Grrl Power #494 – Phenomenal cosmic power! Itty bitty… well, she’s short anyway
Krona’s in that weird category where she has quite a bit of power, but it has to be applied. It’s not raw power like Maxima, and for Krona to do anything more than hit snooze on a bladder, she has learn its properties and how to edit them. This implies, at least for her, that the universe operates on more of an object oriented model. It’s far easier to edit an existing property than it is to create things from whole cloth. Making more of something extant falls somewhere in between.
And Pixel sort of raises more questions about the nature of supers than she answers, but at least it explains why she’s pushing seven feet and the extra real estate. Tracts of land wise. Yeah, I think about stuff like that. I didn’t just draw her with big boobs for no reason. There was a reason.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :) Seriously. I dare you.
This page colored by Keith.
Check out Wearing the Cape: Team-Ups & Crossovers. Sydney’s first Crossover! I’ve made a dedicated blog post for it, please comment there.
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Meanwhile, evil doer’s security team is watching on the monitor:
“Should we go out there?” “Nah, this is fun to watch. Let’s wait a bit longer”
“It’s gotta be a trick. Nobody is that Three stooges”….
You’re right, Joe take a few guys and check round back see if this is a distraction.
Steve when this is done I want a copy of the security tape for home entertainment. perhaps I’ll give them out as Christmas gifts to the other henchmen.
Sneaky Max and Dabbler stand behind them and nod in agreement.
Krona has to be hella smart because in order to refactorise the variables of an object, not only do you need to know how to categorise it but also remember take into account its spatial/temporal vectors otherwise the rotation/momentum of the earth will mean your object is now, at least 30 kilometres away from where you wanted to put it. Hopefully the reality interface has settings for self-correction.
It’d be like programming a video game without an engine.
Coordinates and vectors will xyz f your shit to a t.
It wouldn’t be terribly hard to program in macros to account for the normal flow of time variables, and if things are object-oriented she shouldn’t have to worry too much about specific coordinates in space.
Makes you wonder what kinds of designations, focused objects/beings end up with. OMG it’d be like that pokemon handheld scanny whatsit that gives a bit of narration of what such-and-such is all about/can do. Now I’m just wondering whether the gui stole the xerox, point and click, cursor as well.
It’s called a Pokedex.
Just combine the pokedex with the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and you’re golden.
The hitchikers guide already knows everything. You can literally ask it “What is that” while looking at something and it will tell you.
Just establish your frame of reference differently, duh. You’re not revolving right now, the universe is.
Anybody else just realize that we’re 6 years into a FLASHBACK?
As a comparatively new reader, I realised I hadn’t been here for a good deal of the story but I always assumed it was 3 years tops. That’s impressive.
Since the flashback is Sydney’s, I’m willing to bet that half of it is just arbitrary side-recollections that do nothing for her point. It could easily not even conclude as she gets too off the rails to recall where the story had been going.
Not to point out my own ignorance of it or anything, but how is this all a flashback?
Nevermind just went back and read the first few pages again, totally forgot that this is indeed all a flashback of somekind.
Wait, it’s only been six years?
It’s been a regular daily feature for me it felt much longer (was just reminded that had been reading “Simply Sarah” for ten years)
I prefer to think of the first few pages as a flash forward. :)
Does this mean that the art is going to get worse in the future?
We’re in a flashback?
Read the first few pages of the whole series. Though DaveB has now stated that instead of this being a flashBACK, that is a flashFORWARD.
Good. Glad to hear you are thinking.
Contrary to what Donald Trump and his supporters seem to believe, thinking and logic is not a bad thing.
Oh, you’re one of those
Argument: ˈärɡyəmənt A set of reasons or ideas crafted with the aim of persuading others to a point of view, the truth of an idea, or to cause them to think.
Nowhere within your statement is there an argument. What you’ve got there is a meme. It is designed to shut down thought and discussion. They spread, similar to head lice, to people susceptible to them (often when it reinforces their chosen point of view). I don’t accept those when the Republicans or Democrats use them. (As in the case of the whole is mentally ill and evil.) This is designed to shut down discussion from both sides.
You have neither made your case, nor done anything but make yourself look silly. This is not the place for political arguments, and you gain no reputation for anything save failure by presenting a meme in place of thought, particularly one of this sort.
Please go to your room, and think about what you’ve done, and what a failure you have issued with this comment. Please attempt, in the future, to use appropriate venues, and try to actually give some meat to your argument within those venues, some juicy facts, some nice filling evidence, and some thought behind it so they actually work, rather than revealing your own cognitive bias.
In the case of the whole (x opposing side is mentally evil) *sighs* HTML, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways….
So she’s big boobed because she’s a super in this form then?
That does follow, with the established ‘supers take the shape of idealized people’ thing, but then she should also lack body hair, in that case. Clearly, Pixel’s were-form should be a sphynx cat.
I guess she’s an idealized wereperson then.
Dave’s idea of an idealized person/wereperson anyway.
She’s a titty kitty.
Donald Trump was sworn in today:
FECK, FECK FECKETY FECK!
And in another 4 months or so he might actually manage to fill all of the positions which are so desperately needed. So long as his “transition team” and/or his advisory staff don’t keep going through banana republic-like purges every month or so…
Not that I want to get political, but I’m pretty sure he’s already filled almost all the important slots and just needs approval. He already got approval for a few of them within minutes of his inauguration. Say what you will about the guy, but he’s pretty efficient in a business sense on filling positions.
I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t more like a game show :)
And with that, please no one respond to this post with a political argument. I like this comment board because it tends to stick to the comic. :)
No, this is objectively not the case. He has failed to fill the positions related to national security, and his delays in doing so have had the consequence that many of the people he selected are uncleared. Uncleared and unqualified, but that is a different subject.
Trumps incompetence in filling these positions forced the Obama administration to declassify documents so that those people could even read them. Not that they would understand what they were reading in any case.
He has almost 700 positions to fill.
He’s named people for less than three dozen, many of which are grossly unqualified.
Or, maybe, he sees how stupid (and highly disruptive) it is to replace key people simply because of a change of Chairman
He only started requesting people stay in their positions at the very last minute, (i.e. too late to deal with one who have already made other commitments or simply want nothing to do with his administration). These also aren’t simply the positions he gets to name people for, these are the positions he has to name someone even if he wants to keep the same person in the job.
As for knowing not to replace key people: This is the same guy who just a couple weeks ago said that _every_ appointed person at _every_ consulate and embassy should consider themselves fired the instant he takes office.
(You also don’t address the gross under-qualifications of those he has named. At least Rick Perry knows what the Department of Energy does now, unlike when he was calling for it to be abolished.)
Same thing was said about Osama 8 years ago
I understand how upset & freaked out half the country is right now. 8 years ago the other half of the country was freaked out. We thought the world was ending, the country was doomed to become an Eastern Bloc style Communist dictator ship. We were disgusted, worried & afraid. A major magazine proudly said ‘we are all socialist now’.
BUT, 8 years later and we are still here. Yes, there were things passed the we didn’t like, but the country made it through. Now someone is elected that the other half of the country thinks is the doom of all they love. As someone who has lived through this already I can say, you, me, we, will all be here 4-8 years from now with the roles reversed again.
No party hold the Presidency for more than 12 years, 8 years usually.
I understand. It will be alright. We will all be here for President #46.
Well, statistically speaking we won’t all be hear for president number #46. Even if it’s only four years, quite a few people die in that amount of time from all number of things. Over 200 million people die in the course of fours years, though I suspect a only a tiny fractional percentage of that reads this comic.
-bludgeons ‘hear’ in an attempt to replace it with ‘here’-
Only a complete and utter idiot without two brain cells to rub together ever thought that. People who are capable of looking past the bullshit and smoke screens never thought that Obama was born in Kenya, or was a Muslim, or was going to set up concentration camps, or was going to take over parts of Texas in the guise of a military exercise. Or any number of other idiotic conspiracy theories that your “We” blasted out weekly in order to rile up their sheep.
But you know who did buy into this idiocy? Fox viewers, Breitbart readers, and the alt-right.
Congratulations on grouping yourself in together with this basket of idiots and lack-wits.
I am offering an olive branch. It is just 2 posts but maybe it will help. I wish rather than condemning people as idiots and lack-wits people had tried to calm things down.
Have you not seen the people freaking out about Trump. I have seen people in tears screaming “This must be wrong” I have heard people claiming their kids are too scared to sleep at night because of Trump. I have seen people saying they are scared their family or friends are going to be put in concentration camps by Trump.
8 years ago the people going nuts about President Obama were pointed at & laughed at for being dumb conspiracy theorists. Now the same thing is happening to the people going nuts about Trump. After 2 long years of divisive politics I am trying to say lets not repeat the cycle.
I have tried & said my peace, I will say no more about this & post only about the fun comics.
The difference is that the people going nuts about President Obama were conspiracy theorists. Whereas Trump has said he wants to appoint justice who will do away with Roe V. Wade and gay marriage. Trump actually has ties to Russia, on a level that no other President would have gotten away with. All you have to do to influence the POTUS now is make a deal with his companies, since he hasn’t rid himself of his conflicts of interest. He owns properties in other countries that can now be used as leverage against him. His business debt is owned by other countries. The President of the United States’ debt (not country’s debt) is owned by other countries.
Economists will tell you that his policies on Mexico and free trade will cause a recession. Heck, a historian of the Great Depression will tell you what happens when you start pumping up protectionist tariffs. He’s ignoring climate change. He had the Department of the Interior’s twitter accounts shut down, doing stuff like keeping the National Park Service from providing crucial weather updates, because they showed he objectively had a smaller turnout at his inauguration than President Obama.
Whereas the other side just made up stuff about socialism, Kenya, being Muslim, and the idea he’d be weak on terrorists. One dead Osama Bin Laden later…
Guessing you missed that part where Russia formally and publically denounced Trump?
The Department o the Interior should never have had a Twit account in the first place!
Osama was awarded a Nobel Peace price within days of his Inauguration!!!! For what? Being the first half-black POTUS? And how quick were they to drop the ‘half’ part?
To be fair, being the first racially diverse United States President was a pretty big achievement. And just 138 years after blacks were first allowed to vote…well, allowed to vote if they could pass all the crazy southern poll taxes, literacy tests and so on.
Come to think of it, it took us until 1961 to elect a Catholic President too…
Hmm, maybe that was another problem with Hilary among the multitude of others. Women have only been allowed to vote for about 98 years. Guess we will finally get a female president in about 40 more years if take 138 to elect Obama is any indicator.
No, understand the significance, just find it ‘odd’ how much they trumpeted his ‘half-black’ness prior to the election, but then dropped the ‘half’ part as though they only acknowledged and used his ‘half-white’ side to gain the votes, and once got them no longer acknowledged that he was mixed
why is every race that’s not white diverse?
if there’s a group of five people, each of a different non-white race, and then we add a sixth person of a white race to the group, isn’t that group now more diverse than it was before?
Yes, but that is a poor example. Here’s a better one:
When you have a group of 43 white Christian men, adding a 44th who is half black increases diversity. Adding a woman would increase diversity. Adding a Hispanic, or a Mormon, or a Jew would increase diversity.
This is not to say that diversity should be any kind of qualification for inclusion in this group. But that diversity should also not be a point against any person seeking inclusion in that group, also.
Also correct, but this misses the point. The post I was responded to used the phrase “racially diverse United States President”. An individual can’t be diverse.
Now if they had said, “a President that made the total collection of all U.S. Presidents more racially diverse” that would make sense.
Then they’d just need to explain why making things racially diverse is an achievement, and how mixing all races together increases diversity instead of destroying it.
That Nobel was not something that Obama sought. Having some third party, regardless of how prestigious it might be, award you with something out of the blue is not something that anyone with any amount of intellect would lay at Obama’s feet as some kind of flaw of his.
How to describe Obama? How about: “not my president”?
This makes me wonder how many more people would be considered supers if the correct conditions were met. How many people out there have genetic makeups that make it so vampiric vulnerability to sunlight doesn’t effect them, or allows them to selectively choose their were-form each time they change, and they’ll never know it because it’s so conditional to possible but incredibly unlikely situations.
Super-human mana reserves, with no ability to cast spells.
They’d still have idealized forms though.
But only when they’ve been transformed, I would think. Plus, many people may appear idealized without necessarily being supers, to anyone’s knowledge. Imagine a supermodel that has a superpower that will only manifest once turned into a vampire, or some other undead. Maybe they can’t be killed, and haven’t figured it out yet because no one has tried to kill them.
Well I don’t know that mages transform much. Maybe every idealized person in that universe is super at some archaic skill they would never try. Like “Gains unbelievable powers from eating pineapple pizza.” or “Can listen to Nickleback.”
One problem having: readers are assuming that only Supers can have the “Idealised Form”, while it’s true that “All Supers = Idealized Form” they forget that “Idealized Form does not = Super” in other words, just because someone has what could be considered an ‘Idealized Form” does not mean they are a Super
Sure, but this comic goes to extremes. As far as I’m aware there hasn’t been a single fat or even overweight person in the comic except for one customer of the comic book store. Which is probably not tokenism so much as it is a stereotyping of comic book readers.
Why can’t Galt be fat? He’s just a civilian expert in magic, not something that necessarily has to be an active pursuit. Or Leon, or Zephan? It’s fine to say that being a superhero comes with a perfect physique and the ability to eat at McDonalds four meals a day without ever gaining a pound on top of whatever powers are bundled in, but that doesn’t have to apply to vampires, werewhatevers, every alien or fey race we’ve seen an example of, etc.
So given that almost everyone we see has what could be considered to be a physique which qualifies for also being a super, it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of uncertainty about who is what.
Gault has a vested interest in living as long as possible, with very reasonable chances of that being remarably long. Most of the characters we’re seeing are either supernaturally endowed, super-powered, or just in the military, with a few TV personalities and baristas hired for their appearance thrown in for flavor. Leon is hardly a Grecian god, but he may be considered idealized for his demographic, what Doctorow called a type-two sysadmin, over 6 foot with a toast rack chest. Not a healthy body type as considered by most, even if he isn’t fat.
Yes, what Olethros typed
We have only seen a handful of ‘civilians’ in the last four days, mostly reporters and restaurant staff, with a few bank customers, some nuns and one or two sailors (oh wait, sailors are military)
Leon may (or may not) be a Super (look how long it was before we found out about Pixel Panther), but he is Archon, and, while it would not be mandatory for ‘civilian’ staff, do you really believe he wouldn’t use their fitness equipment or the track at least a couple days a week?
Zephan was, or still is, an Adventurer, they don’t tend to turn to flab until they retire into the grave
Hmmm… Perhaps a better term than “idealized” would be “genetically optimized”? Basically you get the body your genes would have given you IF you had led a perfectly healthy lifestyle, including the perfect amount of exercise?
This makes me think that the cells of Supers are metabolizing independent of convention food sources, perhaps via an extradimentional (spatial) or extradimensional (alternate reality) source?
er, conventional food sources, not “convention” food sources. I don’t think you get bodies like those from donuts, mountain dew, red bull and coffee…
No, ‘idealized’ is an acceptable term, the problem for me was the assumption that only Supers can have that sort of body-type, whereas that’s more of the default package for when their Powers kicked in
What personally hoping for, is to have a flashback of a newly introduced Super (sometime after this arc, because a portion of the readers are already getting rabid about the number of new characters in such a short time-frame) showing that, prior to their powers activating, they were a chubby child with possibly the explanation for their change being their new power (possibly literally) burnt half their body mass: either like Johnny Storm or Quicksilver
And then they put it all back on in muscle, if many of the supers we’ve seen are any indication.
Okay the light saber claws is down right sweet, explains the color of her nails then.
wait if superpowers are responsive to form like that then that means super powers are epigeneitc not genetic rin universe right?
Not sure what you said, but it sounds more like that were-ism is a form of Jekyl & Hyde-ism (or maybe, The Hulk is a were-whatever, with Banner the ‘human’ form)
Not necessarily. I’m guessing we’d need a full genome of pixel before & after transformation to be sure. Though in your favour, Sydney has already pointed out the ridiculousness of the “mutant gene” concept.
It works if the power that it gives all of them is ‘Reality Warping’, to various degrees, but they mostly don’t realise that and just settle for the first possibility that comes to mind…
TL;DR: Genetic reality warping is the most believable explanation, but has “issues” (but so do all the competing theories).
Hmm, like the Wild Card virus was hinted (by some authors anyway) to work off conscious/subconscious desires then? It’s the most reasonable explanation I’ve heard yet, but still one gene triggering reality warping powers is the sort of explanation that makes anyone who’s ever studied genetics snicker and point at you behind your back :-) I suspect the official Grrlverse explanation will stay at “we don’t know” for some time (unless required for plot reasons).
It worth pointing out that Max’s powers are strongly suggested to be caused by alien microbes, so powers being an alien infection isn’t beyond the pale (which would make them epigeneitc). But it’s also strongly hinted that supers tend to breed true, which throws the balance back to genetic (or opens the door for theories of Lamarckian evolution, which makes anyone who knows genetics snicker and point at you even more than the mutant gene theory).
Given that all supers bodies are idealised forms of humans (or at least DaveB’s idealised forms of humans), and that there appear to be no useless or detrimental powers could almost tip the balance to some form of intelligent design, which leads us back to either benevolent aliens or a divine force. Too many questions, not enough facts.
Whatever power level she is actually at, Krona is one of, if not the, deadliest supers out there.
Why? Because there are some simple parameters that a small tweak can cause massive effects. Drop blood pH by half a point, double the amount of insulin or add a bunch of carbon monoxide and you have turned a healthy human into a corpse that hasn’t quite stopped breathing yet.
The more I see it the more I think Kronas adjustment Magic wheel is connected to Sydney’s orbs.
So Pixel is a super that violates the no hair except on the head thing.
Sydney violates it as well, but technically she’s not a super, her induction to the field of supers is via equipment, not actually having powers. Well, at least not yet. Who knows what some of those more advanced tree options are…
You know, I just realized that Krona’s control display is the same seven colors as Halo’s orbs?
Coincidence?
I don’t think so…
In fact, she could almost be Sydney’s older sister. Slightly taller, similar hair style, (two pony tails instead of one) similar build, (or lack thereof) and similar interests. Personal clothing styles are even very similar.
Hmmmmm…
Krona could hack her own body and be like Mystique (from X-Men), and she could do just about anything, if given the knowledge…
She could hack her own efficiency at processing data, AND her own capacity for storing and recalling data… which would enhance her ability to quickly and effectively hack reality.
Wait…if she hit the “Snooze” on the bladder… that means… it’s still full, just that Sydney will have an explosive accident in a half hour?
What if she is forced to… uh… water… a villain suddenly while trying to remain stealthy?
Ah, I think I’ve found the origin of the “I have so many questions I just shat my pants” line.
hay we never saw the elf an fairy fight they seemed to disappear during the fight scene
One the one hand, Sydney would be difficult to run predictive text on.
On the other, very easy.
It all depends on what the training data is composed of. If it’s the entire internet, probably a bad model. If it’s the world of media (including obscure SF/fantasy movies and books), it’s a good fit.