Grrl Power #1443 – Have costochondral separation, will travel
Yeah, so fighting super monsters and ultra bots is not without risks. Ya’doy!
I rewrote this page a few times. The original version just had a word bubble… or a narrator bubble… I should probably know what that’s called. Anyway, it summed up Maxima weaving through tunnels and sneaking invisibly onto the ship while dodging like a zillion drones from news agencies, governments, criminal organizations, and everyone in between. Scary powerful contestants that no one knows anything about cause interest to skyrocket, after all.
But I occasionally go back to find a reference in the comic (usually someone’s eye color) and wind up reading a hundred pages or so. Takes longer than one might guess. But doing rereads makes me realize that the pacing of the comic is… consistent, in kind of a bad way. Like there are very very few establishing shots, no splash pages to set up a scene or anything. Not that every comic needs a wide city shot, then 5 pages of various panels of store fronts, telephone poles, bicycles parked in front of a school, etc, etc. Yeah, I know, you’re all conjuring images of the last manga you read.
So basically I thought it’d be okay to spend a few panels on Maxima doing instead of me telling. I’ll probably only get the urge every once in a while.
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently. The new one is underway. I should have a draft ready to go for the next Monday comic?
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.
I don’t know, DaveB. I -like- the consistency of your comic’s pacing honestly. It’s refreshingly different.
Also I see that Maxima is not ‘completely’unstoppable after all. I’m wondering who in particular did manage to hurt her – whether it was UMBRage, the pixie’s black holes, the initial blast from that robot or maybe it’s lasers afterwards, something that happened offscreen during her fight against the grey anatomy, or something that happened during those 29 seconds in the faerie’s realm with the gate guardian.
My guess would be the black(ish) hole. Maybe her force field doesn’t do anything against tidal forces?
Though the Unbrage stomp might be it. Might just be that being stomped into solid rock, while it couldn’t break her skin, still subjected her innards to a bit more force than they’re comfortable with.
My guess would be it was all of it dealing cumulative damage as it drained her ‘battery’, and Max being forced to steadily put more energy into offense than defense as the fight wore on.
My guess is Max had to shift more power from defense to offense as the fight wore on to deal with her opponents in a decisive manner, and the damage that made it through adds up. The problem with a properly challenging fight is that the other guy can also hit – and hurt – you, and Max tends to prefer to blitz her opponents, even in situations where turtling might have been a better option – even if only briefly.
Contrast this with Sydney’s fight with the Calamarians; where Max does shock and awe, Sydney used hit and run, making full use of mobility and defense.
First contact with potential Orb Makers during the travel? That would be interesting.
Props to Max for not saying anything about Sydney’s bigger chest (if she still has it), but that’s Max for you. Always business first. If she still has it when she swings by Earth though some of the others might not hold their tongue as much.
Maybe she ran into the same issue as Sydney and expended so much power that her power now needs to spend some time recharging?
I don’t quite remember if anything came of that last time when her orbs seemed low. Did they ever figure out what was going on there or did her orbs just recharge in the background without anyone mentioning it?
When Max stopped Sydney taking some of the ARC women on a shopping trip to Fracture, it was mentioned Dabbler thought they were slowly recharging, but it would take months.
Also, separately… after nearly being lost in another dimension for potential years, Maxima is now apparently badly injured. Requiring a round trip to Earth to withdraw another major asset (in which Shenanigans will undoubtely occur), since she doesn’t seem willing to give Frix a chance.
At what point does the Bad Idea level become critical?
I await Dr. Chevy’s opinion on that, expressed with her more emphatic than empathetic bedside manner.
“I dunno Max, don’t want to let those orbs run too low. Remember what you were saying about space jaunts if not completely necessary, and opening atherium causeways near an UCBA event might attract attention to Earth. Cora tracked me to Fracture, after all..”
Well now, that’s interesting. Maxima discovered there is an upper limit to what she can power through. This might have some consequences for A.R.C.H.O.N.’s strategies for the future.
Sheesh, Bluce. Sex positivity aside, this isn’t the naked news network… Slow your roll a bit, buddy.
You know Max is really hurting when she doesn’t comment on all the toplessness and near-toplessness going on.