Grrl Power #1451 – She drinks a mercury drink, she drinks a quicksilver drink…
…She drinks a cinnabar drink, she drinks a hydrargyrum drink… And oh, look, even in the rare cases where she gets knocked down, she does get up again.
I should note that inducing vomiting if someone swallows mercury is not necessarily the recommended procedure. I googled it to see what the proper medical response should be, and most results just said “call poison control.” But basically, getting it out of the body is a good thing, only in the process of vomiting, it could cause vapors to get in the lungs, which is where the real danger happens. And also, since mercury is probably heavier than most anything else that’s likely to be in someone’s stomach, vomiting may not actually expel all of it. I suspect either a stomach pump or a “ass higher than your head” vomiting position is required, and I imagine Downward Dog vomiting could lead to a lot of stomach acid in the sinuses, which would probably suuuuuck.
So when the doctor here panic-ly says “We need to induce vomiting immediately!” He’s probably going to go run into the next room and grab his “Big Book of Medical” and double check the proper procedure. That is, after he watches Max crack open that blood pressure thingy (sphygmomanometer) and hold him at bay with one arm while she glugs down another slug of quicksilver.
Max doesn’t actually have a whole weird shopping list of exotic nutritional requirements, but she also hasn’t gone around trying a sampler platter from the Periodic Table, either. Mercury is the only one she ever felt the urge to eat. She and quite a few others suspect that she could probably eat a whole lot of stuff that would be bad for humans, but she also isn’t in a hurry to do so. For all she knows, swallowing Antimony or Tantalum could cause her to have a bad case of “organs on the outside” or whatever the opposite of Scurvy is. Which… I guess would be Vitamin C poisoning.
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.
Does anyone wonder if Max is getting friendly with any of the crew? She seems oddly relaxed.
Health Potion, Mercury Intoxication, Steak Dinner and coming down from the battle.
She should be unconscious.
If that’s not the next strip, it’ll definitely happen next week.
When in informal situations, she is often relaxed like this
Or did you mean ‘friendly’ (with a side of ‘benefits’) friendly?
Did Gyaxgy (the dragon chef) come along for the ride?
No… why?
If Maxima’s enhanced biology taps the superion field, then trace amounts of mercury might have the same role iron plays in human hemoglobin ….. not the whole bloodstream, just the metal cofactor that makes the system work. We don’t see “superion‑absorbing organs” on supers the way trees have leaves or humans have lungs, so either there’s some extradimensional weirdness going on, or super biology grabs superion energy at a microscopic level (basically the midichlorians joke, but less cursed).
Mercury fits because it’s liquid at normal temperatures, conducts charge, and responds to fields really well. She wouldn’t need a mercury bloodstream, just a little bound into her mitisuperchondria for energy production or her superioglobin for circulation.
How this fits into other clues about her power, notably the comment about her defenses not being so much a shield as a condition of space, remains to be pondered.
That take on the mercury and let’s be honest the other heavy metals parses, mind all my medical training, Anatomy/Physiology and basic biology are better than 40 years gone and as for actually working it? Yeah, 20+ years. I do keep up with gross comparative anatomy by having camelids, canines, felines one dang macaw and treating injuries etc. for the primates around the house also. (do not get me started on people freaking out about injuries etc. calm down, ABC’s are the same for everything though aquatic critters get complicated) I’ve been nearly dead. Meds and too stupid to die. A back that is literally a Tom Jones joke. Is it common? It’s not unusual.
With vomiting, we’re not worried about the fumes getting into the lungs, we’re worried about the vomit (it’s called “aspiration”), especially if the vomiting involves toxic substances.
It’s an interesting trope that nearly every woman breaks the law as soon as she has super powers and it gets hand waved away.
dude, literally anyone with superpowers kinda does that. That said, “eating a Thermometer” isn’t a law.
so your “gotcha” just makes you look stupid.
They were talking about the ‘patriarchal law’, where it says ‘women must be subservient to men at all times and in all ways, AMEN’
I believe he’s talking about the destruction of property (ripping the mounted sphygmomanometer off the wall). But’s more of a “Civil” issue than a “Law” issue, so still an Incel-style “gotcha”.
Given that most laws are written around supremely human limitations, it would be more surprising if people didn’t break the law somehow. Most of us break the law daily without superpowers. We speed, we jaywalk, we do various and sundry minor breaks of the laws that we simply aren’t reported for because there is no significant damage, not enough witnesses or simply no desire to enforce the law.
If you suddenly were able to crack concrete by sneezing too hard, of course you are going to end up breaking the law at some point, because chances are you are going to damage someone’s else’s property, intentionally or otherwise. If you suddenly got the ability to read minds, congratulations on your many counts of invasion of privacy! Are you a scary looking minority suddenly able to shrug off bullets? Resisting arrest by not going down after some poorly trained ‘peace officer’ empties their clip into you for looking suspicious.
Is it actually interesting, though?
Like, ‘women with superpowers’ is a subset of ‘people with superpowers’. It could be that the trend is that ‘people with superpowers break stuff and it gets glossed over’, and you’ve just ignored half the data.
In order for it to be “interesting”, you’d need to show that this was true for when women in fiction get superpowers to a significantly greater degree than when men in fiction got superpowers.
Harem seems to have gotten up between panel one and panel three to get herself two burgers, she has a greater appetite than I do.
forgot which one of her is hungry?
She doesn’t have to move to get as many burgers as she wants
Mental processing actually Burns more calories than physical labor and she is controlling 4 bodies.
Five bodies
In addition to being a super she is physically no more that 20 years old. (She was introduced as 19 but maybe a birthday has passed.) She does PT along with everyone else. So along with the physique granted to most supers she is a physically active late teen/early twenty something. She could probably eat most of us under the tble.
She probably would, too. ;)
how much does max weigh?
mercury is heavy. that 400ish ml flask alone is going to be 4.3?kg.
or… about 35 quarter pound burgers
If she’s actually metallic gold, she should be very heavy herself (gold is very dense).
Interesting to think about.
Interested indeed. Per #415, we are not sure what Max is made of except that it is chemically inert and cannot be biopsied with normal medical tech. She is mostly gold colored with purple and red accents, plus the white and black in her eyes, but that does not automatically mean she is made of actual gold. We just do not have enough in‑universe information yet.
Since most metals are heavier than human flesh and bone, it is a fair guess that her rebuilt body should be dense. But we never see any signs of that. No deep footprints in carpet, no cracked tiles, nothing that suggests statue weight. And we have already seen her use her flight power to cancel Masshole’s gravity trick, which means she can manipulate her effective mass. It is easy to imagine a small amount of that power running all the time to keep her weight in the baseline human range.
You never ask a woman her weight! Or her age, or her dress size, or… much of anything
Just like with Harem and Les, there are some things Maxi doesn’t want to test in case it’s the one thing they can’t survive
Your medical insurance may pay for a damaged mercury thermometer, but no way they are paying for a new blood pressure measuring device.
Sphygmomanometer
“I’m going to do this… And neither of us can stop me”
Awww! Teeny Maxima is cute… And terrifying… No wonder she gets on with Sydney
Teen Maxima was, while very pretty, an RPG/Comic book junkie. She has demonstrated knowledge, explicit knowledge, of the lifestyle on at least three occasions, namely in dealing with Sydney. As an example, explaining to Sydney why she was able to beat Math, then lose to him in the rematch.
i dont know why maxima being a metaliphage is suprising cause it really makes perfect sense in hind sight her body would need more base minerals then average esp when healing
I can’t tell if Maxims is wearing Braces or not…
She sucked them off her teeth and ate them like spaghetti.
Didn’t we stop using mercury thermometers decades ago? I thought we had transitioned to other fluids by now.
that would have been decades. If she was thirteen, it was the 1980’s, and yes, they still used mercury back then, first hand knowledge.
This just makes me wonder what would happen if Max ingested something like enriched uranium. She’s so tough, death or even significant harm is basically off the table for HER, but how would she react to it?
And would her body block the radiation, or would she be dangerous to be around for a while until it’s out of her system?
I would almost want it to be like a sugar rush for her, like her body can process the uranium, but the fact that it’s enriched makes her body want to chew through all that energy as fast as possible.
Alternatively, it would be very funny if it was like weed or catnip for her, if only because she must have 0 tolerance.
she probably doesn’t want to find out because then they might ask her to start disposing of radioactive waste.
Wait…. how is her body disposing of all that mercury…?
See Isaac Asimov’s golden goose story.
Also Disney’s ‘Million Dollar Duck’.
They already have Les for that
Worst case scenario, she can’t digest it, they can’t extract it from her, and she’s a walking radioactive nightmare.
“Enriched” uranium has no more energy than other uranium. The point of enrichment is to isolate specific isotopes which are better to use for the fission process due to their predictable reactions. Common mistake to make if you don’t know much about nuclear power and you hear the word “enrichment” thrown around casually.
Whelp, it’s clear by the doctor’s response that they’ve already discovered she can eat glass without issue. As removing the broken glass before it perforates something internally usually takes higher priority than elemental mercury poisoning.
Might not be about being safe for her. You are what you eat? Imagine if Max becomes a radiation hazard around people she does not want to harm, and not just invading alien carrier ships, and Kevin when he’s being mean.
I kind of wonder when her ears got points in her transformation.The pics of her as a teen before the soaking in geode juice seem to show her with average round ear shape.
Depending on whether or not Max’s resilience extends to chemicals, I imagine that anything not actively beneficial to her body would just go through her digestive system. Which could mean a case of the literal nuclear shits, but she’ll probably be OK…Eventually.
I wonder if Maxima likes Organic Mercury even more? IRL it’s terrifying stuff, like a droplet on your skin will kill you slowly over the next few months and once it starts there is no cure. Look up Karen Wetterhahn if you want a sad but true story.
But Max is Max, although she should be sure to rinse well before she kisses her boyfriend.
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone else want someone to fly Achilles to the top of Mt. Everest (or some simlar geographic feature) and film him snow-tubing down? ’cause, seriously, superhero social media should really consistantly be On Another Level(tm).
I suspect that their base has a VERY specialised plumbing system to recover all of the weird chemicals etc. in their wastes. Demonic blood and pee, mercury and transuranic elements, etc. etc. are really NOT recommended for standard sewers – although having said that, when I was an educational technician the officially recommended way of disposing of the contents of a depleted uranium half-life apparatus (that contains a small amount of uranium salts in solution which eventually need to be replaced) was to flush it down the toilet then follow up with several more flushes to dilute it and get the liquid into the sewer before anyone else used the toilet.
I wonder if Max’s old skin is peeling off like it’s sunburnt, or if it’s more like vitiligo with the shedding of old skin happening at the normal rate.
When it started, she thought it *was* sunburn.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-415-are-you-there-god-its-me-maxima/
But does she sing the the songs that remind her of the good times?
Swallowing elemental mercury wouldn’t be as dangerous as you might thing. It’s not as readily absorbed by the digestive system as you might think. *Most* of it would pass through.
Still not great, and chronic exposure would be bad. But the fumes are the bigger threat by absorption through the lungs. And even then it takes a lot of exposure. Hatters didn’t go mad overnight.
That said. check out Aboo’s comment. That form of mercury IS nasty AND gets absorbed through skin. Eff that noise.
This is oddly more Sydney, than I thought it would be. Maybe this is why Maxima tolerates her so much better?
Max’s half-and-half face is super creepy!
I love the flashback showing Max in a more human moment. She has to be the soldier, commander, and in control all the time, so you don’t get to see her just being a person.
HEHEHEHEHE chumbawumba refrence