Maxima is a dirty fighter, no two ways about it. She employs sort of a super version of Krav Maga, basically with the intent to cripple in a single hit. I know there are some continuities which say that Superman knows some crazy Krytonian martial art, but most of what I’ve seen of him comes from Superman:TAS, the Justice League cartoons, and the DC animated movies, and in those it would be generous to even call him a pugilist. He just hits things, and not even very skillfully. It always bugged me that his job is basically just to hit stuff, yet he never seemed to study even basic martial arts. It’s probably a different story depending on what comic you’re reading, but all the animated Superman really made me want to make sure that my top tier super fought very differently. Besides it being sensible to want to take out opponents with brutal efficiency, Max is also wanting to build a reputation, which is if you get into a fight with her, the best possible outcome is an extended hospitalization.

You can see the two in the last panel of this page under the Hump the Barrett word bubble of the parking lot shot on this page.

I think… with this page, all the major players have been introduced, or at least show doing something during the fight. There might be a few more minions left to blow away, but from this point on it’s mostly attrition. Arc-SWAT has done very well so far thanks to a number of factors, training, teamwork, coordination, actually watching each other’s backs, etc. We’ll see if it holds up, especially now that it seems that the remaining antagonists are trying some coordination of their own.

#MakeComics: Speaking of watching each other’s backs, it’s funny how pages and story details can change while creating a page. Basically Jiggawatt is reaaaaly lucky I didn’t have room on this page to draw her barely deflecting the second parking bumper that gets chucked at her in panel 6. I had planned on having half of it catch her in the ribs, not quite taking her out of the fight but effectively immobilizing her. Basically it would have turned her in to a wheezing lightning turret. But I couldn’t get everything I wanted on the page, so I rewrote a few key postcedent (it’s a word) events and I think it’s much better for the change. Since I couldn’t fit the bumper hitting her, I could have either had Breakpoint conveniently forget to throw it (not ideal since I showed her picking it up last page) or I get to show Sydney being a huge boon to the team, not only providing cover as we saw on previous pages, but now actively stuffing enemy attacks.

Oh and props to Charlie Abbott for being the first person to spot that Jiggawatt is wearing Major Kira’s shirt. (Or my close approximation of it – I think there were multiple version of it in wardrobe and the criss-cross changed slightly with each one.) Charlie has already been awarded his No-prize.

Edit: I’ve removed the ads from the page temporarily since some people were getting warnings about bad links appearing on the site. Please let me know if you see any warnings about the page at grrlpowercomic[at]gmail.com, and if you can, send me details or a screenshot of the warning as it might help diagnose the issue. Hopefully it’s just the ads.


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