This page has two Patreon $50 supporter cameos. U. Kaya Yavuz submitted our speedster, Silent Shadow. Unlike Hex, who we haven’t seen the last of BTW, Silent Shadow is one of Kaya’s characters, repurposed temporarily for this appearance. I’m glad SS is a speedster, cause it’s not something that I had originally included in my supervillain mix. In my opinion, super speed is the single most overpowered superpower besides the obvious ones like reality control or time travel, and it’s a big part of why Maxima rates so high. It’s also why Silent Shadow had to use his first two attacks on people he had no real chance of hurting. Arc-SWAT will take their lumps, but I didn’t want one guy incapacitating half the team within seconds of his debut. Still, in one page he gets introduced, then gets three attacks with one good hit.

The other cameo is down in the bottom left of the page, courtesy of Shana Hills. She volunteered the fact she’s Australian so the first thing I thought of was “Where women glow and men thunder” so naturally she glows and has lighting powers… which isn’t to imply that Shana turns into a boy when you throw hot water on her or anything. Those are just the first superheroey powers that came to mind. She’s not out of the fight yet. It’ll take more than just getting hit with the Easy Bake beam to take out the mighty Glowbug.

Heatwave is one of those characters who is especially vulnerable in a fight. Normally she would wear kevlar or something, but right now she’s just floating and glowing. Yes, she has her heat aura, and that’s bad news for anyone trying to grab her, but it doesn’t do anything against lasers or bullets. Usually in comics, the guy with the heat aura can use it to vaporize anything trying to hit him, but bullets move really fast, and the amount of heat required to vaporize copper jacketed lead in the fraction of a second it’s passing through the foot or so of heat created by the aura just doesn’t sit right with me. I don’t know the math, but I’d guess it’d have to be millions of degrees. That sort of heat would radiate outwards like a nonstop bomb. Even if you say that the aura power contains the radiating heat, then essentially what you’ve set that character up with is a disintegration field. They’d be able to just walk or fly through any surface at up to the speed of a bullet, including a mountain of (copper jacketed) lead like it wasn’t there. So heat/fire powers in my universe can’t do that. It just breaks too much stuff. The best Heatwave can manage is extending her aura out and creating violent turbulence to throw bullets off course. That assumes whoever is shooting at her is on target. If someone is spraying all over the place, the turbulence can actually steer near misses into her. Hence the kevlar.

Oh and Dabbler isn’t summoning another sword in case that’s confusing. She can recall Soulreaver from where ever it is, I just didn’t have the room on this page for a panel showing it disappearing from where it hit the tree.


A-kon is this weekend! I’ll be doing a panel on Friday. Humor-Based Webcomics 1: Humor in Story. In case you can’t make it to the panel, I’ll wander by the Antarctic Press table quite a few times, and it would be cool to have a meetup for lunch or dinner one night with people. I’m not sure how to organize that. Best I can figure is to post updates to Twitter, and here on the page during the con.


My sixth (and final) Gynostar Guest strip is up! This doesn’t wrap up the story arc (which starts here) just my contribution to it. Come see Gynostar be bendy!


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