Grrl Power #1434 – The crushing bioweapon
I really tried to make this page and the next a double, but I ran out of time. It was, admittedly, a little bit my fault.
So, Tamer 11 came out, at least it did if you supported the Kickstarter. If you didn’t, you can buy it off MSE’s site in a few months I think. Now, I didn’t read it during the day while I should have been working, but I did maybe accidentally stay up till 4 am reading it one night, and let me tell you, one of the best ways to supercharge ADHD is to throw a little sleep deprivation in. I was not super productive the next day. Fortunately I finished the book the next night, and before 3 am too, so… all good, right?
Okay, hear me out. The day after Tamer 11 came out, the next book in The Vixen War Bride series dropped. I didn’t even know the series was continuing after the first story wrapped. VWB is one of my favorite xenoanthropology sci-fi books, by which I mean it changes PoV between human and “alien” characters and both sides have their little thoughts about how odd the other is. By the start of this book, the story is past the “nobody speaks the others’ language and hilarious misunderstandings ensue,” trope, and kind of oddly, this story is more of a murder mystery.
So naturally I also had to read that as soon as I finished Tamer. I didn’t stay up till 4 am again. It might not have been physically possible for me at that point, but still I finished that book in 3 days.
Then there was Good Intentions Book 5, A.K.A. Devil In the Details, then The Doctor from Nowhere, Book 2, which is a Russian translated Isekai about a modern Russian surgeon getting blowed up in… uh, Afghanistan, or somewhere, doesn’t matter, and waking up in the body of a recently deceased (or so they thought) Russian soldier in, a slightly alternate history 1914 or thereabouts? It’s pretty well written and translated. The MC does kind of win at everything super hard, and there’s a little bit of Russian jingoism in there, which I suppose I can’t fault the author for. There’s just a few “Russia’s not quite the shitshow everyone seems to think” rants. It’s not pervasive. Then after that was Taroniah & Kyron Unite (Ithria Book 15). Ithria is a bit of an odd series, because the books alternate between Taroniah the sorceress and Kyron the swordsman, and I’ve skipped all the Kyron books cause… I don’t know, the stuff about the sorceress sounded more interesting.
So I had a bit of a reading dry spell for a few months it seemed, then 5 series I’ve been reading hit all at once. Especially Tamer and VWB. You guys know I enjoy Tamer. And I’m bad at pacing myself. So, sorry the page isn’t a little more… you know, “Grrl Power-y 9 panels when there should have only been 5.” (TM) Just trying to work the average back in the other direction? Yeah, I didn’t buy that either.
Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.
Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Go, Maxima!
I wonder if Umbrage can molt and shed injuries. Maybe become resistant to what damaged it kinda like Doomsday?
Sheboygan?
ROFL!
A lesser known page from the All Might playbook.
So.. just dumping all the heavy lifting on your readers to cover the HUGE fight that they JUST missed? LAWL
Two fold thing: Action scenes, and *especially* fight scenes take a LOT of panels, and therefore pages to draw. At two pages a week, *just what was described* could take easily a month and a half, if not A LOT longer. And second, these are heavy hitters, sure, but this is also the first round of the *elimination rounds* – why spend more time here than we need, when the *good stuff* comes once we get into the tournament itself?
Keep in mind that *leaving Earth*, at the latest was the 14th of August last year, and it took Dave doing a time skip on the 12th of January this year to get to the *start of this fight*, with it taking another two pages for the first attack to be made.
On Russian Isekai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCI6es9G0oo
I’m wondering if the “Sheboygan” sound effect is in refference to the 1979 board game “The Creature That Ate Sheboygan”.
Clearly.
I sure can’t think of anything else that would explain “Sheboygan” as a kaiju-hurling sound effect.
That was one of the best of SPI’s small series of microgames, although those really weren’t their strong suit as a company the way they were with Metagaming and Task Force Games. The best-made range in that format was the DwarfStar line from Heritage, but they also came with that hefty price tag if $5 instead of about $3. Different times.
why would they scream the name of a town in Wisconsin?
Why wouldn’t they?
Sheboygan?!?!?
How about the sound effects made up by Mad/Cracked magazine artist Don Martin?
Bloogagopowlumph
It’s a funny sounding town name. Like Walla Walla, Cucuamanga, or Alberquerque.
My personal interpretation of what this page is conveying; Max’s strength is impressive. but on the galactic stage, only her energy projection makers her a true threat. Because sufficiently large kaiju can just take THAT much of a pummeling.
Her beams, on the other hand, can slice through battle ships and probably would have killed the robot & dino she’s fighting right now in only 1-2 hits.
Her beams were at full power and her current strength is not.
Worse, showing her full power would negatively affect the betting or even cause higher powers to step in.
Her beam was at the maximum power she considered safe enough to use in the vicinity of non-super allies. She never claimed it was full power, or looked especially winded afterwards. But Cora’s crew still declared it able to wear down the strongest known shields.
Keep in mind she broke U.M.B.Rage’s foot while pushing it off of her. And the hosts are impressed.
Accurate depiction of applying extreme force in a single pinpoint area.
Little ol Max was a no-gal
As anyone could see
Lookit her now she’s a go-gal
One girl catastrophe
Sheboygan Sheboygan
That girl can really hit
Sheboygan Sheboygan
She’ll win the tournament
Maxi should have thrown Not-Barney so they landed in a very embarrassing 69 on Tinman :P
This is not that kind of tournament.
I like that the page, has both show and tell. i feel it conway’s more with limited panels.
Thanks for the info about VWB, I had also assumed the story was over and wouldn’t have gone looking for a new installment.
I saw a Substack post last week about the decline of reading and it referenced a survey of “books read per year” where the top end of the range was “ten or more.” Checked my Kindle statistics for last year and it was a bit over a hundred. Kindle Unlimited really makes it easy to go through an author’s whole catalog like popcorn when you find someone good….
The problem with surveys is the sample group. I would be willing to bet much of the audience of this comic reads more than ten books a year. If you are looking at a thirty something person with a job and kids at home, maybe not so much. For me personally it also depends on how you define reading a book. About half of my personal library is reference books and manuals. It’s reading but seldom do you sit down to read the entirety of “History of British Aviation”. I can binge read some “Bob’s Saucer Repair” or “Laundry Files” though.
All I can think about when I see “Sheboygan” is that Gus Polinski and the Kenosha Kickers are very big there.
Sheboygan reminded me of “Cheboygan is situated on Lake Huron at the mouth of the Cheboygan River. It is the third-largest American city on Lake Huron after Port Huron and Alpena.” They’re pronounced the same way. There’s also a Cheboygan, WI.
Really? “Sustain” is also describing Max. I doubt she’s tired yet, and having the time of her life. Max took out 2 of the largest combatants already, no matter how tough these others are, it won’t do them any good. It’s a pity she can’t use her beam, but it’s her final weapon anyway. And a dead give-away.
Honestly, I *wanted* Vixen War Bride to be over after the last book, because I’ve seen too many stories ruined by “gotta keep going-itis” where the story is over but the company or the author wants to keep selling books/seasons so they come up with dumber and dumber scenarios and distort the characters beyond recognition(coughSAOcough). But that didn’t happen here, Rite of Vengeance actually found new things to say and didn’t get stupid about any of it. The human and alien cultures are still an awkward fit, but the characters are still good people trying to make it work. I cannot recommend this series enough.
I’m hoping that Maxima meets her match soon.
That’s NOT because I dislike her (I actually like her a lot), but because I want her to be challenged by a legitimate rival. It’s the same issue that Superman runs into. When you’re writing a Superman story, you can focus on a moral dilemma, or on a human schemer taking a swing at the alien they know won’t respond with equal intent… but if you really want to showcase his full power, you need to throw in a Doomsday, or a Darkseid.
Maxima needs an enemy worthy of her. Darude wasn’t really capable of hurting her, just nigh impossible to put down. Vehemence didn’t actually want to hurt anyone; he just wants to feed and enjoy himself. Deus would rather be her lover and is clearly unhappy with the inevitability of their eventual confrontation. She has to face someone who can put her in the position of fearing for her own life, yet needing to stay in the fight like a proper hero.
So we’ve seen a few, but each were short-lived precisely because she was working with a team.
Vehemence/Kevin beat her…but was taken down by her team.
Darude fought her to a draw initially, and in the rematch she won because her team stepped in.
Suckhole/Super Massive was able to at least keep her at bay – and potentially win over time – with control of her movement and deflection of her energy beam…so her team stepped in.
Decent chance that Death Toll would have been able to beat her, at least until her team stepped in to overwhelm him (though with Maxima maybe being a combination of powers, it’s possible that he’d only be able to counter one aspect of her abilities at once).
And as we saw on Alar (Sciona’s planet) she can be straight-up outgunned and sent running by big enough foes.
She’s extremely powerful, but she’s far from perfect – she just hasn’t had many repeating villains on-screen yet, so we haven’t gotten that “rival” effect.
That said, this tourney is actually the perfect setup for “Maxima in Trouble.” We see in this first-round match that she’s able to wipe the floor pretty easily with basic strength-and-toughness enemies like UMB Rage, but they’re kitting her out with some of Dabbler’s anti-magic stuff for a reason (though she doesn’t seem to have any on her at the moment?). Let her get through a couple rounds of basic brutes and into the nasty sort of “stop time, turn you into a rabbit, light you on fire, start time” archmages and we’re likely to see her struggling – all the more so if she has to avoid using her beam attacks to hide her identity, and all the more so since she can’t have any backup.
For that matter, there’s a whole range of scenarios in which a powerful-enough enemy just manages to draw some blood, and that leads to a future where some powerful alien/company/empire is making a Maxima army from the blood drops.
Just saying, don’t despair. She was set up initially as possibly the most powerful super on Earth, we had it established that supers are crazy-powerful relative to the rest of the galaxy, making her a serious galactic-level threat: She NEEDS to be hard to defeat, especially when surrounded by all her powerful allies. Take away those allies, give powerful enemies a chance to study, test, prepare…the tables may turn, in which case Earth itself will be open and vulnerable for the plundering.
Yeah, she looks like a really cute, hottie, but you go kissu with Gail then those heart shaped antennae slap onto your temples and suck your mind right out of your head.
Back to the fight, Max is almost making this too easy. If she plans to participate in future bouts and having a good betting margin she should take a few more falls and appear to squeak by for the win.
Tell not show! LAME! I know it’d take like 5 extra pages to do all that but… Come on! LAME! SHOW! This is a super hero comic! We came for the dynamic comic spreads!
SHEBOYGEN! She knocked him clear to Wisconsin.
Weird sound effects will always remind me of a scene from the webcomic Zebra Girl, where the author told us that he had no idea what a demon slicing apart robot monsters would sound like, and thus introduced the lovely sound effects of “SHLOINK!” “FARKLEMPT!” and “SCOOBY-DOOBY-FLOOBY!!”
As a charter member of the “I’ll just read 1 chapter… hey, why is it now 3am???” club, I hear you. Do your thing; we’re enjoying the hell out of this comic for free, and if an update isn’t up to what *you* were planning, well, we don’t know what you were planning and won’t notice.
I dunno about anyone else, but I imagine that Max is really feeling Superman’s “World of Cardboard” speech right now.
“I feel like I live in a world made of cardboard, always taking constant care not to break something, to break someone; never allowing myself to lose control, even for a moment, or someone could die. But you can take it, can’t you, big guy? What we have here is a rare opportunity for me to cut loose and show you just how powerful I really am.”
Based on the first shot of the competitors in the arena, I was thoroughly convinced that U.M.B.Rage was significantly larger than Kill Seven. Everything since then, however, has implied that they are of similar size.