Grrl Power #1483 – Rocky mountain high?
Okay, website seems to be humming along now, but I lost some time dealing with it, so the final versions of the vote incentive will probably go up next Monday.
One of the big problems with doing a huge arena battle in a comic like this is… well, there’s a lot less humorous antics going on, which is largely the meat and potatoes of the comic. The other problem is that if this were a Shonen manga, none of these competitors would really go down this easily. They’d each all be big fights that lasted dozens of pages, if not spanning multiple volumes, in which the protagonist has to learn some new ability or apply an existing one in a suspiciously flexible way. Or just flexed his power slightly harder. It would probably involve a flashback. For instance, Zerathax (the obsidian golem) would definitely be able to use his fire side to create thrust, Iron Man style, and fly around setting the battlefield on fire. Being broken in half really does very little to threaten his life, it robs him of his ice powers, but is mostly an inconvenience. And he can melt sand down to make new obsidian to reform his body, which may or may not be quite how it works, but is close enough for a 13 year-old Shonen manga main character to deliver an expository speech about while watching Zerathax convert sand and add it to his body, and most readers just go, “Eh, I don’t feel like searching for a refresher course on igneous rock right now. Besides, the person the MC is explaining this to is a stick-with-boobs who is inexplicably wearing a bikini top in this battle arena scene.” But I really don’t want to make each and every fight some hyper extended battle where the protagonist barely scrapes by but learns and grows along the way. Lore-wise, it’s because Max isn’t 14 and didn’t just get her powers. She’s a 20 year vet with them at this point, and all her fights have been against other supers. (And sometimes against foreign military hardware) It’s why she thought whatever she did to Eat-Chicken might have a chance of working the way it did. Non-lore-wise… uh, real world-wise, it’s because this UCBA storyline would take me 8 years to draw if every fight was done shonen jump style. Maybe if I could put out 5 pages a week, I’d extend the fight scenes a little, but instead I guess I’m going for something in between a typical Shonen and the one-punch fights of One Punch Man. It feels like half-measures either way, so I’m considering how to work the final round so that it doesn’t take 6 months to get through, but still have some cool moments.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
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.
So are these guys (guys doesn’t seem accurate).. uh entities dead? I mean I don’t know how you’d even kill some of these beings like Kaboomoid which seems like living energy but I also don’t know how you’d survive any of what has happened so far. Just asking if this is a death battle? Maybe it’s a little too late and a bit naive to be asking that in an unlimited power ceiling class, no rules, battle royal but still. And Max seems pretty okay with that so far. Although maybe it’s fight now, worry about the ethical ramifications of being a ringer in an intergalactic killing competition later.
For many of these entities I’m not sure they’re even alive, or at least alive in a way we recognise or understand.
As such Kaboomoid and the golem Max split in two are technically incapacitated and will probably return, eventually.
Considering Max is a seasoned veteran with multiple confirmed combat kills, who threatened to ash Vehemence’s brain and gave him a VERY graphic amputation during the restaurant brawl 1300 pages ago, I would say Max is not the person to worry about accidentally killing enemies, especially not in an unlimited-class battle royale. She doesn’t want to kill innocents or bring bad PR to Archon by interring one of their rogue’s gallery in front of live cameras, but there is plausible deniability that the team is participating in the battle royale, so as long as the Ixah persona is not burned, it’s fine.
Though I do think that unless Cora’s ship has EXCEPTIONALLY good cloaking protection against scanning, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sydney opening her gateway in the middle of the arena landing pad has been detected by the authorities and there will be some tough questions to answer…
To be fair with Syndey’s gateway, it was established early on that a lot of information it should put out seems to be cloaked. The orbs themselves don’t even show up on a magic or tech scan despite the fact they are clearly very high magic and/or tech. Now yes, some of the secondary effects might be detectable, but chances are it is an incomplete dataset which is likely to make whatever detected something possibly look like a glitch because it would be like some sort of surveillance showing that there was a sudden fiery explosion in a place completely devoid of and blocked off from flammable materials and oxygen that would make a fire possible in the first place throughout the entire period which the fiery explosion was detectable.
In the first battle, the sentient psionics guy she hit with her energy beam was able to say “yield” and was teleported away. The robot was either an AI (probably with a backup somewhere) or else was remotely piloted. Rambo-Barney was a lab-grown biological entity that was remotely piloted. Max made a point of declaring that she had super-speed cleared the castle of any sentient life before destroying it, then gave the pixie the opportunity to yield.
In this fight I believe the only truly living sentient beings are Max and Ryzyl, the magic elf she almost defeated before the detour, and will probably appear for a magical backstab attempt as she fights Mt. Atrocious. All the others were either declared or hinted to be constructs or golems. Eat-Chicken appears to be a non-sentient lab-created animal with near-zero intelligence and probably some hidden method of being controlled or calmed between fights. Basically just a giant chicken (who really are dumb mini-dinosaurs… they’ll eat anything they can fit in their mouths), and she’s treating it as such.
When it’s down to her and Ryzyl I predict she’ll defeat him (again) but give him the opportunity to yield before death. He’ll then take advantage of that “weakness” for one last stab attempt, forcing Max to deal the death blow. Which will blow up the comment section and lead to 1-2 panels worth of discussion of Max killing someone in a “game”.
“That’s not a man, it’s a Chicken Boo.”
“Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes!”
Daughter about died when I gave the remains of a steak to a rooster. She could not believe that a chicken would happily eat meat.
It was mentioned when they were introducing this to the general, the people running this will generally try to save any combatants at death door if they are unable to yield themselves and are clearly defeated, so it’s nots so much as death game but shit happens in a unlimited match.
I think it’s out of character for Max (let alone Sydney) to be participating in a death match in the first place. Killing is an unfortunate part of the job, not a sport, and these aren’t really enemies. But oh well.
Cora explained to General Faulk (and us) that deaths do occur, but are quite rare. Many of the contestants are remote-piloted bioroids and golems and robots and such, and the ones who are there in person tend to be extremely resilient AND have virtually-instant access to powerful technological and magical healing.
It’s closer to a no-holds-barred MMA fight than to a serious deathmatch – debatably even safer given the power of the healing tech available. While Max probably wouldn’t be up for a straight-up “killing for money” scenario, like assassination, a voluntary free-for-all fight with crazy space/magic healing tech seems a lot more her style. It helps Cora and her friends (money), helps ARCHON/the US/the Earth (space money), and gives her a rare opportunity to stretch her capabilities and let loose.
I think anyone defeated by the Kirby Monster (Eat Chicken) is pretty much dead, since its power is basically to absorb the essence of anything it eats. So RIP Master Chief Doomguy Clone (Roark 18) and Kaboomoid and whatever else it absorbed.
Would be pretty funny if Eat Chicken ate Maxima. Obviously that’s not going to happen, but then they’d have to deal with a superfast, invincible monster that will just keep absorbing more and more power from anything that is sent to try to stop it.
I’m pretty sure what happened was that those guys got ate, but anybody who was actually a person got ejected, but their gear or magic power got sucked in and is forfeit to the monster, since they kinda lost it in a fight they agreed to the rules of.
I’m not so sure about that. Earth, and particularly the US, is in a really odd position now.
That being Earth has a resource (supers) that a lot of the space people polities want. It’s *really poor* compared to a lot of those polities.
Which is a major reason why Max even considered doing this contest. Winning (and the side bets) gets a lot of currency, and may actually allow Earth to get measures in place to allow us to actually keep undesirable space people out.
The closest position I can see historically is something like Switzerland. Which for a long time had a resource larger countries wanted. The mountain passes to their political rivals, not chocolate. This was before chocolate became a thing.
They were also really poor. Not a lot of people actually lived there.
So they ended up sending out mercenaries. You may know about the Papal Guard. That’s about the last remnant, but the French king had a number of them too. Most kings who could afford them, had them. Because they owed their allegiance to their paymaster, and not to any of the nobles. So they were reliable bodyguards.
Earth isn’t sending out mercenaries. At least not that we know of, *yet*.
I originally thought Deus might do that, but I suspect that the space people will look at his association with the Alari refugees and say “Too involved already”.
Archon might, but you’ve got Dabbler there and her association with Thothagoth.
Anyway, the contest seems like an alternative method of getting space money that doesn’t have quite the same associations Americans have with *mercenaries*.
Hopefully this doesn’t turn into a gore-fest, or the association will be with things like Death Race 2000 instead. Which would be bad for Max’s PR. Arianna could have her work cut out for her when this inevitably gets out. And it will, it’s a matter of how long it can be kept secret and how it eventually comes out.
Actually, in earlier pages, where Deus says how he got his demonic mercenaries, they also discuss that it is a super for demonic mercenary trade, Deus’s nation sends some of their trained super soldiers for some of the demonic forces. Not in ‘this’ dimension supposedly, but there is obviously galactic to interplannar transportation networks going on.
Ah! there it is about the mercenary thing: Grrl Power #1047 – Deployment abroaaaad
by DaveB on May 9, 2022 ….
Eats-chicken is going to have an off switch if it’s not directly piloted. It could eat a lot of powerful stuff and expand without doing Max; in fact that’s it’s game plan.
And highly likely it’s piloted. The name is a hint. It’s lack of speech is a feature, not a bug, because someone doesn’t want to own up that they can create this thing. It’s a rival or brother to robo-dinosaur.
As if America has any actual problem with mercenaries. Blackwater, anyone? If Grrlpower was real, the government would contract out supers to aliens the second they needed space cash. They’d use some stupid euphemism too, like Offworld ‘Security Contractors’ instead of calling it what it is.
Met a couple of those guys. They’re not your average citizen.
I don’t know how many more rounds there are left until the final one, but I have a feeling that for the coming fights against ‘Ixah’ there will be a lot of surrenders or attempts to team up against her.
Only three total 8v8 “rounds”. Starting with 512 contestants (64 battles), then those 64 winners were matched 8v8 (that’s where we are now… everyone we see here has already won their initial round), then the final 8v8 championship match is still to come.
“ Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?”
CaptainAmerica.jpg!
I’m pretty sure that Eat-Chicken Noodle is going to act as an explosive cord; wrapped around Atrocitous’s thigh, this is going to get ugly.
Either that or Max is going to pull so hard on the Eat-Chicken Noodle it saws through Atrocitus’ thigh cutting that leg off.
“Eat-Chicken Noodle”! I love it, very creative!
Yeah, was thinking of an explosive cord, just couldn’t think of the name :(
The term you’re loooking for is “det cord.”
Ok, you’re the author & artist, but theorizing what you are presenting is a big part of these comments. So I think you at least owe us some hand-waving explanation of what just happened to Eat Chicken once the fight is over. Make it funny, by all means, even if it’s just Maxima trying & erring many times at super-speed. Super powers do make things look easy, don’t they?
That’s an easy answer, Max force-fed the explosion golem to eats chicken and to contain the resulting explosion that was about to happen she used the wrap. Now all that fire and energy is in the wrap so she’s using it to take down the big mountain golem. It was dumb enough to think it could stomp her and she’s showing why it was stupid. Once the wrap goes boom it will get a confused look on it’s “face” and tople over.
I’m pretty sure those are just speed lines, not a wrap. Eat chicken probably is going to function like detcord.
That’s not unreasonable, I just want to hear it from Maxima, not in the blog.
I figured more humor would come from E.C. being unable to finish assimilating Kaboomoid in a final cluck. If Maxima deduced that she could achieve this result that would really be too Mary-Sue for me, I’d prefer that she lucked into it.
20-20 hindsight says the author planned this some time ago. E.C. and K. are characters chosen for this successful assimilation result. E.C.’s “hull” had to have been fairly indestructable before, but it makes sense that its’ weakness is accidentally assimilating the wrong thing. Kaboomoid was designed to be that wrong thing, producing a “solid explosion” more easily carved up with the Manavore than the original E.C. would have been.
So it’s misleading to analyze the comic as the pages are posted, at this point I’m guessing that the storyboards are completed at least a month ahead of completing the finished pages. Good work Dave B., it will be easier for me to wait patiently on the story now.
I think it’s generally better writing to show not tell. What Scarsdale said is exactly what Dave B showed us.
That said, I do think would be interesting to hear the creators of eat-chicken complain about some nuance of their technology that made this vulnerability. Or if the family or creators of Kaboomoid could explain something.
I think that depends on whether Dave can milk some more humor out of a post-UCBA analysis. (That could come in the form of the 2 factions arguing over how to separate their 2 contestants after the round ends.) But we’ll probably move on to the next story arc, given many vocal commentors disenchantment with this action-oriented arc. I will be satisfied if Maxima gives her teammates some insight into her thought process during this round. I enjoy Gail and Bluce’s commentary too, which we may get more of post-round. Then we have 7 more new characters for them to introduce going into the final round. For me it adds tremendously to the Olympics-like atmosphere of watching a sports program in the comic!
Considering the general art and storytelling style of the comic seems to be closer to that of DC and Marvel crossed with Archie, a pacing and action density more akin to those than to typical shonen manga is definitely more appropriate. We don’t need three panels for a quirked eyebrow, or 90 pages of two opposing characters posturing while they “power up” for forty-five minutes while other characters look on in awe or fear. Maxima isn’t like Goku or Gohan or Tanjiro Kamado or Ichigo Kurosaki; fully kitted out like she is for this tournament, she’s like Superman, Batman, Iron Man, and Thor all rolled into one with a side of Luke Skywalker, so pacing her action scenes like DC and Marvel and Dark Horse would is absolutely the better fit.
And we also similarly don’t need 5 panels of ‘brooding over a skyline while someone else exposition dumps from off-panel’ unless you’re in a hurry and feel like copy/pasting a skyline and sillouhette a few times.
I don’t think Sydney ever got the “sulking in the shadows” training {p190}.
This is officially just boring now. I expected this would finally be a moment where we would see Maxima having to fight a real fight.
Heh, it’s Max, this is like a huge boxer trying to take on superman…
(Insert Wilhelm scream)
I think I prefer Sydney’s observations to the professional announcers. :D
With Max busy in the arena and already done with her obligatory mid-match trip back to Earth, it’d be a great time for Sydney to sneak out for a shopping trip.
I _do_ hope that we do see at least one fight where Maxima is really pressed to the absolute limit, and not by some special trick like magically sending her into another dimension. The notion that there’s nobody in the galaxy which can take down a top-end terrestrial hero kind glazes the superheroes a bit too hard for my tastes.
What would that look like? We’ve already seen her get knocked around pretty hard.
I don’t think dramatic tension in this was ever supposed to come from challenges to Maxima and, as the author states, dramatic tension in this comic is second to humor. Rather, for dramatic tension Maxima is to set a benchmark for villains to try to live up to, and when she’s off dealing with something that only she can deal with, everyone else has to deal with all the lesser problems, and they succeed or fail. Do leave behind a world that’s worth living in?
I’m thinking about when Sydney was trapped off in another place while Max had to lead the team. What about when Sydney made the obelisk while Max fought Darude. Max was about to beat the snot out of Vehemence, but Sydney got to spend time thinking.
Not just K; she’s setting him up for some Special K!
You think eat chicken is still alive and thinking in that state?
Pretty sure Eat Chicken doesn’t really think as such, it probably won’t notice, or will reform where the largest part of its mass is gathered, around that leg, and eat it.
That last panel is a “Rocky Mountain Thigh”, thank you very much, DaveB. If you’re going to miss the obvious puns in your work, then I can’t help you.
Yeah, was gonna comment on how DaveB missed such an obvious puntitle
No complaints about making short work of these enemies. This is not a manga, after all.
And I appreciate the horrible way of “one opponent ATE all the other competitors, then it over-ate on the competitor who is an eternal explosion; which set the opponent on ire giving the MC the oportunity to slice that opponent to pieces and use those pieces to entangle the final competitor.”
That is indeed ultimate combat, and I would think that the FEL were born from a similar fighting arena.
Except the mountain *isn’t* the final competitor…
I expect that mountain man is about to lose a limb and, given proximity, his family jewels. If mountains have them.
Dang it! Now I’m wondering how two gigantic mountains would employ the family jewels.
Mgnostic, obviously they would “Rock” each others world ;) , and probably a good chunk of the nearby continent…
Somewhere along the way I once encountered the terms “Watsonian” and “Doylist” to discuss explanations from “in canon” and “in the real world” perspectives. More reading in link below, but it basically explains itself (developed to differentiate between good faith fandom discussions, watsonian arguments should only be countered with watsonian replies, etc.).
So, topic: “How is Max able to crush a super arena class fight in like 18+ full-color pages”
Watsonian explanation: “… Max isn’t 14 and didn’t just get her powers. She’s a 20 year vet with them at this point, and all her fights have been against other supers. (And sometimes against foreign military hardware) …”
Doylist explanation: “… this UCBA storyline would take me 8 years to draw if every fight was done shonen jump style.”
Source: https://bemusedlybespectacled.tumblr.com/post/670763180426952705/bemusedlybespectacled-hey-folks-im-gonna
Eat Chicken in its current state kind of reminds me of the energy monster from the OG Johnny Quest.
I’m reminded of the fact that Dabbler was apparently able to fight Max to a standstill. Given some of Max’s more recent feats, I’m now more curious than ever as to what THAT fight looked like…
Fairly sure, a large part of that fight being a draw was because Maxi wasn’t out to kill Dabbles
I’m pretty sure the entire answer is “magic” in how Dabbler stalled that fight out. As the fairy demonstrated, Max has issues with spellcasters, and Dabbler has a ton of experience in combat with people who punch above her physically.
Yes “magic” but also the fact that at that time Max probably had very little to no experience fighting someone like Dabbs: even Sydney was able to surprice attack Max’s boots with vomit when she was fully unprepared for it.
If they had a rematch now it might go very differently, and if Max was given the sword she’s using now it would most certainly do.
Plus Dabbler had just feasted and was full to the brim with tantric energy; and it was hinted that this was Superion-enhanced tantric energy, so she was beyond peak power for the time.
I was going to link back to it (Dabbler and Hoss on fracture station), but I got a weird error and can’t look through the archives currently. I’m guessing they upped the security after the recent hack so rapidly clicking “next” triggered a security alerts.
Found it: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1358-heres-my-gene-code-so-super-me-maybe/
Re-reading that page, my thought was that this means it’s unlikely that the “deserted for centuries massively haunted space station” is something that could happen in this setting.
Oh, well. It’s overused anyway.
I’m guessing you’re referring to page 1356, or thereabouts?
Dabbler’s advantage is an extensive bag of tricks. We saw an example in the fight with Heavenly Sword — she was losing the straight swordfight until she had a rush of brains to the head and stopped letting her ego get in the way and broke out the magic.
I’d just like to take this moment to remind you all that Dabbler is apparently capable of fighting Max to a standstill. Given some of the feats we’ve watch the latter pull off in this tournament, I’m now more curious than ever as to what THAT fight looked like.
Still I kinda feel bad for eat-chicken.
No worse than what we do to actual chickens.
I feel like at this point there’s a real chance of one of Max’s opponents just straight-up surrendering. Maybe the guy she already beat easily and then left alive? Someone’s gonna look at the sheer level of overpowering she represents and go “You know what, I’m losing either way, at least this way I don’t get chopped into tiny pieces in the process.”
Couldn’t she just ribbon cut the mountain with her indestructible sword? What’s good for the goose (chicken?) Is good for the gander.
she could, but the mountain is significantly thicker than Eats-Chicken, so she’d have to spend a while “shaving edges” before she could get her sword all the way through anything to get an actual “cut” – just based on the length of her sword. Detonation cording a leg is faster if it works.
Dave, your commentary sounded downright-nearly apologetic. It’s your comic, dude! You get to pace it and write it and draw it as you feel like doing. Of course we nerds and nerdettes can carp down here in the comment section … because we’re all so creative and ambitious, right?
To me, this sounds like true wisdom.
I…feel that Dave switched up the commenters in one panel. It currently feels like it would be more reasonable to have Bluce respond with “She’s turned it into a noodle!” rather than have Gail be surprised by her own analysis. or flipping them in the previous panel, that almost as well (Bluce feels like he’s more irreverent, and so fits the noodle aside better, in my opinion?)
Should the comment have been “krack-a-toe-off”?
Bluce wouldn’t put money on what comes next…but has Deus put money on it?
That lady on ridiculous level of capabilities.
Once you have master hitting a M-F with a M-F you go on to advanced enemy as weapon techniques… like whatever that is.
@DaveB
If one wanted to volunteer to write code / patches / updates for the website, how would one go about doing so?
is it bad i wanna see max go against someone almost as good as her in the final. like totally “holy shit, this guy might *ACTUALLY* be able to kick my ass….not that she’s broken much sweat in the fights so far.
Don’t forget that Max was ready to send for the medic after her first round. The worst I recall prior to that was a bloody nose fighting Vehemence. She seems to have hit her stride in the semifinal, but a significant challenge would be appropriate for the final. That would be the place to meet a recurring character, be it a villain or a new ally.
She made him into det cord?
Is there a reason you would want to do it shounen style?
I feel like overdramatizing fights is kind of ridiculous – speaking isn’t an action that takes zero time, even thinking isn’t an action that takes zero time, and in super-fights with speedsters you might even consider that a fight could end in less time than it takes to blind.
There is no time for dramatic speeches or life lessons, you come in with what you have and being creative is great but most of the time, the time to be creative is before you enter the arena. Coming up with a new plan outside of some kind of stalemate often takes orders of magnitude more time than you have before utter defeat.
And of course, not every battle should necessarily be life-or-death for the protagonist – because if almost every battle is life or death it means they’ve messed up in picking and preparing their battles. If you are constantly flipping a coin to see if you die, getting lucky 5 times in a row is damn suspicious – you should not expect to get a long career if you keep flipping the “do I die today 10-60% chance” coin every engagement.
If most of your engagements as someone who does them on a regular as part of their career are not stomps, you are doing something very wrong and will not be long in that career.
There’s a section of the commentariat here that wants more fights and less jokes.
There’s another section that wants more jokes and less fighting.
OGH has already said (multiple times) that the comic is supposed to be a humorous slice of superhero life, mostly what happens in between the fights in regular superhero comics.
So I’m not really sure why the first section is complaining. But I guess it’s not hard to do. And the comic is almost 1500 pages long, so the pages where OGH says that can get lost among the other pages.
Huh. Not page relevant, but a potential plot hole I’ve just thought of: the eats-all-magic-sword, specifically called out by the decently-informed announcers as proving that Ixah’s powers aren’t magic-based (presumably because they’d have been eaten)… was stored in a magical pocket dimension? Does it have an off-swich or something?
So Maxima just turned 2 competitors into explosive cord, to use against a third competitor?
Ixah has no mouth and she must eat.
I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but even if the final round took 6 months I’d still be here for it. I love your comic and the comedy and the action equally. Even if some would complain I love every action page and going back and reading them in sequence is lovely. The parking lot super brawl is still one of my favorite segments in the entire comic. =)
Afaic, yours is not an unpopular opinion. Here in the comments opinions tend to be strongly held, but please don’t let that dissuade you from sharing yours. I compare ☢️GrrlPower’s focus on humor to the first live action tv series of “The Tick”. (I think Patrick Warburton was an excellent choice for the lead.) The series’ budget apparently didn’t allow for superheroic action, so I was a tad disappointed, but enjoyed the show nevertheless. This webcomic doesn’t suffer budget limitations, unless it is in terms of Dave B.’s time and patience, so I am grateful that he takes the time to give us action sequences as part of the comic. On the other hand, ☢️GrrlPower wouldn’t be the same without the humor, which is a matter of taste so can be risky to put out there. Dave B. has to have a thick skin or he wouldn’t be doing this. He knows that readers who don’t care for it won’t be back. I’ve dropped other webcomics after reading for a while, for one reason or another. But if I didn’t comment he wouldn’t even know I read it.
So, Oni Fae, what do you think of “Deus Superion”?
Deus is hilarious, and scary competent with just the right about of nerdy silliness. I think he and Sidney could be amazing frenimies if Deus was ever foolish enough to cross the team, though he himself has stated that Maxima and himself my eventually become enemies just because of the way the world doesn’t bow to his vision.
Even in a villain role he’d be hard to hate because he’s smart enough to make the world a better place enough that we the readers could excuse the occasional executing of evil men.
..Also he’s wonderfully smug and I dig smug for the sake of getting a reaction out of others~
Indeed, it would be hard not to be smug if I were as smart as Deus theoretically is!
And the greatest problem with utopian visions is that the visionaries just aren’t smart enough to achieve utopia. So here we have a villain, because the comic presents him that way, whose evil plan involves turning humanity into his minions by giving them a realizeable utopia. No exposition yet on Deus’ plans afterward. It’s such a refreshing difference from the usual smart villain in comic literature.
Nail on he head.
I dont mind at all. I just start from page one, and re-read all the archives, again and again.
Dave, get this published sometime – hint?