Maxima obviously has extraordinarily strong bones and ligaments and tendons etc – like, “make a space elevator cable out of that stuff” strong, so when she cracks her joints, it sound a bit like the 1812 Overture. The version where they fire actual cannons to go along with the symphony.

Fun fact, in panel 2, I had planned to draw Cora with her arm somehow extended out so she was covering herself from “4th wall camera angle” POV, but… there just wasn’t a natural angle that didn’t either look like she was intentionally being modest, which she wouldn’t be, or didn’t look like I had grabbed a 3D model by the elbow joint and just yanked it into position with no thought to how humans actually move their limbs. So, poor planning on my part. Instead I’m pretending like she put up a modesty filter than only Maxima can see somehow.

Technically, they’re on P.T.O. – I know it’s called “leave” in the military, but they’re a domestic branch, so a lot of people on the team call it P.T.O. – so Maxima can’t officially get upset at Sydney or Harem for having a topless watch party with “friends of the team.” Honestly, she’s not so much a stick in the mud that she’d even care, especially after while coming down from her battle royale adrenaline high. If Harem and Cora sit down at the dinner table later with their knoks out (which is British slang, I assume for “knockers” that I heard once on… Blackadder? Or Red Dwarf. Definitely one of the two.) then Max might at least tell Harem to go teleport a shirt on. (She can’t teleport things to her, but she’s trying to learn to teleport small things that one of her is holding to another her. No luck yet.)

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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.

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.