Grrl Power #767 – Maxima effort
If you were wondering why Max hadn’t joined the fray yet, this is it. It’s not like she couldn’t have knocked some heads first, but she wanted to be sure the Interdictor’s shields wouldn’t interrupt her blast. She wasn’t that concerned about it blocking her shot, she was more concerned that if it did, the backblast would be detrimental to her own team and probably all the windows on headquarters.
Somehow I didn’t realize it while I was drawing them, but now I have two sequential pages where someone dials in their energy attack complete with closeups of their face and hands. Normally I draw two pages side by side, then save them as separate files when I’m done, but because this page is a double, they were separate files that I had to flip back and forth between. Still, you’d think I would have noticed.
Okay, so… let’s all politely ignore that tactically… this was terrible move for Maxima. For one thing, she’s lucky that the ship listed before crashing to the ground. I mean, Maxima is crazy strong, she could have shouldered it to the side though if it had started coming straight down, but I’m not sure she could lifted it.
The part of this that makes it especially risky is that while coring out a spaceship is a baller move, there’s a chance she could have hit something… sensitive on the inside. What if she had ruptured an antimatter chamber or hit some kind of… I don’t know, singularity implosion drive? (whatever that is.) She could have turned North America into a black hole or something. So… let’s pretend that she had a brief conversation with Cora about where to aim.
The reason I didn’t get into this stuff in the comic is because the point of the whole Fel attack wasn’t to have a big drawn out fight with a boarding action and all that, it was to prompt Cora’s final line. I actually planned out a longer fight, which I hinted at when the Mushroom Spacecop girl called the ship a supercarrier, but again, I decided to trim the encounter to the essentials.
Okay, so most of you guys know one of my favorite authors is Michael-Scott Earle. Quick update – Amazon banned him over a year ago for reasons they never explained. Basically Kindle Unlimited is deeply exploitable, so instead of fixing anything, Amazon has taken to banning authors whose success doesn’t match their expectations. The short version is, he sued them but it came down to them saying “we’re a monopoly and there’s nothing you can do about it.” So he’s striking out on his own and is going to start running Kickstarters to fund his novels. The good news is that 1) New Tamer and Star Justice! 2) All his previously written books will be available soon at his website, (soon) so if you missed any of them the first time around, then prepare your wallets. You can also sign up for his mailing list there to get heads up on the kickstarters. He’s also super active on his facebook page, so there will be updates there as well.
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Hope there’s nothing behind that spaceship for lightyears to come, otherwise she’ll have broken her own rules and tips on shooting!
Luckily space is incredibly empty. So the chances of an unaimed shot to hit anything are extremely small.
And we all know that chances of 1 in a million work in 9 out of 10 cases.
The odds of Maxima causing unexpected collateral damage can be severely altered by the rule of funny.
As in Schlock Mercenary:
… That said, two years after this test-firing, a ‘dirty-snowball’ cometary body (which had given rise to some slow-growing, anaerobic, single-celled organisms some kilo-millennia earlier) passed in front of the beam and was completely sterilized. …
Maxima really does need to rethink her warning to Sydney about looking behind the target. About 3 lightyears behind maybe?
I don’t believe your stats, Berpol. Everyone knows that 89.2% of statistical claims on webcomic forums are made up on the spot.
:)
That’s a reference to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, specifically Guards! Guards! The guards in question spend a page or two trying to make sure that the chances of hitting their target are exactly one in a million…
I’m a big fan of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Tom Holt. They all have a very similar sense of humor in their writing. :)
Can’t find it now, but I remember watching a YouTube video of a officer making sure 3 soldiers realized that they have to be precise with their aim or the solid ammo space cannon they fire will keep going forever until it gives someone a very bad day…
We never really worried about that back in the Decepticons. Seems like the general theme of the army tho…
Sounds like the ‘Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in deep space’ speech from Mass Effect 2.
That was from Mass Effect. Stellaris references something like that as well – it’s one of the potential events that can happen to your science ship, where a mass driver round from a long ago interstellar war clips it.
If you meant this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tIk-vUtLBs
One of the best ME:2 dialogues I remember. I cracked up.
“If you pull the trigger on this, your are ruining someone’s day, somewhere and sometime!”
Yep, THAT’S the 1. Shoot the 20 kilo slug, it’s gonna hit something & ruin its day. Maybe not right now if you miss, but at some point it will hit something and mess it up big time…
Since Maxima’s is an energy beam rather than a physical projectile, I would imagine it would peter out relatively quickly after she stopped powering it.
The big differences between an energy shot and a matter shot is the speed and inertia. The energy is faster (typically the speed of light or a significant fraction of it) and generally the matter has more inertia it can impart to its target. Turning off an energy weapon is like releasing the trigger on an automatic ballistic weapon: nothing new is coming out, but what is out there is still out there ready to hurt stuff by running into it.
Let’s see if the moon acts as enough of a backstop to the left-overs of Maxima’s energy blast.
It would likely disperse. Even the most focused beam isn’t perfectly parallel, so given enough distance, it will lose its oomph. Plus, the atmosphere will absorb and refract the energy before it leaves the planet. That beam being out the other end, if it terminates in a planet with life, will, at best, be a barely detectable pulse of energy that would get drowned out by background radiation.
Sounds like something from Mass Effect.
Whether an EM signal (particle or wave) internally reflects has to do with its frequency and the angle of incidence. In this case I’m betting the incidence is acute and its going to go straight through. Also the higher you get the atmosphere is thinner and thinner so any spreading would take place lower down, and the beam looks very coherent coming out the far side. Space is really shallow. If it were not for gravity it would take about 2.5 hours to drive there at 60mph/100kmh. Once it is done punching through the rest of that ship, remaining energy is going to go a long way as a slug of light. The only thing that will peturb its continued flight is going to be gravity wells. at that point it would become scattered.
Actually from the way she narrowed that beam. I would hypothesize it to be based more off of particle physics (I.E. Lasers) instead of mass acceleration ( I.E. Rail Gun). Which means that the distance is finite the further it goes the wider the beam spreads. It could actually be just a bright spot light in as little as a light hour.
Most likely a needless concern; she was firing from the surface and her beam duration wasn’t that long. Whatever energy wasn’t absorbed by the enemy ship and subsequent outgassing will most likely scatter in our own atmosphere before it reaches a few miles out. They probably won’t see so much as a flash even from low orbit.
Oh shit, where is the ISS!?
About 250 miles up.
Also probably won’t be anywhere close to where Archon HQ is :) No worries!
http://www.isstracker.com/
The rule of cool says that it is precisely a hundred meters to the southwest of Max’s beam, which clips their weekly solid waste disposal pellet into an atomic cloud of ions-that-used-to-be-poop.
Better question: Does this reflect off the atmosphere?
No. Its much too acute an angle for an internal reflection. There is no giant mirror in space that will reflect This light. As it is, even with terrestrial mirrors, a strong signal will burn the backing off. Since the spaceship was cored there isn’t any thing its not going through besides so stellar body.
Even worse, what if the enemy shields had reflected Max’s beam towards the surface of the planet?
Then the Interdictor’s shields would have bounced it back and who knows from there.
Even if it wasn’t a straight reflection, that energy is going *somewhere* while the shields are holding. They won’t be dumping/radiating it into atmosphere directly (too inefficient), but…
This might be a short one after all.
For a minute there I thought Halo was involved or Max had orbs too…..
Always know what’s behind your target…
Cops arriving in space soon. “HOLY SHIT DODGE DODGE!” Where in the hell did that death beam come from? The Fel don’t even have weapons of that grade? Did this come from that planet? It’s pre-FTL! No way they can…CALL IT IN! Also think the Fel ship is sounding it’s OMEGA beacon…block that signal!”
I think if Earth got their FTL tech from aliens that basically invaded and attacked the planet. The Tech recovered is pure Hors de War.
Lets hope the cosmic cops werent following too close or Max’s shot will core them too
Also a secret new power for Maxima – hair style change for ‘Maxima Effect’. Short crop in panel 2 to wind blown backblast in panel 3.
That’s a ponytail. But still.
The elastic band could not withstand firepower of that magnitude :)
That elastic band is within Maxima’s “field”. It can shrug off tank rounds.
buuuut not Max firepower. Sorry, I haz a dum
I want to know what it did land on. Isn’t there a city around that building? It could be resting on the shield, or caught by a tractor beam. There should always be consequences for this kind of thing.
> Isn’t there a city around that building?
Was.
The city of Townsville
Hokay… Townsville lives about 1,300Km north of Brisbane… Youse blokes need to learn some Strine.
G’day cobbers! Aaahhh, don’t go in the water without full length panty hose, that’ll keep the worst of the Irukanji and Box jellyfish stingers off your skin. And make sure youse have a couple of litres of cheap vinegar handy. Just in case… Did I mention the stonefish? Don’t step on them. But the carnivorous kangaroos did die out with the rest of the megafauna, so not too much to worry ’bout now.
“I am the insurance adjuster for the city of Townsville. I am a very…very….very busy man.”
Parking lot…
With Arianna’s car…
And she WILL SUE!
Cut to a commercial for Farmer’s Insuramce. “Alien warship being shot down over the city, and turning your car into a thin disc of scrap? Yep. We’ve seen that. And we covered it. Here at Farmer’s Insurance, we’ve seen some shit.” (Cue theme song, “We are Farmers! Bum Ba Dum Ba Dum Dum DUM!)
I award you 1 internet for that vivid and spot-on commercial, and another 0.5 internets for your avatar reminding me of my favorite character in that movie.
There is no town nearby. Just the local farmer and his crop of…….. cabbages.
“MY CABBAGES!”
Welcome to Sto Helit.
It landed on the rebuilt restaurant that got wrecked when the team was attacked by the supervillain brigade.
And unless the shot and crash turned all the occupants into pulpy masses, there will be unorganized but very irate Fel pouring out of the ship shortly.
The penultimate panel shows secondary explosions coming from at least 6 (maybe 7) different points of the ship on just the side we can see. The ultimate panel shows a very large explosion out of one side and more explosions on the other side of the ship. It is not unreasonable to assume that much of the interior of the ship has been destroyed, probably killing most of the crew.
We can also see building sized chunks of the ship flying off that could potentially land on nearby building sized buildings. Not a good day to be in the same office park. I definitely would not like to be the company that owned the building in New York right next to where Stark decided to build Avenger’s Tower.
We might not be done yet. Good to see a good battle by the team again.
And now come two fun things.
1) Who gets salvage rights? Archon? US Government? Microsoft?
2) Where there’s one, there’s usually more…
Cora mentioned a galactic police force that should be protecting planets from invaders… Maybe they’d claim salvage rights?
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-755-the-great-gouda-caper/
It’s Max’s prize ship. Perhaps the US will “buy it into the Navy” and pay Max and troops lots and lots of lovely prize money, which they can donate to the Alari Refugees.
That many energy bursts coming from that many places on the ship… it is now a giant paperweight. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find the inside slagged.
Which in no way contradicts what I said.
It is a little difficult to understand what happened here. Even after reading your blog post underneath, it confuses me. It comes down to what is happening in panel 3. So has Maxima somehow telekinetically pulled the power core (or is that some sort of projectile fired from the ship?)out of the Fel ship while Blasting it? Then panel 7 she is putting it back? Panel 8-10 I’m not really sure what is happening either. I guess one of the ship cannons got imploded?
I think that orb is how she’s controlling the scale and width of the beam attack. Kind of like how she can “min-max” her normal abilities, she can manually adjust the beam power.
Seems to me she modified her energy blast from a wide beam to a focused blast, She ‘Operation Yashima’-ed the battleship.
I think that’s the origin of the beam in Maxima’s hand. She’s demonstrated a similar move before on the firing range, only there she threw that power orb to the tank before it exploded.
That speech, especially the third panel, is scarily fitting for the current situation as well. They could take that, add some footage of the destroyed Fel ship, and broadcast it into space as a warning to other wannabe conquerors.
To me it looks like she shot the spacecraft to put a hole in it, changed the shape of the beam
to a long pipe, then manifested a Sphere of Ultimate Ka-Blewie AT THE SAME TIME and shot it
through the pipe .
It certainly looked that way to me.
Think of it like Shin Godzilla’s concentrated atomic breath https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhCFiHMSyAw
I think it’s sort of like the ball of ki you create when doing the Kame Kame Ha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sJgsoEZ-bs
Kame HAME ha.
Nah…is more like the Hadoukou.
Only if referring to the Shin Hadouken super move. Basic hadouken are energy spheres encapsulating a ghostly pair of hands (in most cases), Kame Hame Ha is a beam attack.
Nope. The ki aura that encapsulates is Hadou. Hadoukou is created by using Ki not as a glove but as a projectile. That is at least the explanation in Streetfighter II Victory. A different Streetfighter series or movie may have a different canon explanation.
The thing floating in front of her hand is like an emission point for her beam. It’s coming out of her arm, but I guess that part is like the gas coming out of a flamethrower, you can’t see it until it hits the spark, and then everything lights up. I guess that purple thing is like the spark, but also a lens she can focus the beam through.
I just thought it looked a little cooler that way than just having a mess of energy shooting out of her arm.
Kind of like the Bahumut Summon from FF7: https://youtu.be/LrEjHmBzUK4?t=19
It makes it look like she has a PPO built into her powers.
Like, I now have a vague theory that all the supers’ powers work exactly like Sydney’s orbs, just Sydney’s the one who has physical, modular ones.
that’s probably wrong, but…
Well, Max did get hrt powers from a space coconut, er rock.
You mean from space coconut water. :)
Makes sense to me. Far better to have her project everything forward from her hand and have a bit of an air gap, rather than have skin-to-energy contact and try not to burn off her own hand.
This is a Maxima Combo Move (TM):
1. Fire energy beam
2. Punch home through enemy shields and into ship
3. Convert beam to a hollow cylinder
4. Generate Nega-Sphere (aka the attack she used on the firing range
5. Fire Nega-Sphere through hole in shield into ship.
6. ULTIMATE BOOM
Could be a special quality of fel ships that they don’t violently explode. Gives you a chance to convert more creatures if you have a bunch of ships floating around looking salvageable.
Cora is a missionary for the Church of the Holy Ovaries. She holds regular services every night. All members welcome. ;)
BHAHAHAHAHA! I just had to wipe orange juice off my screen, thanks for making my morning!
Awesome. :D :D :D
(Are you sure you didn’t mean “does” instead of “is a”?)
This is one case where most people wouldn’t mind paying more than lip service?
Cora no longer needs to worry about her ship’s shields holding up to the Fel weapons. Now she needs to worry about her ship’s shields holding up under the weight of all the debris that is about to fall on top of it.
Yeah I kind of saw this coming then again I wasn’t sure if it was going to be Maxima or Halo who took down the ship like that. Now I really want to see Maxima and Halo compare their powers side by side maybe we can have them try demolition on one of Jupiter’s moons.
Destroying space junk.
The trick is to vaporize the stuff so the solar wind blows it away,
otherwise you are just compounding the problem.
There is an Issac Asimov story where humanity builds three robots to explore Jupiter, and to survive Jupiter’s gravity the robots are built so strong that they not only endure it, they are faster and stronger than even the native Jupiterians (it was the 1940s, okay?). This raw strength and durability intimidated the Jupiterians against invading a planet filled with people so much stronger than them. The robots don’t realize until they are leaving for Earth they they failed to mention that they WEREN’T normal everyday earthlings, and humanity had been saved from invasion by a verbal oversight.
Point being, makes me wonder if this is something that may happen to the Fel homeworld, and now they’ll think we can all do that.
I remember that story! :-D Cool story.
However, I worry about extraterrestrial forces making the opposite conclusion from the same observation- that given the power of Earth’s superhumans, they are a resource worth capturing when possible, as per Cora’s comment in the last panel.
“they are a resource worth capturing” It’s already happened, and… happening. Conquering, analyzing, and using earth’s superpower’s was Sciona’s ehvil scheme. She’s already on her 2nd invasion.
I think I know that story. Victory unintentional right? My particular favorite part was when they were trying to while the robots with their force field technology saying it was even greater than the force field in the robot spaceship when the robots told them that their spaceship didn’t have a force field it simply let the air come and go as it went because they didn’t need to worry about breathing. And with the Jupiter people talking about how they were going to go to war and bathe the Earth and stuff like that it was great especially with the robots agreeing that since the Jupiter people wanted War they would have a war down to the final person if need be.
Sydney is gonna throw a hissy fit… so much xp lost…
Halo: [ Flies in with Peggy in her shield. Touches down and drops the shield. ] So, boss, what did we miss?
Peggy: We saw the big boom over at the gun range, but it took us a few minutes to get back here. Um, so that think up there did not do re-entry well.
Dabbler: Nah, they handled atmospheric entry just fine. They didn’t handle Maxima well, is all. Hmm, handling Maxima well…
Halo: Ah, you had a fight and I missed it?! What a rip.
Cora: Well, there still is some straggling foot soldiers to kill, if you are up for it. [ Points to some aliens in a knife fight with Achilles, Reflex and Jiggawatt. ]
This whole page reminds me of ‘Operation Yashima’ in NGE. Helps that the Fel battleship is roughly Ramiel-shaped too.
I’m amazed that Maxima can do that……! Maybe she shouldn’t hold back!?
Alien Overlord: “Did you honestly think you could fool us with those audiovisual records of your so-called heroes? “Superman” lifting a continent, “Captain Marvel” blowing up spaceships? We invented theater millions of years ago! Your insistence that these records document actual historical events on your planet is an insult to our intelligence! Prepare to be invaded!”
Maxima: *smiles*
We have just seen a genuine E.E. “Doc” Smith primary beam in action. Pity really. There won’t be any back-engineering that warp engine.
And now Alien Races from across the Galaxy will come to Earth to kidnap Maxima and steal her eggs to create a Legion of Super-Soldiers
Sydney is desperately trying to get Maxima to say Kamehameha when she uses that move
Everybody is!
Steal Maxima’s eggs? Would be a hazard to try, plus since part of her mutation is caused by a symbiote, so they wouldn’t necessarily get the results they wanted even if successful. Though, now I wonder, is Maxima able to bear children? Probably won’t be explored in this comic, but a variety of possible complications would arise in her current condition, the elasticity of her skin and it’s ability to stretch being the first one I’d be worried about.
So you think her powers make her impregnable?
(What a stupid word! It could mean can or can’t!)
It wouldn’t be a hazard if they went to her house while she was sleeping, used some alien tech to induce a coma and then teleported her to their med-bay where’d they get to her eggs via the vagina, then return her to her bed before daybreak.
As for the Symbiote, the could just scrap off some samples and then replicate it in a lab
She is Barracksed at Arc Swat headquarters.
Hard to sneak in.
Phase technology? :)
“just scrape off some samples”
…good luck with that part.
Talk about a suicide mission. We may or may not be able to tranquilize, move, and perform minor surgery on this entity that is so powerful it can vaporize us all in a second, and may or may not be surrounded by several other similar entities of varying levels and types of powers we aren’t aware of, including possible stealth and stealth detection powers, in a military facility filled with alarms and traps designed to counter as many powers and even magical and supernatural beings.
You’d be better off having transmorphic multi-method impregnation life form try to seduce her so it can bear her children.
-oh high Dabbler, on a mission from the Overlord of the pit are you?
It’d be a lot easier just to get dossiers on the male heroes, find out what they’re into, and send collection teams that blatantly pander to THAT. Sure, you won’t get access to Maxima’s ultimate top-shelf super-genetic material that way, but there’s still going to be a decent ROI.
So basically Alien Sex Bots…
There’s a reason why it’s a cliche.
We have just seen a genuine E.E. “Doc” Smith primary beam in action. Pity really. There will be no back-engineering that warp drive.
The primary beam: Hits so hard that even being “free” doesn’t help; The resistance of the interstellar gas behind you is enough that even inertialess your ship won’t be pushed out of the way before it holes you.
It diverts the entire ship’s power through one ray projector, which fires an incredible beam and then explodes a fraction of a second later. You treat the projectors like expendable munitions, and the biggest engineering challenge is keeping your own ship from being damaged by that explosion.
Originally invented, IIRC, by a Boscone engineer in a surrounded ship. But he never got the chance to transmit the idea back to HQ, the Patrol saw to that. But they did adopt it as a super-weapon themselves.
Yeah, I’m a Doc Smith fan…
I hated, when they did manga of the Lensman series, what they did to Worsel.
They made him humanoid and symmetric!
The PRIMARY character tag of Worsel is that you could never tell how many hands, feet or whatever he might have at any given time.
I replied elsewhere in the thread that someone described it almost the same as the Q-gun with the initial shot and then another shot ‘inside’ of the first one (except it was an energy + energy payload instead of energy + solid explosive ) :)
I wonder how many stat points Maxima put into her energy blast to pull that off.
I am thinking that is an RKA with penetrating and explosive area effect.
No Idea on the points.
Clearly she has a multipower…. I’d start at 300 active before even attempting a calculation…
But many of her skills just aren’t going to work in straight Champions, so you’d have to get creative.
Able to catch a bullet at max speed… possibly could buy that as ranged PD usable on others with appropriate special effects, rather than equivalent dex and movement skills. ranged deflection also possible.
We all want to do that.
Wait, Max was a weird kid for wanting to do that?
…
I might have to re-evaluate my weirdness factor…
Yeah, I thought every kid privately tried to do a kame kame ha after watching Dragonball.
HADOUKOU!
I am more a StreetFighter kinda girl.
The way that the space cops were talking about the Fel Carrier, and given Cora’s initial worry about the Fel attacking, leads me to believe that the Fel are a real badass problem for most of the galaxy. The fact that their ship didn’t last 90 seconds after attacking Earth is bound to raise considerable interest in our little backwater planet.
On the one hand: YAY!!! This fight won’t drag out to next year!!!
On the other hand: I see this as serving as a beacon for Thothogoth (whom it’s been implied has something to do with the origin of Maxima’s powers) drawing his attention to Earth, Maxima, Dabbler and (inevitably) Sydney.
Naturally fun and games will ensue.
The problem is that we don’t know if this was the supercarrier’ the cops were chasing, or ‘just’ a smaller ship it carried…
We didn’t see the ship they pursued…
Thothogoth is already moving on Dabbler, and he has known where she was since he saw her at the press conference where Archon was revealed.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-186-fingers-to-maximum-steepleage/
Top right corner, remember?
Now I do. Thanks. ^_^
But I figure Cora and Dabbler talking about Thothogoth means he/it will be turning up sooner rather than later. Chekhov’s Gun and all that.
It wasn’t implied, Dabbler just saw a similarity, but brushed it off.
Her origin comes from some goo from a geode, so less likely demon after Dabbler and more precursor/prehistoric advanced inhabitants who colonized Earth hundreds of millions of years ago but left since then symbiote armor; or just some natural symbiote of super powered nature that was hanging out inside a geode, or the geode was its egg, ect.. but in the end all other signs show a not demon origin related to Dabbler.
I now suspect Maxima is infused with Nth-level Biotech, like Sydney’s Nth-level orbs.
I don’t remember, but I might have made an off-hand comment some time back on the idea that Maxima and Halo both got ahold of some ancient ultra tech civilization’s weapons. Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if all the supernaturals and supers were also the result of some dimension tech civilization’s stuff and byproducts of that stuff being left behind on and in the Earth.
Uh. guys, not that I want to ruin the fun or anything, but was it really … wise … to pierce through a totally overpowered FTL capable starship ?
I mean any fan of star-trek or star-wars or other things with “star” in it, could probably come up with an example as to why that might be a VERY bad idea. Several examples, in fact.
Such as the ships ( fusion / anti-matter / quantum singularity / Rhydonium ) generators, “Photon-Torpedos”, the “Warp-Core”, plasma and anti-matter conduits or maybe even stuff like Tachyon accelerator.
Those are so dangerous it doesn’t even matter if they leak, radiate or simply blow up.
You SOOS don’t want to risk damaging one of those.
So how to prevent the earth from end up looking like the fruity logo of a certain well known computer manufacturer ?
… did I mention to be an idiot for skimming posts on the matter prior to saying anything myself, but totally overlooking that DaveB himself already had it covered … ?
Dave may have covered it but having done a bit of engineering study myself it doesn’t matter where you hit it if it does enough damage to cause system failures. Most of those drive/energy systems aren’t “creating a environment to cause energy creation” situation but are “Holy Sugar if the containment drops we are all gonna vaporize” situation. Doesn’t matter you missed the core if the loss of systems causes the containment field to collapse.
This exchange got me thinking…
We have a good (informed) guess that Sydney’s orbs constitute a Nth spaceship. What if all the other supers are a side effect of some technology leak from an Nth event which also made the orbs appear on Earth, long time ago?
+1
Yes Cora, we defiantly have something the rest of the universe will want… To keep our supers and their powerful destructive abilities the hell away from the “civilized” parts of the galaxy!
Harmless
EDIT:
Mostly harmless.
EDIT:
Keep the F*** away!
aaaaand there they go placing a F.A.K.K.2 beacon in our orbit :p
Wow, somebody else who saw/read that one… personally i think that one wasn’t as good as the first one though…
ah, but look at these humans! look at their history, they will spread and they will bring their violence with them.
they were able to take down a fel ship in seconds! as soon as they leave their own planet the death toll will be inconceivable. if theres one thing that could unite an entire galaxy to war its a threat as terrible as Humans!
they will want to keep us away and the only guaranteed safe way to do that is to sterilize the solar system!
Trying to hold back…
really…
…
…
…
sorry, I can’t, some spelling mistakes are just too painful.
considering what these aliens do for a living there is probably all sorts of extinction level goodness maxima could have hit there :D
“Maybe this planet does have something the universe will want.”
Where “something” = superhumans, that may mean this comic following Young Justice’s overarching premise (metahumans are unique to Earth, enslaved, trafficked and used as resource by people and organizations both terrestrial and extraterrestrial to nefarious ends).
Also the DC comic’s Invasion crossover series from the late 80’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion!_(DC_Comics)
Said aiming conversation would be a good flashback point. This would also be motivation to get her tank deatomization speech broadcast on the galactic language level.
Awww, was kind of hoping Sydney would be involved
I guess who has more firepower between Sydney and Max is back under question.
It was never in question. It was always Max. She basically Superman, having virtually limitless power.
Vehemence proved the “virtually limitless” thing wrong.
She still has her limit, highup as they may be.
I think that was more of an issue of context. One-on-one Max wipes the floor with Vehmenece.
At any rate, Max has always been, and will most likely be, far more powerful than Halo, or anybody else on the team.
The ONLY reason why Max has a team is because she allows for it (for the “warm-fuzzys, or “camaraderie,” or whatever.) She has no actual need for a team.
There is the rather important practical issue of, no matter how powerful Max is, she is only one person.
She needs a team because she can’t be everywhere at once and is vastly outnumbered by the amount of threats there are in the world.(Some of whom are smart enough to not fight her fair and square.)
And that just proves that ARCSWAT consists of Max and her sidekicks. The only thing that the others are is numbers that exist solely to support her, and to deal with threats that are beneath her notice.
So, what happens if she just decides to pursue a career on her own? A mercenary or “hero for hire” type deal? ARCSWAT can afford to lose any number of other heroes (Halo is supposedly one of the most powerful members, but she was gone for months with no ill effect,) but they can’t afford to lose Maxima.
What happens if Max decides to listen to her ID and go the supervillain route and go after ARCSWAT directly? Her powers, full knowledge of her teammates’ abilities, and experience in combat tactics, would make her unstoppable.
Sydney and Dabbler are the only ones who seem to have any real counter measures, but with her super speed, she could easily dispatch them before they would even know something was up! There is no reason to believe that ARCSWAT has any realistic countermeasures to deal with a Maxima that has gone rogue.
Fact of the matter is, Maxima is ARCSWAT, and everybody else is just kinda there too. And I hate characters like that! It’s also why I despise Superman in relation to JLA. I understand that not all of the characters are going to be at the same power level and that some are going to be more important than others. That’s fine! But to have such a difference in power for one character over everyone else just seems like bad story telling in what is supposed to be an ensemble.
Having one character that so overshadows all the others just isn’t fun to me. I want a team that enhances each other so they can all shine in their own way; not just have everybody exist as support for one character.
“And that just proves that ARCSWAT consists of Max and her sidekicks. The only thing that the others are is numbers that exist solely to support her, and to deal with threats that are beneath her notice.”
‘Just numbers’ is a pretty important thing for an organization. Max simply can’t pick up the slack that 5 other Heroes provide in terms of coverage and variety in power. It’s why ARCSWAT has been so eager to recruit other Supers to fill out the ranks.
And so far, there has been nothing beneath Max’s notice, almost any Super threat has been pretty serious.
“What happens if Max decides to listen to her ID and go the supervillain route and go after ARCSWAT directly?”
As DaveB already admitted: Fighting Max with raw firepower isn’t the way to go. An illusionist would have a better chance of beating her than another big-and-strong type.
And considering that Max is vulnerable to magic, it’s definitely possible to beat her with the right kind of preparation.
“It’s also why I despise Superman in relation to JLA.”
Other members of the Justice League have beaten Superman on numerous occasions and have skills he doesn’t have, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Nobody else noticed the change of hands Maxima is shooting with? Starts with her right, big boom with her left, then back to right again.
shadows makes it really wonky but i *think* panel 3 is still right arm. you can see her chin above her shoulder and the hand looks like a right hand.
Yes, Panel 3 is indeed right-handed. I played a bit with saturation and contrast, there’s no way you can [b]naturally[/b] do that with your left hand.
But yes, the panel as it stands is ever so slightly ambiguous.
So Maxima dialed it up to 7.5? Somehow i don’t think this is 11 for her.
I think Sydney should learn to use the ftl interface and maxima should go shoot the aleri interloper. Also some glancing blows on Sydney’s shield should let her level it up again and let Maxima work out some kinks.
Oh i just remembered…Sydney owes Tailor Guy a present from not biting it when the rock shrapnel got caught in her shield. That might make a @DaveB break comic.
Singularity Drive : Multiple planetary masses held within a stable (barely) gravity matrix. Mass is bled off in a controlled fashion and converted to energy for use. Disrupting the matrix destabilizes the singularity, resulting in the full gravity effect of multiple planetary masses being released just before the singularity collapses into an unstable black hole that goes BOOM. So, not a singularity drive, since Earth is still around.