Breakpoint appears courtesy of Avery Leckrone, one of the high roller Patreon supporters. When I asked for some cameo ideas, he handed me a slew of links to his characters. I chose Breakpoint because the team is poorly equipped to handle sonic attacks like this at the moment. As with most of Avery’s characters, she’s normally a hero, so we can assume extenuating circumstances, like this being her mirror universe twin. Also I’m sure her name has nothing to do with Keanu Reeves movies, but seriously sometimes the most difficult part of each page is the title and the little quip at the bottom. But who knows, maybe she’s a fan. Also, I’m not sure her name specifically has anything to do with the fact that she can do sonic blasts, she actually has an interesting mix of powers, but I wanted to get her name on the same page she debuted on.

Breakpoint doesn’t have to shout in order to do her sonic attack, she can just generate it. I had trouble getting my head around that for a few seconds, then realized it’s really no different than Jiggawatt being able to generate lightning or Maxima generating plasma or Cosmic Boom Booms or whatever energy that is. I wasn’t sure if “AAAAAA” was the right sound effect. I considered WUBWUBWUB to slip in a dubstep joke or at least something else throbby sounding but as long as you get “loud noise” from it then I guess it works.

Interestingly I learned from reading Breakpoint’s bio that the loudest sound under 1 Earth atmosphere of pressure is ~194 db. The fact that there might be a limit to the loudness of sound is something I had never thought about, but while you can have a shockwave that is many times louder, a sustainable sound requires the oscillation of a wave, meaning the maximum amplitude of the wave would be from 0 PSI to 2 atmospheres. In other words, 1 atmosphere, plus or minus 1 atmosphere. Apparently someone did the math and that works out to 194 decibels. Which by all accounts is pretty god damned loud, since the decibel scale is logarithmic. (20 db is 10 times louder than 10 db, 30 is 100 times louder than ten, 40 is 1,000 times louder, etc.)

Of course in a medium like water, sound could be much much louder. It’s weird to think that on different alien planets, sound would behave differently. The composition and density of the atmosphere would affect both the speed of sound and how loud sounds could be. Of course if the atmosphere could support human life, the atmosphere couldn’t be too different from Earth, but imagine an alien planet where visiting humans had to wear atmosphere sniffers like that dude from TNG . A concert on that planet might require repeater speakers or something. That would have to be a pretty thin atmosphere, but it’s interesting to think about.