Grrl Power #1437 – Sus party
I wish I was the kind of artist that could draw a room with like, 60 people in it*, because these 7 to 12 person watch parties over the last few pages are a little sad looking. (*It helps that guy does 2 tone shading, but it would still take me 2 weeks just to pencil that page.)
Yes, it is, indeed a terrible disguise, especially when put in front of Super Genius or even just regular genius intellects who are very familiar with Maxima. Of course, the people who suspect what’s going on over the last few pages don’t know. They have the advantage of a limited data set, but also realize that there’s literally a trillion lifeforms out there, and a lot of them are humanoid and roughly half of those are female. So the number of them that could just happen to closely match Maxima’s dimensions could be enough to populate a planet. The number of them who have her dimensions and also fight quite a bit like her is a slice of that cohort, but the ones that match those attributes and can also hang with the UCBA competitors is a pretty small fraction of that original subset. That number could still be triple digit, but… it’s probably double or single digit. Maxima’s power makes her quite the outlier.
But they’ve all seen Maxima fight. Not just witnessed, but studied. Deus probably isn’t planning to scrap with her, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to review slow motion footage of her throwing a punch. For observational and scientific reasons, of course.
Realistically, there’s no way the UCBA would have as much attention as something like the world cup if the current fight that’s been going on for, let’s say ten minutes, is as much as has been broadcast. The world cup has (quickly googles cause I don’t know anything about sports) 104 matches, which is up from 64 in 2022. It takes time to build the excitement. The UCBA would have to have a bunch of preliminary rounds before it gets to the Battle Royale matches in order to cause anything approaching a “fever.” Personally, I felt it was a little convenient for Cora to mention the UCBA with juuuust enough time to get permission, make a few stops and arrive just in time for it to start. It’s like how people in movies turn on the news at exactly the right time to see “A Utahraptor has climbed out of the LeBrea tar pits and is thought to be at large in the Beverly Hills area.” instead of them having to sit through 3 and a half minutes of a soap opera and two commercials before the plot relevant news comes on. I personally didn’t want her to bring up the UCBA and then have to wait for seven weeks for it to actually start, because that would be another 8 years for us suffering here in non-comic time.
So instead, we can say Cora only brought it up because she new it just happened to be about to start. And as far as Maxima missing what must be an exhaustive series of preliminary rounds that exist to bring ratings and viewer fervor to a head, let’s say the UCBA allows entrants to test out of the class, as it were. Beat up a squad of doomsday robots, kick a volcano so hard it stops erupting, rip a shipping container sized block of reflexium in half, that sort of thing. They allow it, because having someone like Frieza or Boros or The Gunbuster compete in prelim rounds makes for some dreadfully boring and short prelim rounds.
Also, the challengers who fight their way up through the prelims usually make for a better story and garner a lot of fan support. Some ultra strong competitors moderate their abilities to barely eek through each round, because everyone likes an underdog. Also, if they juuuust squeak by each time, the bookies are far more likely to put worse odds on them than the guy who stomps everyone hard, and that can be a valid strategy to maximize one’s own winnings.
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.
“dude, is that your ex?” XD
I wouldn’t be surprised if surprised if you could just sign a waiver to enter Unlimited Class because it makes for good TV if the unknown rookie gets comically flattened, and even better TV if the unknown rookie comes out of nowhere to pull an upset victory against a couple of known heavyweights. I expect the lower classes of bouts serve well enough to build a fan base, with Unlimited Class as the Superbowl event. It’s been going on long enough that people recognize the main players. But I also suspect that there are a couple of officials who are willing to let some minor details (like a holographic disguise) slide if given the right “incentive,” and they know the boss won’t mind because it makes for good TV.
SEVEN person watch party? I count nine people there. Don’t sell yourself short, DaveB.
Tom’s watch party was only seven (shown, at least.)
I mean… there is absolutely a difference between staff and invited guests. Also 6 of the people in this picture are additional staff. Deus is absolutely doing a movie theater “The Wall” or bigger livestream. That’s a 146″ 4k UHD screen for those unfamiliar with the work of insanity and it is NOT THE BIGGEST. The catering staff probably is doing their best to try to look like they’re working and totally not also watching what could possibly qualify as kaiju fights… And failing horribly but being forgiven because yeah… Deus even understands.
Military are not ‘staff’, and… will let you tell Valyeur that she is ‘staff’ (will be waiting on Fracture)
Sorry Max, but far too many people have admired that figure both close-up and from a distance. As you have complained about often. In both friendly and in opposition. If you ever do this again, I strongly suggest a less form-fitting outfit, (not that anyone minds) and maybe a more harder to recognize general body form? Deus will just make bets, but Scoina might rat you out in spite.
Then again,
Max never (almost, there was that beach episode once) wears anything form fitting.
Nothing even remotely close to skin tight like she is wearing now.
There is no real reason why Tom or Deus would recognise Max from what is effectively her nude body as they have never seen that.
Add to my own email :)
It is funny that they do, though.
Didn’t Deus used to date Max?
Date (badly), not have sex or even see her naked (that’s why he’s so fixated on her: she’s the one who got away {not even threats from Valyeur could change that})
Tom recognized her from the way she throws giants. From first hand experience.
Not just her figure, anyone that has been either at one of her fights or been on the receiving end of, you would pick up on it. She seems to have tremendous power for a “normal” sized biped, able to throw things without any leverage or design, totally breaking physics, she just does it, like with Toms clawed finger, or the ambulance that Sydney hid under. Max’s fighting style is based entirely on the fact that she “sometimes forgets that things have weight,” her words.
There was much explanation on earlier pages for just why it must be so skin-tight.
Though there must have been some inner conflict if it doesn’t have to be quite that tight…
In the long long ago, in the before time, a youtuber named Jenna Marbles made a video about how drastically different a woman’s figure can look depending on how she’s dressed, and I doubt Max has ever been one for the “I’m not wearing a bra today” look.
BTW, pocket squares are stupid.* Someone should tell Deus.
*so are neckties, FWIW
So are fez’ and bowties
Fashion is an important part of culture and always will be. Fully utilitarian clothing is a feature of dystopias (dystopiae? no, it’s Greek)
Utilitarian clothing can be fashionable, depending on circumstance. You go into production at a place I worked at one summer between my stays at university, and you must wear a coverall with nothing loose; you really don’t want a necktie to get caught in some of those machines. But the question is, what should the coverall look like? That can still be fashionable utilitarian clothing.
Why I said *fully* utilitarian clothing, with no consideration of aesthetics.
I suppose you could co full THX-1138 with peoples wardrobe but once you have any specialization you create hierarchy with the necessity of signifiers of that hierarchy. Insignia, however restrained, confers status and becomes fashion. Regarding utilitarian clothing, I recall in the mid 1970s that the farmers in the small farming community where I grew up went through a fad of wearing one piece coveralls. These were not the comfy insulated Carrhart stuff that you wear when it’s really cold. They came in various colors and were summer weight fabric. I think it lasted a couple of months and then every one went back to jeans and cotton work shirts.
If I recall correctly, Deus would agree with you, but also point out that it’s even dumber to play a game intentionally poorly because you thought an aspect of the rules was stupid.
Deus may be super-smart, but he seems to be not as good at hiding his reactions. Unless he *wants* Sciona to see his reaction, which seems a bit “Xanatos gambit”-like to me.
I don’t mind compression for plot’s sake. Whedon’s “Serenity moves at the speed of plot” is perfectly valid as a way to move the story along.
I don’t want to watch 12 episodes of that crew having dinner while they go from one planet to another with a load of cattle in the hold. One dinner maybe. Then you’ve probably used up all the funny bits you can usefully cram into a dinner scene without a different scene in between.
Plot compression: 100% agree, and this wasn’t a “just in time broadcast” type trope. There was one documented unknown-length time skip (mentioned as Sydney binging alien sit-coms or something). This covered the last part of travel to the contest, and also any registration requirements, getting there a little early to scout, preliminary prove-you-won’t-die-if-Rambo Barney-sneezes physical tests, etc. There easily could have been a few more time skips. At the start, for example, Military approval up the chain, followed by planning and packing, could have taken a lot of off-screen time.
I, as a regular reader, am greatly appreciative of not having to wade through weeks/months of filler-panels going through all that detail.
Deus is a Xanatos and Hank Scorpio kind of guy.
I still think that sending Max out to clobber aliens at a live sporting event “for fun and profit” was a horrible idea.
She would have needed to learn a completely different combat style for this disguise to be anywhere near effective – and even then, her powerset and physique work against her.
Even if Tom and Machina Industries don’t start crap, now that cow Sciona knows Max is off-planet. And she is more likely to try and capitalize on that absence.
Earth is a backward planet whose Galactic Membership is creeping through the Xevoricracy Bureaucracy.
It needs SpaceBucks to buy/rent environment rehabilitation. (Microplastic removal as an example.)
Supers and Supernaturals are the only advantages Earth has.
No one is saying it’s a good idea, just the best of the bad ideas.
Most of the powers that would recognize Max would also be smart enough not to bet on how fast Max could get back to Earth if they tried to do something in her absence with an unknown window of opportunity.
The point was: no one off-planet was expected to recognize her (she wouldn’t be hanging around long for autographs after anyway), and people on-planet wouldn’t really care (well, maybe pissed they didn’t think of it first or had the chance to join in)
Pretty sure Sciona has an idea about how fast Syd can get them back if needed. And Deus CERTAINLY does, and will warn her off if he thinks she’s about to do something stupid.
Why would Sci-fright know that? Or SmugD? Oh, because Harem told him? You sure about that? Oh right, because Harem is a traitor who is sleeping with SmugD and telling him everything… Then how did he not know Maxi was there from the start?
SmugD would need to be warned himself first
…or Deus gets to see a Sciona matchup with his bodyguard (I forget her name and the archives need tagging to be useful for looking up names in less than an hour).
Vale. His “eldritch entity in a girl-shell” bodyguard is Vale.
BTW I love Lorlara’s energy in panel 1. She’s wonderful, but in small doses.
Yes :)
She must still be high from the knowledge that she is finally part of a successful family.
Deus knew that I knew he would recognize “Ixah” as Maxima. Deus also knows that Tom will also have recognized her. Deus knows what Dave B. will have for breakfast 2 years, 3 months, and 12 days from now, he is just that good.
I love the smug look on his face in panel 2. If Deus is surprised by anything it’s probably that Archon has dared to try this gambit so soon.
have you tried drawing quickly? let it be ugly and go as fast as possible, and even faster. if it’s in your heart to do this, your dreams will flow onto the page in dynamic living form. and after a long while of this practice, it will even look damn good sometimes
One answer for drawing time might be to use what they call “billboards” in 3d art. Basically two dimensional panels which have an image of a person on them. In 3d art it’s used to cut down the triangle count so scenes render faster.
The scene in the link has a lot of people, but most are “human in draping clothes talking to someone to one side or the other”. If the artist wanted to save time and was planning to have a number of those scenes, he or she probably drew a bunch of them a while back and saved them against a transparent background. Then when you need them you draw the background with no people, and arrange a number of the saved billboards on a new layer in the right positions.
OGH has a somewhat different problem because all the scenes are *not* “generic human”, almost all the people are recognizable as characters. So the billboard idea won’t work for that unless one is into doodling the characters in various poses.
So now the betting scene Iteslf should be interesting. Especially for the level of enforcement/security present to keep things sane and the collective currencies in one spot.
So what was even the point of the disguise at this point? Every major player weve been introduced to now seems to be sussing out Maxs real identity.
The charade hasnt even lasted the length of the fight.
It wasn’t to prevent absolutely everyone from seeing through the ruse. It was to stop the vast majority of viewers (99.99999999+%) from clocking that this was an Earthling, especially one of the most powerful and identifiable earthlings. It was damage control to minimize the chance that unrelated extraterrestrial forces would take this opportunity to do something stupid, while Maxima and Cora made some quick galactic cash.
Exactly. The few who have sused out her identity have close personal knowledge and experience with her, enough to recognize various aspects of her despite the disguise. Also, those individuals know better than to try anything, knowing she would have a backup plan or a way to get back to Earth in a hurry if someone did try something in her absence.
Also, doing anything else with the knowledge would screw up their chances to cash in on it by placing bets.
The one real problem is Sciona, and Deus can keep her on a leash with threats up to and including turning her over for execution (again) if she screws up his chance to profit from the situation.
The point of the disguise is that there are a significant number of people in the galaxy that know that Maxima took down a Fel Battle Cruiser in less than ten seconds. (https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-767-maxima-effort/). By “significant”, I mean “enough to substantially cut into your profits from the bet”.
It’s all about the money.
Also, all the bets are on and locked now, so it doesn’t matter for the money if people figure it out now.
It does, however, matter for her getting conscripted into the xevoarchy. (Though given the givens, maybe a generous retainer for the troubleshooter squad of Max, Syd and Harem might not be a bad idea as a “you done fucked up now” team)
Really hope we get a good big tiddy battle damage máxima voting incentive. Shed make a great ‘aesthetically wounded’ pin-up
My surprise that Deus recognizes those… flanks is minimal.
You mentioned someone drawing a room with 60 people in it and I was like “Is it gonna be KSBD? Yep, KSBD.”
Just a quick spelling mistake
Panel 1 speech bubble at the bottom.
Alerady – Already
Great page as always though bud
Dude, huge group scenes are a lot of work. Not everyone can be George Perez.
I guess we know who will become Earths permanent entrant in these thing: Vehemence should love these.
That one guy looks like Michael Pena
Yes, that is intentional
Just like General Faulke does not look like Peter Faulk (instead, it’s Dan Hedaya)
Great smug expression on Deus in panel two.
Well, I am sure Max can not Kill Seven Billion Demons. But surely she has smashed a wheel or two.
I want to know where and when the representative had an opportunity to bet on Wardeathdoom Industries – Earth didn’t “officially” have access to space comms to contact space bookies as of the last time this fight was held (presumably? I assume this is spaced out…not a year, years are local phenomena…but a good length of time apart, so people can have time to calm down, rebuild betting stakes, heal, train, get a new line on a supply of unobtainium, learn new ancient galaxy destroying techniques, etc.).
Friend pointed out the Council does have native xenomorphic members that might have access, but that’s a subset of a subset that’s a tangential subset (government officials who somehow got the read-in that magic is real, have access to the council, and somehow knows a guy (who still has grandpa’s space telephone) well enough to let them use it to contact a space bookie), but that’s quite the chain. So I’d like a few more details, yo!
unless this is going to be a plot point that will actually be explored, at which point ignore me XD
I believe it’s been established, at least in the author’s comments, that the senator has been possessed by one of the many Alari souls from the soul battery that Sciona broke on Alar. He’s at the very least fluent in Alari.
He’s one of Sciona’s Alari ghost buddies possessing a human body (in the same way she’s possessing the body of Escorpia).
The human would never have seen UCBA before, but the Alari would have had plenty of opportunity before their planet was devastated by the mecha-squid things that Sydney fought.
Who wants to bet that Sciona bets against Maxima, just out of spite, against Tom betting in favor, and Dues playing both ends? Then they all start trying to manipulate the odds.
This could get *good*.
I can imagine Deus giggling manically in delight if this happens.
Not only is Sciona wanted by the Alari, but her host is still wanted for her criminal activities in Mexico and her likely illegal immigration.
I feel like Maxima’s disguise also functions on a Superman type level: Why would Maxima even do this?
Part of the theory on how Clark’s disguise works is “Why would Superman ever choose to NOT be Superman?” Most people don’t even think there’s a secret identity to find out.
Likewise, Maxima has nothing to gain from this in most people’s minds and if she did why wouldn’t she just go as herself?
Maxima’s disguise is less effective than Clark’s because she doesn’t have the element of *acting* significantly different the way Clark does. (The best illustration I recall is the scene from the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie where he considers telling Lois his secret and shifts from “Clark” body language to “Superman” body language but then shifts back before Lois sees him when he decides not to go through with it.)
Also, this is intended to be a one-off disguise, for this one time appearance at this Tournament (why do people keep ignoring that fact?)
Now the real question… Can he bet on the matches? Does he have the capital to make even a low grade bet in the intergalactic scene? If he can, he’s probably going to go all in on it and rake in the gdp of a large country on that.
He purchased a bunch of stuff on Fracture Station, so clearly he has some galactic-spendable assets (unless he blew them all on that trip, which seems unlikely; he strikes me as the contingency-planning type).
Nice reference to kill-six-billion-demons. In the description. Not in the panels as far as I can tell.
That comic is only slightly off-rails as far as not-mainstream-fantasy webcomics go. The real kicker are usually the user comments, that read like the fever dream of would-be prophets. If they are roleplaying? Then they are really convincing.
Oh. I was hoping that “exactly at the right time” link was this one: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1387:_Clumsy_Foreshadowing
I’d love it if this was an honest reaction from both of them. I’d love it even more if they had a panicked ‘Rat Race’ style dash to the nearest Interstellar Bookie.
(And before someone points out that both are rich and/or influential, they are both largely powerful on Earth. Both would welcome an opportunity to get some more off-world resources.)
“I recognize that body.
I’ve studied multiple.”
He might be smart enough to be able to recognize her, but he’s not smart enough to have foreseen her being in the competition.
Since when is Sciona wanted for Alari crimes? I though her entire original plan hinged on having allies on the Alari homeworld willing and ready to head through her portal to conquer Earth?
I suspect the timeline is something like this:
Sciona gets Alari to follow her from various houses. The followers aren’t at the top, and so are ambitious. The tops of the houses get mad at her for poaching them and preaching rebellion. She has to flee secretly to the backwater Earth.
She can communicate with her Alari followers, but because there’s no hyperspace relay it’s magical and has constraints, so she’s not up to the minute on what’s happening back home. Yes, Tom can pop back and forth, but I suspect he has a lot more magical resources than Sciona, particularly after the next part.
She gets up to the same tricks here. The Council gets mad at her for getting a following here (more rebellion) and also being “loud” by killing lots of humans for more blood. They end up removing (most of) her head and also killing (most of) her Earth followers. The ones they missed manage to secretly patch her up, which is why she was in the condition we first saw her.
She lives here for a long while secretly (200 years or so?), with few resources and being constrained by not getting back on the Council’s radar. Meanwhile back home, her following is doing somewhat better somehow.
So she thinks she can get back to the home world, lead a bunch of her followers here, and overthrow the Council. We’re now more worth conquering now since we have a better tech base than when she fled here. With proper leadership, and the weird stuff we have, she might be able to lead an army back to the home world and get a proper house going there, with enough power that the other houses can’t just hunt her down.
Meanwhile the mecha-squids attack, and this is where we came in.
Umm, no, she was sent to Dirt to lay the way for an invasion
I love how even the Alari are looking at Little Miss Homicidal Secretary with some serious side-eye. Might be she’s a little ‘extreme’ even by Alari standards
I’m just trying to figure out if that’s supposed to be Tony Stark or Vladimir Zielinsky.
Not sure which one you are talking about, butt can still say the answer is “No!”
Crowd drawing advice from someone who cannot art to save my life:
Can you prep a few dozen generic background figures to paste into different scenes? Maybe it goes against your artist ethos, but it seems like a time-cheap way to do it. Well, it would be front loaded for time i guess.
I feel almost sorry for Greybuff the Anatomically Perfect. But I also know this is possibly the ONLY one on that field who could hit Maxima and actually make her feel it. I also feel extreme “Ash vs Mewtwo” vibes so this is probably the only time anyone ever successfully blocks her punch.