Grrl Power #1446 – Tropical storm Leander
Working out is hard when you can lift the entire gym.
The bottom-left panel is supposed to be a hypothetical Everglades post-maximum Maxima event. I assumed Willy Crocman would make that obvious-ish, but the background could also be interpreted as Monument Valley after being pounded to sand. There’s not a whole lot of crocodiles in Utah, though, generally speaking.
Maxima’s outfit has to basically be printed onto her skin, and while makeup and grease paint don’t stick to her, it’s not like nothing at all does. A wacky wall walker would probably stick to her well enough. Probably one of those rubber stickers that are used on windows. Those might use the same technology, come to think of it. Cora and Galen found some material that basically won’t come off her skin if she’s exerting even the smallest amount of “personal force field” to envelop the stuff, and embedded thousands of micro holo projectors in it. The projection overlaps, so she’ll still have coverage if she loses small patches during the fight, and if large enough bare patches cause her disguise to start to fail, the stuff will slither around and attempt to close the gaps, but that’s dangerous during a fight because it can’t migrate anywhere while her force field is holding it in place. The plan at that point is for her to shift “Armor” into “Speed,” and keep out of danger for the 10-15 seconds it would take her smart cat suit to rearrange itself.
It is conceivable then, that if enough of the outfit was damaged all at once, she could find herself on Space-TV in front of a trillion viewers wearing nothing but pasties. But that’s a risk any superhero or heroine takes when they get into high-powered fights in front of a bank, and they are tougher than their own clothes.
Ah! I thought I had more time till March. I’m bad at looking at dates apparently.
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 know they have shared showers and everything and but that first panel of Max assumedly flashing Syd as she changes is kinda wild. They’ve all just gotten super comfortable with each other. Is that the Dabbler effect?
I think it’s just the context… Max wouldn’t have any problem in this situation (as long as Dabbler isn’t around), since as a soldier, she’s going to be used to not always having privacy. She’d have a lot more problem if, say, Hiro was in the room.
No, this feels very out of character for Maxima to actually hold a conversation while undressed rather than just get changed as quickly and privately as possible. She may not expect full privacy due to being a soldier but I wouldn’t expect her to act exhibitionist like this either.
If that wasn’t the case I don’t see why Maxima would’ve taken such objection to Dabbler in the first place.
Maxima doesn’t have any objection to nudity, what she objects to from Dabbler is the constant sexual banter in the workplace, which she sees as unprofessional. She’s not a prude, she’s a professional. Changing in front of a same-sex colleague is fine.
It’s all about context.
at least the comment says she’s wearing pasties, so it’s officially decent (except for the superball)
Think of it as a changing room at the pool. That’s basically what she’s doing there, and that’s a context where people are generally OK with (semi-)public nudity.
Maxima doesn’t strike me as the type to hold conversations while undressed the changing rooms.
Maxi is not a prude, she just has a problem with boundaries, more importantly, when people either push them or simply ignore them entirely (that’s why she has a problem with Dabbles)
People are prudes if they *don’t* hold conversations while undressed in changing rooms now?
Literally *no one* holds conversations like that where I live.
Max still probably has the pasties on?
Pasties seems more like what Dabbler would consider acceptably decent than what Maxima would consider acceptably decent though. I could see Maxima reprimanding Dabbler for showing up in pasties when asked to get dressed than I could see Maxima considering it fine to just wear pasties.
Footloose?
FOOTLOOSE? Really???
*groan*
:)
OG Footloose
Maxi does enjoy dancing (and abandoned factories)
Should that be “keep the full extent of my powers a secret”?
Being tougher than your own clothes is a problem, physics should be rewritten to make my clothes last longer for financial reasons.
Hmmm, random thought. Has Max ever tried “shrinking” her power pool? Or putting points into a “reserve” that doesn’t do anything but store the power? Might let her power down a some to challenge herself.
I think she does that all the time. I don’t know if her powers work in a way that lets her hold reserves but I assume most interactions she’s operating at her lowest levels of power possible so a random punch doesn’t cause her enemy’s head to explode or so she can open a door or shake a hand without crushing it. I don’t think it’s about challenging herself as much as rarely reaching that upper limit to begin with. Unless she’s fight heavy hitters like Vehemence or Darude she just doesn’t get to experience that too often. Maybe with all their new resources they can magic science together like a training dimension or something eventually.
In addition to strength, her speed would have to be at the bare minimum at all times she was interacting with other people. Especially while holding a conversation. Waiting on the other person to croak out one phoneme at a time would eventually drive a true speedster insane.
Tossing a wall walker at Maxima would probably be insubordination.
Nobody tell Dabbler.
BUT THEY’RE SELF-ADHERING!
Now I’m imagining those pasties as being those octopus wall-walkers that came in boxes of Froot Loops long ago.
Kami’s Hyperbolic Time Chamber :)
Maxi would enjoy the reference
Not really, the mental icons we saw earlier was about balancing what she had. Nothing there about stores, reserves, or a power sink. Most of the time she just keeps everything at even levels which is still meant time greater than the average human. What I’m thinking is more about getting everything to human levels except for whatever is in the reserve. She may even be able to get her human skin back for social and low-key situations.
One of my RPG characters had that problem — but in her case, it wasn’t that she was tougher than her cloths, she was tougher than her *skin*.
So her idea of “nudity” was being stripped down to her nigh-indestructable cyborg chassis, looking something out of a Terminator movie. And since wearing clothes wasn’t really practical until she’d replaced the organic layers, she ended up attending a formal event wearing nothing more than rank insignia stencilled on her metal frame.
Wouldn’t the old nuclear testing range in the nevada desert be a safe spot for Max to practice?
You’d get all the fringe groups yelling that she’s destroying the planet by stirring up THINGS that will kill us all.
The human race has had extensive experience with radiation at this point, and because of those fringe groups the US is STILL pretending there’s some magical level of zero radiation and zero chemicals that will get rid of cancer forever. Experience doesn’t show that, but the paradigm went into law nearly seventy years ago IIRC, and it’s still there.
And we’re still doing it! All these panicky “news” bits about micro plastics, but none of them ever get around to mentioning there’s natural generation of tiny plastics by bacteria, somehow nobody wants to get samples from mummies and such to establish a baseline of nano plastics pre industry, it’s just numbers. Numbers without baselines are just counting stuff. And not very well, per some of the actual papers out there. Science does baselines, science gives accurate counts or gives you a +- XXX or a standard deviation/sigma – some level to the uncertainty above or below a baseline. Did some heavy searching of journals and abstracts last year, didn’t find much of that at all.
And, BTW, if you’re into that kind of thing, you have to keep track of the unreliable “journals” that have poor or no peer review and the retracted papers. Thank GAWD for places that keep track of those lists.
Ok OK, “went into federal regulations”.
That’s really just semantics, but people LOVE to play semantic games.
Natural generation of microplastics by bacteria, with no fossil fuel involvement, is an assertion I have not seen before. My attempts to learn more through various searches have turned up nothing. Even Wikipedia makes no mention of this idea. Do you have a source?
You do know there was fossil fuel before they ‘invented’ oil in Texas, right?
While the American Crocodile does live in the Everglades, most people associate Florida with alligators since they live all over the state, including the Everglades. Crocs only live in the very Southern tip of the state, and most people don’t even know that North America has crocodiles.
A gator man might be better than a croc man for clarity, is all I’m saying. Though I thought it was pretty clear regardless.
[Reading Dave’s post] Do you mean “Willy Gatorman”?
The American Crocodile lives in the Southern tip of Florida, including the Everglades. I actually posted a comment about this right before yours appeared, saying most people associate Florida with gators and don’t even know that there are crocs in North America.
The gator is supposed to be packed up for a move, but as I was typing the post, I thought he kind of looked more like a traveling salesman, so I referenced the only salesman character I could think of, Willy Loman.
Short for Sydney’s last line there?
“BTDT”.
Ah, “World of Cardboard” references. Nicely done.
Sydney’s taken off her new knockers?
They were never going to be permanent
So Maxima is going commando then?
Not trying to derail this fun arc, but while going all-out wouldn’t be possible on the Earth without revealing her power levels, she’s had the ability to travel to the moon for a while. She would need a life-support system for the trip, but it’s been stated that she can take that off for a short period while she cuts loose on the dark side.
And with Cora, she now has access to any number of uninhabited planets with a breathable atmosphere where life hasn’t evolved yet. Or even without the breathable atmosphere if she’s wearing that mask.
It’s very unlikely that a lifeless planet will have a human-friendly atmosphere. Earth only has gaseous oxygen because it is constantly being regenerated by plants – without that, it would eventually all react away and get locked in rust & rocks.
True.
To play devil’s advocate, a world where nothing beyond oceanic phytoplankton has evolved yet is close enough for a lay description of a world where “life hasn’t evolved yet”.
Oxygen can be created by other means, chemical reactions, microbe growth from comets, carbon-based life requires oxygen. Super heating plain water breaks down it to the base elements, ask any fireman what happens. Or the first-time turkey fryer. Throwing water on an oil fire does 2 things, it spreads the oil and flashed the water releasing the hydrogen and oxygen making a fireball that spreads. That and 4th of July were the worst times to be a fireman. Oh and Christmas… Pine trees that are dried out just go whoosh! Not to mention the gifts are wrapped in paper. As part of training, we got to go in and watch just how fast a tree fire spreads, in less than 5 minutes the entire room is ablaze.
Yes, but you need a constant, planetary-scale supply of oxygen for it to stick around in any quantity in an atmosphere, let alone at human-breathable levels.
[And that’s just the O2. You also need to consider toxic gases (including CO2). Or atmospheres being stripped away, like Mars; or turning into runaway greenhouses like Venus (with bonus Sulphuric Acid vapour in that case).]
No oil fires do not turn water into component atoms.
What it does is float the oil, and if surface is hot enough, flash to steam. Increasing in volume rapidly. Which further spreads oil atomically in very hot micro dots allowing it to flash with resident O2 in either a deflagration or slow boom.
Water is still there, only in vapor/steam vs liquid.
Now a Class D fire (burning metals). That will breakdown water and produce steam on contact. Those have to be handled chemically.
That Gator looks like he could get a job at a Circus…or as a Truck Driver.
So you’re saying Maxima DID perform Footloose once in her life. Looking forward to that backstory page. :D
Superman: “That man won’t quit as long as he can still draw a breath—none of my teammates will. Me, I’ve got a different problem. 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 man? What we have here is a rare opportunity for me to cut loose and show you just how powerful I really am.”
A fellow man of culture, I see…
Only slightly undercut by him getting a few hits in, then Darkseid getting up and shutting him down hard. (Yes, with a gizmo, but Darkseid was still in a condition to get up and use it). Before Lex Luthor saves the day, yet.
You’d think it’d have been a lead in to something closer to Flash taking out Lexiac at maximum speed earlier in the show, the way people talk about it.
The “world of cardboard” speech is great, but the fight is a problem: Superman unloads a few huge shots, Darkseid goes down, and then gets right back up and shuts him down with a gadget. It’s framed like Clark is finally cutting loose, but the choreography doesn’t match the hype.
The in-universe problem is Superman fights like someone who’s never had to worry about being hit back. It’s all wide haymakers, planted feet, no setups, no defense – what we’d expect from a guy who’s never needed timing or technique. The Kryptonian martial arts he “knows” mostly look like styles built for opponents who can’t dodge.
If he ever added even basic wrestling or MMA – clinch entries, takedowns, rear chokes – he’d be terrifying. He’s fast enough to take almost anyone’s back before they finish blinking, and grappling doesn’t care how tough your skin is. A Superman who can grapple doesn’t throw Darkseid through a building and hope it sticks; he ends the fight in seconds.
And minimizes collateral damage, but that’s separate issue.
Comparing panel 1/2 and panel 5, that was a super tight hair bun!!
She can fight Vehemence…Actually, he can become stronger than her.
Yes, but she risks revealing just how strong she is, and damaging the planet in the process
We can actually register atomic detonations with all those civilian Seismometers. The seismic shockwaves of the Tsar Bomba travelled around the earth.
3 times.
“It is conceivable then, that if enough of the outfit was damaged all at once, she could find herself on Space-TV in front of a trillion viewers wearing nothing but pasties.”
With the words of Charisma Epoch from Magellan Academy: “I hate being strip-singed.”