Grrl Power #1450 – Hospital food
We’ve only seen “transition Maximillia” once before, and at the time, I managed to not turn that flashback into a whole long side-story. I’m sure I could do 40 pages on that period of her life, no problem. But don’t worry, this is just another quick flashback.
This page takes place a few weeks after the page 415 flashback. At this point, Max had spent some time staring into a mirror, and decided that the gold stuff under her skin was kind of cool looking, and while all the doctors still didn’t have any evidence based theories about what was going on, they had mostly agreed that she wasn’t suffering from some sort of fatal heavy metal poisoning, nor were her skin or organs calcifying. On top of all that, after a brief initial fever, Max didn’t feel sick, and in fact was starting to feel really healthy. Like, accidentally ripped a door clear off its hinges healthy.
Man, I really need to find some time to go back and post slightly larger versions of the old pages. They’re 643px wide, and at some point I did a minor site update that let me post the comics at 750px. It helps with the text if nothing else. Of course if I do that, I’ll be tempted to go in and fix little bits of art, like Maxima’s oddly manly golem face. Also teen Max’s shoulder in that first panel is not the shoulder of a beanpole cross country runner. It would just take a little nudge with the liquefy tool to fix it, but that’s a trap. Her tank top in the reflection is all part of the same layer, and I’d have to separate them and fill in the bits left blank from the smaller shoulder, and now instead of a 2 minute fix, it’s 10 minutes, and while I’m at it, I think Deus’s head is too big and now I’m spending an hour on each page and there’s 1400 of them. I could probably resist the urge to fix most stuff due to time constraints, but there are definitely some panels that are just bad. So we’ll see about posting enlarged versions of the pages.
Finally, here we go! I took the suggestion that I just use an existing panel for a starting point, thinking it would save time… I guess it technically did, but a 5 character vote incentive just isn’t the way to go.
Patreon, of course, has actual topless version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Yay! The simple reason was the correct one!
I guess I called it. Probably not the only one, and it was my second take (responding to myself), but yep, oral thermometer under the tongue.
I wonder if we’ll ever see a ‘Maxima is depowered’-arc, where she gets de-mutated to what she would’ve been without the symbiote.
It was said she would always have been a late-blooming super, one less powerful than she is now.
Would Max be willing to live with that in trade for being able to walk down the street without people instantly recognizing her, or would she yearn for her symbiote back?
Did I miss where it was confirmed Max has a symbiote attached to her? I know that’s kind of the theory from the whole geode reveal but we know for sure that’s what it is? I still think a lot of Max’s history is a mystery so far.
While not 100% confirmed, it was mentioned as a possibility by Dave in his blog post linked in the blog post above (415). “… some sort of symbiote (?) of indeterminate origin adding its powers to hers AND that it was able to determine her superness and made a decision (whether consciously or by some sort of instinct – if it indeed even had any agency at all) to hitch its wagon to her horse.”
But then he mentions that this is still speculation by Max.
“being able to walk down the street without people instantly recognizing her,”
Dabbs gave her that ability already. (I look forward to the inevitable reveal when her boyfriend gets called to a fire that turns out to be a super attack)
Yeah. But without the alien symbiote, she could do it in her own skin, without having to worry about the gizmo failing.
She would still be recognized, just not as “Maxi the Mighty Fel-Feller” (or the GEODE)
I’m fairly confident Maxima would prefer her current power level with associated issues over a much-reduced power level with no issues. Not for the sake of power – although that would be a factor, I’m certain she genuinely enjoys that – but rather because it would reduce her ability to keep everyone (her team, her friends, her country, her planet, her species, and while it hasn’t really come up yet, her galaxy) safe. Anytime she’d feel briefly happy about not having to use the collar as a crutch to get along in normal society she’d probably immediately feel guilty that, if she were still Golden Maxima, she could be saving a lot more people right now.
yeah, plus it’s kinda hard to go from (I am nigh invulnerable and can arm curl freight trains without looking like Arnold) to maybe lifting station wagons or something.
Before I joined the military many, many moons ago, I could jump high enough to hit my wrist on the baskekball hoop with only taking 3 steps before jumping while I was only 6ft 1in. After i injured my knees in boot camp, I was lucking to be able to jump up onto a chair. Was a big adjustment for me.
Oral thermometer? Who could have guessed that!?
(It’s been some time since I’ve seen one with mercury though.)
Even if you could prove I’m aulde enuff to have had that in my mouth while being trained with mercurochrome on road rashed elbows, knees, shins etc. So that no amount of torture would ever affect me. I’d deny I’m that old. p.s. the current ‘boss’ I hench for has a 401k layed out in century long payoffs. Might be worth sticking with this one, most don’t plan more than the next job and maybe dental.
Better that than a rectal thermometer.
She looks like she has a cataract in her right eye
I’m pretty sure it’s that particular eye hasn’t transitioned from it’s original blue color to deep purple.
That eye is still the original blue. There is flesh toned skin around it.
Still looks like a cataract rather than her original colour (unless she always had cloudy eyes… )
Looking closer, it seems a thicker film has formed over her eye. Its still the original color but with a blurry layer over it. Most likely to prepare it for the conversion process.
Alternatively her eyes could just be straight up dying one at a time before being converted into new ones. Sorta like how her old skin is peeling of to reveal new skin underneath.
Going back to the link page, pre-change her eyes were a dark blue, but when she was being examined her right eye was blurry and her left was her current purple (this was when she still had predominately blonde hair)
I was thinking something similar. The still-human eye looks faded/dull, making it seem cloudy. Maybe it’s just to contrast it against the post-conversion eye, but human eyeballs are normally pretty reflective.
Could very well be a ‘shed’ situation, where there’s a stronger/fancier lense growing underneath her regular eyeball’s lense. Human eyeballs are weird things- they’ve got their own immune systems separate from the regular body’s, and act in some ways as separate organisms, and are, along with most vertibrate eyeballs, built backwards. Max’s morphing here might be ‘fixing’ those issues by growing a new eyeball, and it’s doing the eyeball before the stuff around it due to that separation.
Supers had existed for a while before Max right? I know they’re rare but I wonder how big a deal it really was that Max was turning gold. Like was she a local celebrity? Some town’s golden idol track and field star? I kinda seemed at least at the start of the comic she wasn’t that known despite being a 6 ft tall gold flying woman. Maybe the government was suppressing that but I’m almost fully expect a comic nerd like Syd to have immediately known of the United States gold super hero on sight.
Supers were partially covered by The Veil, the thing that stops all the supernatural stuff from becoming common knowledge, so somebody like Max would be a local celebrity but the news wouldn’t spread nearly as far as what you’d expect it to.
Yes the first few strips I was somewhat confused as to whether supers were public or not.
Her comic store partner seemed to assume they existed, possibly because he saw one. But then others said “no such thing”.
So the Veil is probably working on them. If you have really definitive continuing evidence, then the Veil doesn’t work for you. But good luck convincing anyone else who doesn’t have that, or keeping them convinced.
Which is likely how the spell was designed. Many supernatural types have minions who aren’t supernatural, and it would be inconvenient for e.g. a vampire to have to convincingly prove they’re a vampire every single night to their daytime sanctuary guards.
Yeah, and IIRC supers are only partially covered by it because there’s so much variety in them that it’s hard to pin down what exact constitutes a “Super”, and the spell that creates the Veil is written in an archaic magical/programming language that requires each case for it to cover to be individually specified. Supers get some benefit from a “catch-all” clause built into it, but they had much more exposure than mythicals like vampires and werewolves even before ARCHON went public.
Imagine that Doctor suffering a meltdown when he gets but part of his precious thermometer back and realizes into which gullet the rest of it must have gone, trying to come up with emergency measures to get both the mercury and shards out again.
Interestingly elemental mercury does not readily penetrate the skin or digestive tract of humans. It’s the fumes that get you.
That said, there are a few types of mercury compounds that readily penetrate the skin and they are extremely dangerous, as in typically fatal dangerous.
And yes, the doctor will be very put out.
Which is really odd considering how dense mercury vapor must be. You would think that just not lying on the floor would reduce your exposure considerably.
Vapor of mercury compounds seems similar. They won’t be lighter.
Obviously this doesn’t apply if you heat it up.
Or burp it up.
Her beverage cabinet was always filled with fluorescent lamps of all kinds back then.
Lava lamps?
You should do a SFW (for obvious reasons) poster of Max during her transition phase.
That would be an awesome vote incentive! She looks way taller here, so I’m wondering just how quickly she got to 6’1″ tall. I’m guessing over the course of the one summer?
then the probably gave her treatment for mercury poisoning lmao
I’m betting her unique physiology absorbs the metal directly for healing/refreshing. Would explain why her going to the bathroom isn’t a hazard.
In the Adams Family TV series that’s what happened to Uncle Fester.
It was precisely what he required.
We all get weird cravings sometimes. I kept craving cottage cheese for the longest time until I had blood work done and found out that I needed salt and calcium. It’s like the cravings pregnant women get, although they blame it on the baby. That’s partly true, but it’s the baby taking nutrients from the mother that causes it. For Max, I think it has to do with her need for elements that her refurbished body needs, having metallic skin would cause her to crave some pretty weird stuff. We can see how her changes brought out her beauty early on, like many blondes with blue eyes don’t show their beauty until they are in their later teens. I’d not be surprised if she had the same for the lead/acid batteries too.
How long ago? ‘Cause I don’t think I’ve seen anything but digital thermometers since the early 1990s…
Like the Archie comics, Grrl Power is essentially timeless.
In the “current day” in the comic, Barack Obama is still the president, and he was president in the real world in 2009-2017. Since Maxima is only a teen here, the mercury thermometer seems like it would match up without too much comic timeline shenigans.
Agreed. According to the “Who’s Who” page, (which might be a year or two out-of-date?) Max is currently 34, and on pages 414/415 she is 13 when first exposed to the geode water, so 21 years difference. The present-day comic is set sometime between 2009 and 2018(*??). Putting the doctor scene between 1988 and 1997.
Note*: We actually don’t know what the “present day” year is in the comic. Obama appeared on the second day in comic time (the next day after Sydney was discovered by Max), which was around 5 years in real-world time. A lot of things have happened since then, including several notable time skips. Sydney’s time-travel portal, skip for her to finish basic training, skip during this arc to get to the tournament, several more.
Time frames can be difficult. I like to point out “The Lord of the Rings,” where it takes most of Book One to cover four months to the Breaking of the Fellowship, then all of Book Two and about three-fifths of Book Three to the destruction of the Ring at Mount Doom.
Timelines that are (presumably) fictional may connect with our (presumably) nonfiction timeline is a nonlinear way. The precise rate of timeflow differential can depend on plot.
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff
Speaking of time frames: you didn’t say how much time it took to reach the Ring destruction
A lot time, the confusion over time lines is because sometimes you are getting different POV, like, you focus on one person (or group) until they meet up with another group (or person) and then you switch to the others POV leading up to the same meeting
How did her pre-existing hair fully transition to purple or is this several months since the museum incident?
The trope of a person’s hair turning white instantly doesn’t make sense, but this is that except purple?
I had this exact thought aftrer looking at #415.
Not much time could’ve elapsed between her x-ray there, and the thermometer incident. Definitely not enough for her hair to have grown that much.
I can’t think of any rational explanation except for dye.
Her power seems to have essentially hijacked her human hair. Human hair is made of dead cells, but her transformed hair is protected by her powers and is thus most definitely alive. There may still be a layer of human detritus as a film around each strand of transformed hair, and that human-hair detritus would be protected by her aura.
Looks again, it’s not fully transitioned, you can still see streaks of the original straw (those aren’t highlights or reflected light)
Her blonde hair started falling out, then purple, silk-but-also-metallic hair grew rapidly in its place, curiously stopping when it reached the length of her extant hair.
Had anyone other than the author have said that…..
Nah, not buying that, and you aren’t buying it either
You can still see traces of the original hair colour
Curiously, for some of us out hair does stop growing at a particular length. We cant all be Crystal Gale. My barber closed up shop just before covid to have a baby. The shop never reopened and haven’t had a haircut since. I hit shoulder length and that’s as far as it goes.
Hair has a “terminal length”, either at which it stops growing, falls out, the follicle rests for a bit, then grows a replacement hair. It’s staggered, so you don’t really notice like you would if they all did at the same time. Hair also tends to get broken and damaged, depending on its durability and how well it’s cared for, and so tends to end up shorter than its natural terminal length.
It would be interesting to see someone whose body hair didn’t have terminal length. You could have people running around looking like wookies. I have known a few people who looked like a walking furry costume.
Oddly some people’s hair doesn’t. Some people’s terminal (head) hair just grows, indefinitely. It’s not as rare as we tend to guess, because lots of them have just been cutting it every time it gets too long and never realized it would get longer forever if they allowed it.
Crystal Gayle (country singer, popular 1970s-1990s) was probably the most well-known example. She let it grow as long as she was tall, and trimmed it only to prevent it dragging on the ground.
I guess I kind of expected to see her with blonde tips and purple roots. This looks more like new follicles started in with purple hair while existing follicles were still functioning and growing blonde hair.
And by most of the original follicles are gone, along with most of her original skin. ….
I found out the traditional reason we value silver so much.
If you put it in water it kills off most microbes.
When it becomes tarnished, take it out and clean it, then put it back.
Gives a whole new reason for the phrase “Born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”
Like they have a better chance of surviving infantcy.
Is it bad that I find this “Half-Max” form kind of pretty?
No.
Depends on what you mean by “kind of pretty” and who you are.
Are you simply stating that she’s objectively “pretty”? She is objectively pretty, so not a problem.
Realizing that you find the look of vitiligo skin coloring attractive in general? Not a problem.
Are you age appropriate (she’s supposed to be 13) and physically attracted to her? Not a problem.
Are you an adult physically attracted to someone you know is only 13 years old? Yeah, that could be seen as bad.
Lol, I first read this in black and white because my phone was in bedtime mode, and was totally baffled about what’s going on – the thermometer just looked like a scar on her lip, and the skin patches looked like maybe damage from the battle? Except we just saw her after the battle and she was fine…
Love the backstory page, and art. The left eye fully transitioned with her right mid-transition is a nice touch, along with the different eyebrows. But how does she already have full-length purple hair? I realize it’s still mixed with blonde, with more blonde on her right side, but wouldn’t she just have purple “roots” at this point as the hair grew out? With more visible purple on the left side transitioning to less on the right. Of course page 415 also has a few strands of full-length purple hair, so this page is consistent.
I would presume that the transformation is spreading down her existing hair, rather than only growing out with new hair length. And, in fact, the lock to the farthest right in the comic (falling behind her left shoulder) is purple part way down, but fades to blonde at the end.
Not just in that part, you can see streaks of the original hair in other places (kinda looks greenish though, so might not be so easy for some to notice)
Now I’m wondering if Max is continuing to transform. Just because the outside is finished doesn’t mean things aren’t still changing under her x-ray proof skin.
If I recall correctly, she didn’t manifest the ability to fire energy beams until she was in college.
So yeah, chances are it took a few years for the whole process to settle, but I believe it’s been roughly two decades by now. There is a common, though oversimplified, observation that most of the human body replaces it’s cells completely at least once every 7 years. Whatever this is, it’s clearly working overtime if in under a year it’s replaced at bare minimum half of her epidermis.
Does there exist an “artist’s helper” image editting AI that could help Dave B. update his older pages quickly?
I wouldn’t trust AI with that task.
I’m relatively sure that an old-style medical oral thermometer doesn’t contain enough mercury to get a ‘glub’.
Dave is about start to redraw the whole story.
Was she turning gold like she had vitiligo, or was she shedding her skin and the gold was beneath, and was now the skin’s freshest layer?
In an earlier strip we saw her peeling off sunburned skin after her vacation and there was gold underneath, so I’m guessing the latter.
According to the backstory pages, she was peeling. Like how you peel after a particularly nasty sunburn.
As said, her skin is peeling. Her hair (& presumably eyes, etc.) seemed to be turning purple rather than being replaced. Put “grrl-power-415-are-you-there-god-its-me-maxima” after /comic/ in the address bar. I’d link but think I got rejected for that earlier.
DaveB linked it in his authurb
should have used the same doctor as the one that poked sydney in here vivsection memories.
ERMAGERD! She’s so ADORABLE!!!
I approve of this anachronism. Guess she is lucky they didn’t require a core temperature.
I don’t know if Dave B will read this but just in case he does, DON’T GO BACK TO FIX ANYTHING. It was a great pleasure to watch your artistic skills improve so significantly over the years. This is just my opinion. Like one of your old comics said, “I do not have the authority to order you to pass salt”
Or, if you do redraw older pages, include a link to the original page. I, too, enjoy going back and seeing the progression of the artwork.
Add me to the list of appreciating original works (the only time to ‘fix’ errors is shortly after they happen, like, before the next page)
Seconded. Although for me it’s the amount of time he would spend on it.
Netscape (remember them?) failed mostly because they decided to completely rebuild the engine. While they were doing that, they weren’t moving forward.
In the art world, I don’t know many artists who took a painting that had been displayed and decided to “fix” it.
George Lucas decided to do that with the Star Wars trilogy. Is the consensus that this improved them?
Navigator and Communicator :)
Have both on an old machine, only stopped using it because it literally ran out of room to defrag (that was back when you could watch it moving bits of data around, which was fun :) )
Possible explanation for the mercury thermometer:
Start with the assumption that her internal body temperature is unnaturally high due to the transformation.
The doctor tried a digital thermometer first, but didn’t believe the result.
He speculated that whatever is happening to her might have interfered with the digital thermometer’s operation somehow.
So he found an old-school “analog” mercury thermometer somewhere to re-check her temperature.
He’s old enough that maybe he had one in his office as a keepsake from early in his career.
She would have been a teen in the 80’s, considering she’s in her 30’s now (2008-9), and they were still using old style thermos in the 80’s.
Told ya it was still a thermometer :P
Butt… was this the first?
She already said it was not a butt thermometer :)
It’s crazy to think that any amount of potential cravings (because at the time, she wasn’t sure that’s what that was) would have actually gotten Maxima to attempt drinking mercury. Surely even at that age she knew the harmful effects of the substance?
That’s what the “Twitch” and “Quiver” was about, she didn’t expect her lips and tongue would be strong enough to break it (which is why she looks shocked in the “Glub” panel
Her super powers allowed her to taste Mercury through glass?
Some kind of short range psychometry effect?
reminds me of Vitiligo
Teen Max would probably be worthy of its own spin off comic. It would have its far share of pathos. I would bet that somewhere along the line Max picked up a mentor to help with all the trauma of the changes, but before that. Imagine being 2/3 of the way through you adolescence and suddenly all of the things about your body that were a part of your identity and self image started changing or even just sloughing off. Imagine waking up and pulling back the sheets to find patches of skin and body hair all over the sheets. It would have to be pretty traumatic.
First day back at school after fully transistioning would be interesting.
Her friends would want to touch her face to see if it’s soft or hard.
Also demonstrating super strength.
She was already tall.
Gods yes teen Max would be awesome.
The question is: Is the Comic doing well enough to afford a Fiver assistant who does that sort of stuff for you?
This seems like the sort of thing that I could code in a weekend. As long as Dave has the original files that just need to be run through batch processing to save an export copyas a new size, rename them so that they matched the file names on the Web server, and then upload the new copies over the top of the old ones.
I wonder how much Max’s skin is like actual metal. Is it more conductive than normal human skin? (Does electricity even affect her?)
Yes it does. (Although not as much as V is thinking)
” I think Deus’s head is too big”
On that page? Is that what Deus looked like before he used his intellect and a little genetically optimized cloning to have a brain transplant done by Frix??
OMG the doctor head DOES look a little too big!!!
I’m starting to wonder if she’s even biologically compatible with ordinary humans after such a transformation.
Hard to say for certain. Has she been transformed through and through or is she still a gooey human, albeit a Super under that hard candy shell? She had been shown to bleed a different color but that should still be an effect of the gold skin and not her internal structure. It’s all a part of the mystery that is Max.
There are several elements/metals that are liquid or soft at room temperature. One that comes to mind is sodium. I happened to acquire two five pound canisters of pure sodium at a military surplus auction that was included with a bunch of other stuff. It’s highly reactive to water and other elements and is so soft that you can easily carve off chunks. I used to toss pieces into water where it would react by heating up and generating oxygen and hydrogen which would ignite and blow up with popping sounds like fire crackers. Sodium is an essential element for humans (and all animals). No way would you want to chew on a piece of it but Max certainly could. Might be like ‘pop rocks’ candy to her. Gallium is another metal that liquid/soft at around room temperature..
My question is how did she explain that to the doctor right next to her?
Much the same as everything else. The doctors are completely baffled by her emerging biology, so her eating mercury might be somewhere in the middle of the list at best.
For what it’s worth, Chaykin put it to me this way, which I’ll paraphrase.
Never redraw or repair your own work. Once you’ve called it a final, it’s submitted to the universe. If you get paid to draw it again, you probably wouldn’t tell the story the same way, so fixing old mistakes just leads to endless editing and undercutting of real work. Commit to the page and walk away, and be proud of the best you could do at the time.
Yes, that last part is the important part: “best you could do at the time”
Again, fixing errors (words and art) when it is first released is fine, but it needs to be done before too much time has past (within a week at the most, or before the next upload)