cora’s hard light holograms are already pretty high tech, but combine them with molecular fidelity and a system that keeps them and the wearer at the perfect humidity and tempurature and never has a lose thread or a scratchy tag and never gets that waxy deodorant buildup in the armpits even if you launder the shirt after every wearing. Eventually there’s going to be some wear and tear. But still, a nice cable knit sweater is hard to beat.
How he gets the turtle neck over his head plate thingy is where the real tech-as-magic comes in. It’s either some kind of distance de-relativeizer distortion field, or there’s some buttons on the back.
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.
I get you on the Kirby Dots.
in many settings/uses, they just look like a mess… but in the right place, done right, they can do a great job illustrating all kinds of tech and/or power flow.
The thing with high-tech is that, in a lot of ways, I would assume it’s unobservable because it’s not out in the open with its guts sticking out everywhere. Consider this, its very easy to have 5 differnet identicle plain black computer cases that one might assume are all the same, BUT, inside, 1 is a 486 dinosaur of a system, 1 is say something in the 800mhz range, another is a dual core 1.5 Ghz based system, one is rocking the latest high end CPU andgraphics, and the last is effectively a Raspberry Pi 5. Without powering them up and observing the boot sequence, you would have no idea which one is old tech and which one is new tech. With a lot of homes, yachts, ships, etc, how much tech is hidden inside walls behind paneling?
Another example might be something like an iPad, TNG PADD, or similar device. Very simple nondescript form factor with none of its ‘tech’ really on display. You could lay 5 different identical-sized iPads in a row, and the layperson who knows nothing about Apple products might assume they are all identical tech, even though they may cover a 10-year span of development and advancement.
Same thing with a lot of automobiles, some are very high tech, but if you do not check out the specs, you might not know what all is packed in there, as most of it is hidden behind paneling.
Running late today, but I REALLY appreciate this character’s visual uniqueness. I don’t think I’ve seen anything particularly close to this.
I hope this means we’ll soon be learning what the final Mystery Orb does, AFTER OVER A DECADE
So the Kirby Krackle is supposed to illustrate energy fields? I always thought it’s just some black smoke or dust or oil slick.
I’ve always assumed that it was illustrative of potential energy fields, by which I mean energy fields that aren’t quite there yet rather than potential energy in the usual sense normally illustrated by suspending a weight in a gravitational field. Also they really just look cool.
As far as the turtleneck is concerned what’s to say that the mushroom top isn’t removable or just flexible? Great splash space scene.