Grrl Power #1474 – Mega influencer
You know… “RAR” If you know what I mean.
I don’t, actually. I don’t know why it’s in quotes.
I know what you’re all wondering. The symbol on her phone is an eggplant with a bite taken out of it. Admittedly the branding could be a little clearer.
I think Babezilla is clocking in at about 300 feet tall there? The building next to her isn’t 2-story technically, but it’s one of those businesses like an auto repair shop or your basic strip mall structure, so it’s got a false ceiling with all the ductwork and cabling and some HVAC on the roof. So it’s a little shorter than a 2 story house, cause houses have sloped roofs, but it’s about the same height as two stories of an office building, if you ignore the bottom two floors which are usually a high-ceiling lobby and them a mezzanine level. Anyway, that comes up to her ankle, so my back of the napkin my brain calculation puts her at about 300 feet.
Babezilla is 5’5″ normally, so 300 feet means she’s 55x larger, and assuming she starts off at 100 pounds (for easy math,) she’s clocking in at about 8,500 tons now, according to a square cube calculator I found. That’s why the street is cratering under her. The storm drains no likey.
Of course, being 55x larger means the 5,000 mile swim to Senegal (assuming she starts from Galveston) would still be a 90 mile swim for her. She may not have fully realized that. It would be a pretty stupid way to die, getting 3 or 400 miles out and realizing how badly she’d underestimated the distances. Even if she hadn’t gotten past the continental shelf, the water there can be 350-600 feet deep. Though I guess if she started from Galveston, she’d be basically in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and could angle toward an oil derrick. There’s a lot of them out there. It’s not like she’s stuck at 300 feet tall. She could swim up and be all, “Gosh guys, do you have a helicopter to spare? I think I’m lost.”
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
“OK, so which dumbass Devisor hit Kaiju with a growth ray?”
(Well, no, Sadhira Patel is way too introverted to pull this shit. Maybe Don Sebastiano is psychically pranking her?)
OK, so the comment software doesn’t escape out invalid/joke HTML tags, which is… less than optimal.
Could one of the mods please either fix the previous post (by removing the mock tag) or delete it outright? Sorry for the trouble.
“Friend Computer” say your security clearance is too low : Please proceed to the nearest extermination center, and notify Schol-R-LEA;3 on your way.
She seems to be rocking a Godzilla aesthetic. Dorsal fins that go all the ways up, lizard tail, scales, claws, super durability, and massive size. Wonder if she’s got atomic breath as well.
More reptar then godzilla.
Galveston, huh? Interesting, given that’s where I live…
Although it did not escape me that this comic takes place mostly in Texas (Sydney’s car has a Texas registration, and her fake ID says “Beaumont, TX” (which is sorta-close to Galveston.)
DaveB spent years living in the DFW Metroplex back when he started this.
Kind of surprised she’s not dead already. I would have thought there would be lots of ways to kill her…
Hiro’s about the size of one of her eyes, he can’t just punch his way through to the back of her brain? Archilles could get stuck in her throat to suffocate her, Heatwave could probably do some serious nerve damage if she used an anatomy textbook to tell her where to aim, I’d be interested to see what would happen if she tried to bite down on Anvil inside her mouth, there has to be something Stalwart can do involving breaking her toes or aiming for her archilles tendon, if Mr. Amorphous can get into her bloodstream he can create arbitrary blockages, Jigawatt would have a chance of either stopping her heart, short-circuiting her brain, or at least being able to trigger involuntary limb movement with some sort of localized taser or electric neuron activation…
For that matter, there must be lots of routine weapons worth trying… 20mm vulcan MIGHT do something, it’s worth checking, and what about tear gas? You could probably chuck a few dozen tear gas grenades straight into her lungs… Heck, even flashbangs next to her ears might do something… or concussion bombs.
She’s a LOT tougher than you realize. Because she’s moving and acting like she’s a normal person while 300 ft tall… and the author implies that she moves 55x faster than a normal human, that means she’s actually 166,375 times stronger than a normal person. Same for her toughness. Normally a human grown to 300 ft tall would immediately die under their weight. Babezilla HAS to be 55x tougher and stronger than her mass alone would suggest. Her muscle tissues are stronger than any material man has invented. Same for her skin. Heck, even her eyes would be tougher than industrial grade titanium.
No, she’s only 3,025 x stronger than a normal person – strength is based on the cross-sectional area of the muscles, (the square in square-cube), while mass is based on the cube, so she’s 166375x Heavier. Yes super powers flaunt the laws of physics – even the cell phone shouldn’t be working – if nothing else the aerial is now really badly tuned.
Good catch on that her cellphone can’t work. Even if there was engineering for a battery to power it, every signal it transmits over its antennae is going to be resized off frequency.
Yes, she obviously does not obey the square-cubed law. If she did, she WOULD be only 3025x stronger than a normal person, as you say. But if that was the case, she would be laying on the ground, rapidly dying and unable to move. But the author says she could travel 5000 miles like it was 90, ie, she moves 55x faster than a normal person, equivalent to her size change. So no, she CANNOT be only 3025x stronger, because she has to be 166,375 times stronger to be able to move “normally.” Her power is not just ‘growth’, it is ‘growth plus all the secondary powers needed to let her act ‘normal’ while bigger. That power obviously effects her phone as well, adapting it to it’s greater size. It’s like a classic speedster. Without the speed force, they don’t work. Well, call it the ‘growth’ force. She’s playing by movie monster Kaiju rules, and her powers obviously make that work.
If it takes her the same time to take one proportional step as it takes a normal human, and she’s 55 times taller, then her feet would be moving at about mach 1.5 when she runs, assuming her normal body runs at 10mph, and that feet spend half their time not moving at all, and the other half moving twice as fast the human’s torso, so that her normal foot speed of her leading foot is about 20 mph while the other foot is at rest. If she’s a skilled baseball pitcher, she might be able to throw a fastball at about mach 7. That’s fast and all, but I still think that even without Dabbler, Halo, or Maxima, Arc-Swat should still be able to kill her by their fourth or fifth attempt.
I think the reason they’re calling in Maxima is *because* they want an option that doesn’t involve murder. They could obviously call in a fighter jet with missiles to aim at her face, but I imagine she hasn’t tripped that level of force yet. (Considering how she’s streaming rather than, say, rampaging through central park.)
That said, it does seem a *little* strange that a genki girl whose power is ‘Being really big’ is pushing them so hard. If nothing else, you’d think Dabbler would have some kind of ordinance that works on Frost Giants, even if it’s a basic ‘Trip and fall into a glue trap’ deal so Maxima could at least finish her fight.
I’ve said this before, but I think Babezilla exploits a unique gap in ARC Swats capabilities. They don’t have many effective and non lethal options to handle giant sized threats. It seems like it’s either kill or be useless. Vehemence kinda presented a similar issue when he got too strong. They have to rely on Max for this stuff. That aside I’m surprised “just kill her already” is the immediate answer comments are going to. They are heroes right? I wouldn’t want ARC to just start killing any super that poses a significant problem.
Comments seem bizarrely split between “Aww, she’s not hurting nobody, leave her alone!” and “They could have easily killed her by now, why haven’t they?”
Archon are military.
Unlike US Cops, that means they have a lot of rules and restrictions about when they are or aren’t allowed to use lethal force, the training and dicipline to follow those rules… and can face actual consequences for breaking them, rather than being placed on full-paid leave and the quietly shuffled off to a nearby precinct.
Do we have any indication that Babezilla has done anything that breaches the necessary thresholds?
Obviously this is what Max came back to deal with. What I’m wondering is whether/why haven’t they tried…
* Dabbler’s sleep spell
* An M829 to the kneecap
* Dabbler’s amnesia hammer
* Vorping Varria up to the small of her back and seeing if she gets a useful gestalt
* Dabbler’s boob hypnosis
* Were-panther laser claws to the achilles tendon. (Or is it were-jaguar? I forget.)
* Dabbler’s lube spell (the bigger they are…)
* Leon hacking that phone so at least she isn’t being an annoying streamer about things
* Letting her step on Anvil
Honestly? Our writer is a gamer. Sleep spells have to scale like anything else. Dabbler’s best shot in that area wouldn’t make Babezilla yawn. That goes for any of Dabbler’s direct target spells honestly. The M829? It’d be like an airsoft round to her skin. It MIGHT leave a mark but it’s not kneecapping her. Varia would probably get something useful, but “defeat a Kaiju” useful is unlikely. Were-panther claws are cool… but Babezilla has Kaiju skin. To hold that enormous body together her skin has to be tough enough to make Beskar look fragile. No damage… maybe they make a tiny red spot? Dabbler’s Lube spell… better… but applying it to a big enough area… problem one. Applying it to an area that doesn’t crater under Babezilla’s weight, rendering it useless? Problem two. Probably doesn’t work unless she’s at a tipping point from something else. Leon Hacking her phone? Yeah… she’s an influencer. Leon can totally beat her. Anvil… gets driven into the ground like a tack… and maybe knocks Babezilla’s foot up a bit? If you want to really hurt her… you need someone who can core an alien battleship. Oh wait…
Halo’s soloed kaiju before. Still wondering why Max is needed here.
Halo’s killed kaiju. Max is needed for a non-lethal solution. Haymaker and lights out.
its not just non-lethal, Halo will tend to have a lot of collateral damage as she tends to kite kaiju. Max will apply direct force.
Lights-out & she falls over unconscious = collateral damage.
Portal magic to the rescue. Nicely adjustable effect.
considering that Max was in the middle of a fight, I would have though that Halo would’ve been a better choice, Way more versatile unless they arestill trying to hide Halos powers..
knocking out her phone should be childs play and since she still needs air do the invisible woman and block her airway with a force field till she fall unconscious.
I don’t think any of the team can make force fields. (Honestly, alongside psionic-energy-fueled telekinesis, the kind that can ALSO put up barriers, force fields that can be formed at a distance and without line-of-sight are really an overpowered ability.)
I want to see a short comic (1-2 page) of the first time Babezilla discovered her powers for a patreon bonus lol
Yeah, this definitely a Max-level threat, if her powers work to fully scale her up to that size with full humanoid functionality. As observed by Christopher29 and Krenn above, in order to defy the square-cube law on this level, you need to be a *lot* more durable than just directly scaling up by volume. And moving with proportional speed to a normal human requires being even stronger than the already massive expected to be able handle your own increased weight.
If her powers work based on some kind of spatial distortion field, that would be the minimum power level, if she was simply translating her “normal size” directly to a distorted scale for the world around her. Even then, incoming attacks from most supers would be scaled down to feel like 1 / 166375 of their normal impact.
Still, Max has shown her strength is able to be on par with kaiju-scale opponents, quite recently. If Babezilla is “only” possessed of “normal human scaled up to the size she grows to”, then Max will be a lot more energy / force focused on much smaller cross-section of impact. Could feel like the difference between being stabbed by a knife as opposed to being tackled by a linebacker.
Hmm, yes, but considering that the Kaiju beaten by Max were also science projects by aliens or made by magic. Grrlpower has establish that the “superion” field humans possess abilities that outstretch both. So, personally I’m betting on Babezilla being a step above what we’ve seen so far.
Dave, want to compliment you on good scale establishment on Babezilla here. When I wrote a few scripts for AC Comics back in the day, I saw how challenging it was for some artists to work in giant-sized characters into a scene, and make good visuals out of it.
Some good choices here in the layout composition to work with the difficult challenge of characters of vastly different scale (larger panels for Babezilla, alternate word balloon font, cut-in panels for the normal sized people down at her feet, having buildings and helicopters for scale reference, having the attackers on her leg be Jiggawatt and Heatwave since their powers can be recognized even when they are hard to make out at that relative size on the page)
Like what you are doing here. Even though I think Babezilla is going to be dropped by Max in a single page, so she can zip back before being disqualified, nice to see how you are illustrating the scene.
Agreed. Lately there seem to be more pages where the layout choices really carry part of the storytelling load, and often more effectively than in a lot of other webcomics. Panel 2’s intrusion into Panel 3 at first reads like a simple way to show Arc‑Swat bantering while Babezilla kaijuifies, but it also quietly sets up Math’s placement in Panel 4. So when he pops in with “I do!” the attribution lands instantly because Panel 3 has already oriented us — we don’t need to see Math to know it’s him, and the joke hits harder with that little identity puzzle built in.
It’s been nice seeing the composition do that kind of narrative work.
Lets say they did kill Babezilla. Aside from dealing with the remains of a 300 foot tall kaiju which would be a mess in it self (assuming she didn’t shrink back down upon death or unconsciousness) the problems of social fallout due to killing someone who was cute and engaging would be a huge mess for Arianna. If she were bashing through Houston and killing thousands of people that would be one thing but so far she is just bumbling around and doing some property damage while being an attention sponge.
Am I the only one wondering if she has an additional invulnerability power on top of sizing?
1) She’s ignoring lightning and fire damage. I know that if I was hit by a visible electric spark equal in length to the distance from my knee to my ankle, I’d be all types of rocked.
2) Wouldn’t she have to to stand under her own weight?
What you’re missing is, in order for her to be able to move ‘normally’ and not have her own body crush under her own weight, Babezilla has to be essentially 55x tougher than normal human tissues would be. So an electric spark that (at equivalent size) would really badly jolt a normal person will barely tickle her. She’s WAY tougher than anything made by man to this point. Her skin would be too tough for tank shells to penetrate. Her eyes would be bulletproof (although not tank shell proof), and her bones would be… well, tougher than alien battleship hull by a considerable margin I would guess.
You have knocked her out. She reverts to her real form, a godzilloid who is also a werevalleygirl.
Babezilla doesn’t strike me as a super-gadgeteer – her only significant powers appear to be bigness and toughness. If she’s not a super-gadgeteer, then that phone is pure magic. At 66x scale, being generous is giving it 1/66 speed – not nearly enough CPU to run a modern phone OS, let alone stream. Also it would be producing a signal at a frequency more than six octaves too low for the local cell towers to deal with. And just to be clear, the speed would be a LOT WORSE than 1/66 of normal.
So I’m just guessing but I’d clock a 20% chance her phone is some kind of focus for her power. Or if not her phone, maybe something like the adoration of a million fucked-up fans, which she can’t have in real-time without the phone. So I’d start by piercing the phone and see whether losing it forces her to shrink.
As for the knock-on effects of her super-bigness? The square-cube law about strength and mass, her vocal frequency being one that we can hear, her feet not driving into the ground, etc… we’ve heard all that before and we’re ignoring it because the Superion Field magically interacts with biology. But the phone isn’t biological.
There is no question that Max can deal with this idiot. But doing it both non-lethally and quickly is going to be tricky, and seriously unless she’s been deliberately stomping on buildings full of innocent bystanders, nonlethal is the only real option here.
But if she hasn’t been deliberately stomping on buildings full of innocent bystanders, it’s hard to see how this idiot was important enough to risk losing the big bets that the USA has on Ixah to win the competition. Seriously why not just let her rampage for two more minutes until Ixah finishes the fight and THEN have Max show up?
As far as I know, the USA doesn’t have any bets on Maxima winning anything. Although they might get a cut of the profits if she wins. And the general who authorized this little excursion may not have told all of the people who normally think Maxima is a phone call away that Maxima would be unavailable for a bit…. Which means that it would be really embarrassing if Maxima didn’t answer the phone call.
The official briefing documents available for distribution to state governors and international allies and such, which totally will have been copied by enemy spies, probably say something like “The USA maintains a 24/7 Maxima watch, guaranting that she can will always arrive at any point in the world in 30 minutes or less once a phone call is made, even if she was sleeping in a shower on a rural training grounds in the middle of a snowstorm at the bottom of a cave when the call comes in.” 30 minutes or less or the USA is a liar.
Which means that if Maxima ever DOESN’T show up in 30 minutes or less from the time a state governor places a phone call…. espionage agents are going to notice, and then American deterrence suffers, and then foreign state-sponsored super-terrorists start risking things like staging three simultaneous attacks in three different parts of the world, and hoping Maxima can’t respond to all of them in time, and everyone intelligence agency in the world is holding a stopwatch to track her performance….
Under the circumstances, the contingency plans for Maxima’s mission probably covered this: If she gets a call while in a match, she must be back on Earth and responding to the problem within X minutes, and if the match was likely to take more than X minutes to finish, she leaves early.
30 minutes or less? Can I get Maxima to deliver me pizza?
After I misinterpreted the emergency call, I didn’t think of a kaiju-girl when pondering the possible reasons. It seemed much more likely to be some completely mundane task: taking a phone call from a Congressional committee; signing for a package; some other military officer bureaucracy?
The cell phone could still work if she has a very, very, very specific but still singular super power. That power being that the space she’s encompassing with that power is out of scale with her surrounding space and _then_ we start telling the lies. In the way that the Martian Manhunter doesn’t have Martian Vision, super strength, super speed, flight, telepathy, intangibility, etc. etc. – he just has conscious control over his physical form, practiced up the truly Martian telepathy & intangibility and stuff and then started hanging out with the Justice League and ‘figuring out’ how to do the other super powers he didn’t have when the White Martians burned Mars.
If that’s the case then her cell phone’s signal collapses back to the proper wave length after the fact, inside the power the electrical wave propagation through the circuitry is running at normal speeds relative to itself, and her biology from her breathing molecules that would be too small and/or not in sufficient supply to her body heat radiating square/cube law hotter or cooking her insides and all the rest are just interfacing with the world through a sizing filter that always works in her favor.
I want to ignore that flame attack, it’s at least as small as it appears to me. I want to throw a car, I’ll treat it as a hollow metal baseball. I am a bajillion tons heavier though since gravity is about spacetime curvature and mass / relative velocity simply causes that.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe tries to do this with Ant-Man tech. The redesigns of the costumes include closed helmets so people can still breathe when size changed because that’s what the helmet is doing to what they’re breathing. Pym particles are as much the ‘why’ the plank distance is the plank distance in the way that the higgs boson is why things have mass, but that’s unexplained even to its discoverer so there’s plenty of not explained sci-fi in which to hide the lying. The MCU still suffers because they want Ant-Man to be just as strong as he is relative to his normal size when he’s ant sized but also giant strength when he’s giant. They don’t cover all the lies they’re telling, but it’s a more…congruous? singular lie.
For my part I think the non-lethal solution will end up involving Dabbler producing a kaiju-scale Yuri Paddle and Maxima delivering a few high-impact swats to the giant scaly buttocks. This will work but it will also result in Babezilla “discovering” for her viewers that she has a spanking fetish and her hastagNaughty4SuperMommy content will be a future problem.
Honestly, I think her cell phone works for the same reason she isn’t crushed by gravity and her own body mass. She has a secondary power set that compensates for all the physics she’s breaking… and since her powers work on what she’s wearing (and apparently holding) if she wants, then her ‘growth’ force (stealing from the speed force) works to make her cell phone work as well, despite physics saying no. That said, I think her cell phone is probably her biggest weakness. She’s an influencer. ARC-SWAT has better media people AND some of the world’s best hackers. They can make her viewer count disappear. At the minimum.
Not one comment on the ittsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow pokadot bikini? Guess im old…
Not just one, but two. The comments are broken up into multiple pages. While each comment can have a very large number of replies attached to it, there are only 40 top-level comments per page.
Hey, @DaveB , is that a Frank Zappa Easter Egg on panel 2?
Dave….
Will there be a count down clock for each panel?
9 seconds to….9 seconds defeat…. 9 seconds to get back?
Do you have a voice in your head for everyone and if so who does everyone sound like
Wearing a skirt when you grow to giant size is certainly a choice. It’s a choice Giganta from DC comics has also made in the past, but it’s not one that I, personally, would make.
A) Why hasn’t Babezilla entered the tournament? Seems like she’d kick butt.
B) Max can certainly handle this, but how will she do so in less than 27 seconds? This will be interesting.