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…
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.
“ Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?”
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.
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?