Grrl Power #86 – OMG It’s… The hell are those?
So here they are. I know after all the buildup the reveal is going to be a letdown to some, but this is what they’ve always been. It’s interesting to finally see them though, even for me – this is basically the first time I’ve ever drawn them. Of course, revealing what they actually do should be fairly amusing, and will happen quickly over the next few pages. Then her meeting the rest of the team, then… arrg, I wish I could draw this thing faster. :P Speaking of which, it’s ridiculous it’s taken this long to get to. 86 pages and a year and a half just to get the tube open? As some of you know, I had Sydney’s powers listed in her bio on the cast page for several months, cause the reveal was always “soon.” Hopefully things will start moving a little faster now, but it’s a balance of getting in those little moments of character development, jokes and keeping the story moving.
This page, being the big reveal, is unfortunately a little short on content and jokes, but we’ll… uh, call that pacing. It would be nice to be able to say I got lots done on the next page since this one didn’t take quite as long to draw, but that didn’t happen. I did get some banners made up that I’ve been meaning to, it occurs to me I should make a page with all that stuff on it in case anyone wants to grab stuff to link back to this page with. That’s another project for the upcoming weeks.
When I drew the tube, I didn’t pay much attention its size, but now looking at the orbs, I’m not sure they would have fit in the thing. There’s 7 of them (hopefully I haven’t forgotten one, hah) and they’re about the size of a tennis or baseball. Each time I draw the tube its size is a bit different though… the version on this page seems especially skinny, but we’ll say they just barely fit.
There were quite a few good ideas bandied about in the comments (lots of really silly ones too of course) but more than one person suggested the tube was full of gaming dice. I really liked that idea. So much so I almost started trying to figure out how I could merge the idea with everything else I had planned – baseball sized dice, one of each kind, etc., but it would have changed things too much. Still, I could easily do a whole other comic around that idea.
Thanks for all the TWC votes guys. Hitting #1 and even holding it for a couple of days isn’t something I thought would ever happen. I thought I’d be at this for years before even getting into the top 100. It’s quite a feat given the sheer number of webcomics out there and the size of their audiences’s. I’m glad you find my daydreams as amusing as I do.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Sydney will need to become an accomplished juggler. :-)
I knew there’d be seven of those whatever-they-ares.
lets see if i can figure out how to work spoiler tag blah blah blah i tell secrets of the universe like that?
nope lets try this haha you cant see me! success!?
yay! now i can ask my question. about Sydney’s powers form the cast page it says two powers are telekinetic pseudopod, and clarisense. i understand telekinetic to mean you can move stuff with your mind but have no clue what psuedopod means is it a restriction on what kind of things she can move? and not sure what clarisense means at all closest i can come up with is clairvoyance. so what are these two powers.
I am not very good at spoiler tags on something like this but a pseudopod, is simular to a tentacle, its a term used for amoeba and simular microbes that extend a part of their body out like a tentacle *but can be retracted into the main body* so its kind of like a pod except still connected to the body which it then uses to engulf rather than wrap up the target object. So basically a telekinetic pseudopod would be kind of like the Insivible woman’s force fields when she extends a portion out from a force bubble to engulf and move another object.
It also means that her reach is limited to the length of pseudopod she can extend, so to have three star telekinesis it must be very strong within its reach. clarisense is like clairvoyance, but includes all the senses, not just sight.
so she can hear smell and taste the future?
(Hopefully I will get this right)
That would be Synesthesia. Clarisense would mean perceiving an area as if you were there without the down sides of being there.
[testing the spoiler block] [spoiler]testing the spoiler block[spoiler] I’m not sure how this works, hang on.
The second spoiler tag should look like this: [/spoiler]
That didn’t look loke it worked…[spoiler testing]
Nope… oh well, my question’ll be answered eventually.
A tube of materia.
But David, the orbs don’t NEED to be small enough to fit in the tube,
perhaps the tube is bigger on the inside, or perhaps
The tube is PART OF THE SET, and thus making the changing shape and size make total sense,
and masking the objects power(s) adding to the explanation on WHY the tube seemed “TOO empty” from the outside.
but then again, I’m just a fan.
The whole Tube Of Mystery, and Orbs Of Wonder. type thing.
The artwork on this one is amazing. I’m used to this comic having great artwork, but the lighting and coloring is REALLY well done – especially panels 2 and 3.
Thanks! I’m tempted to integrate a more dynamic method of coloring like what’s in those panels. As much as I like improving the art I don’t know that I need to add one more layer of complexity when I’m trying to figure out how to speed up. But the orbs will have that soft glow around them, so that will persist in the art at least.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting that. I had my money on some kind of bad-ass, angelic looking, guyver-esk battle armor.
Hmmmm. I scanned quickly, and did not see the question, so I will ask. Sorry if someone did, and I missed it. On the cast page, it says there are 6 powers, and 2 that are unknown. I only see 7 balls. where is lucky number 8?
It only lists 5 powers, plus the two she doesn’t know about. The powers shown down the side are a little misleading, I need to update those.
yeah. you can ignore prior question. I read a comma where there wasn’t one. Oops.
QUICK GET EM! I got the rope, now all we need is a tree :)
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We have all made mistakes on the comment board.
Those spheres remind me alot of the spheres of power from age of wonders the wizards throne one for each of the seven elements . . . only yours look more interesting
A girl with invisible tentacles is a girl after my own heart. HURRAH!
But why is she twitching and moaning so much?! Oh umm yeah ok….
Does anyone else imagine the spheres making the proton pack power up noise from Ghostbusters when Sydney taps them?
Or Shlock Mercinarys’ guns’ “Ominous Humm”
They quite clearly go TNNNNNNNNGGGGGGG. I read that as a kind of crystalline chime sound.
you have a LOT of comments from this page!!!!
Yeah this is by far the most to date. I wasn’t expecting that given that the page itself is a little low on content. I am pleased.
how could you not expect a plethora of comments on the big reveal?
Plus you got a lot of new readers when you hit #1.
Lot’s of people going ” Grrl Power? Is that some kind of Spice Girls comic strip?”
Just joking.
Realy they were curious and saw that it had great artwork and a hilarious storyline.
So great work DaveB and keep up the good work.
Suddenly I’m wondering why Sydney is about 10-20 lbs heavy for her size when compared to the height and weight of the other characters?
Do the orbs have weight and is that weight somehow transferred or linked to Sydney’s own?
Or has Sydney become slightly denser as a result of the orbs for some as yet unknown reason?
Or are the orbs gravitationally locked (tethered) to Sydney and therefore increase her gravitational connection to the earth, thus creating the slight weight increase?
Or has this question already been asked and answered?
I think she’s just very muscular for her size; there isn’t much of her, but what there is is all lean meat, therefore dense.
It’s because I’m terrible at estimating weight. Also Syd was supposed to be a little overweight but I wasn’t happy with the art when I tried to draw her like that. I should go fix that.
On the other hand, her bone and muscle density may simply be unusually high, making her actually a little tougher to break the bones of, and give her problems with swimming. (I have high bone density, and despite my body fat, I still have a very difficult time remaining on the surface of the water. My legs drag me down. It doesn’t help that according to the clinical charts, I qualify as ‘big boned’, as in the dimensions of my skeleton, with those bones being of high density.)
I had a cat like that growing up. Looked like a regular black cat, only when you picked it up and realized it was 25 Lbs. of muscle.
That cat ran the neiborhood. Every dog on the street was terified of that cat.
same here, turned out the bugger was a poly-dactyl half bobcat, 30lb of muscle, extra claws and fangs when mad.
We had a female cat like that once. She used to bring home woodpeckers and snakes. Some poor Basset hound dared to sniff around her turf and you never heard such howling as he ran away.
Mine was laying down in the front yard, when a german shephard walked by. You could read the dogs mind ( HeHe I’ll scare that stupid cat over there!)
So the dog started barking at the cat. The cat looked at the dog dismisivly and started cleaning itself.
That dog had the most affronted look on it’s face. It then charged at the cat.
The cat waited untill the dog was two feet away and then proceded to tear rhat dogs nose up!
German shepherd turned tail yhipping all the way and the cat chased after him and gave it’s ball sack a scratch. What a wail that dog let out!
Well any time that dog went by our yard it did on the other side of the street in the ditch.
Had a black car that did stuff like, this, but he went about it the old fashioned way: Floated between 20 and 25 lbs and was fairly large (3″ wide skull if I remember right). Seen him fight off two cats at once, sit in a neighbors driveway cleaning himself as three other cats circled him. And have heard, and seen him chasing raccoons out of our yard.
The page before this completely makes up for the somewhat but not total letdown of the tube opening.
I look forward to seeing what exactly Sydney’s little friends are capable of.
Now it’s time for a flashback within a flashback on how she found the orbs after winning an auction on an episode of Storage Wars :)
What, they didn’t fall on her head, one by one, when she was trying to get a waffle iron off of a high shelf in her Grandma’s house?
oh yeah i forgot that this is all flash back!
New favorite webcomic. Thanks!
Thank you. I mean… you’re welcome?
I still think her swearing should qualify as an additional super power.
Seconded
thirded.
can make a sailor blush
And Nuns faint!
Actualy, the nun’s didn’t faint. I think one of them was taking mental notes for later.
Yeah the funny part was Sydney’s reaction. But I wasn’t really referring to the comic, more a reference to how tough Nuns usually are. Ask anyone who has dealt with them.
To be perfectly fair, I feel that Maxima’s face in the last panel is joke enough here, haha. And these are by far more intriguing than what I originally expected from the tube.
come on magic the gathering
Navi has been whoring it up.
So that is where Tootles left his marbles.
There needs to be a like button just for that comment.
i hope people dont say this is a spoiler but. a very long time ago Sydney said something in passing in her head or to herself i think that said something about finding them on a “dig” most likely as a student asst. to a professor on a digging opperation. which would mean there might be at leaste one other person who knows how and where she got the “kids” (orbs) cause from my point of view they sulked in the tube till she touched one.. and then it was like MAMA!!!
hey how Do I get the website to stop e-mailing me updates for the comments on this page?
There’s a crazy number of comments aren’t there? I thought the emails that went out had a link where you can unsubscribe, but I removed your email for this page in the back end.
Magic marbles. Simply awesome.
Ooooh look. Bleeep Ferret Balls!
Sorry to chime in late, love the page, and “they” look awesome. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
Hello, first time doing a review in your fantastic story. I just love it.
Strange thing is i am bit like Sidney as i am a RPG game master/player who love to improvise on existing guidelines & limitations in gameplay.
I just reread the Cast powers about Halo.
Strange thing is that no one has commented on how the marbles look like the Infinity Gems from the Infinity Gauntlet of the Marvel character Thanos.
In fact, we could guess that Sidney understanding of her marbles is incomplete and that her powers only reflect her current knowledge and experience with them.
One explanation about the lack of signature from the marbles is that they are cosmic power sources. The various scans failed because the sources are beyond their measuring scales.
Another advantages of the marbles is their innocent appearance. Who would guess that a glass marbles is able to throw a level 3 energy blast.
I think someone mentions the Infinity gems about 2 comment pages back. ;)
I actually want to read the power reveals as they happen in comic, so I tried to skip the spoilers. I did catch that Sydney doesn’t know what 2 of ’em do.
Which I mention because, well, I was trying to figure out how they all fit in the tube. And it is definitely gonna take some powerish ability, because I did a simple copy paste with the pink orb and six of them overfilled the tube…
First of all I discard the notion that the tube is in any way abnormal – she is Halo, not “The Tube”.
There is foam packing in the tube to stop clinking (and they stay in the tube), so the orbs are physical, not energy.
Now, the first time we get a halfway decent look at the tube on page four and another time at the Chapter two splash, the tube is just about the same size as it seems now. So the orbs size-changing the tube is unlikely.
That leaves a myriad of possibilities, but I think the most likely is that the orbs become smaller when “asleep”. Until they fit.
Possibly a few don’t power down, or there are some inherent properties to them even when asleep, thus Maxima’s pratfall and the Jedi Yoink as well as the absence of contents when scanned (that last makes me think one of the orbs can grant undetectability to Sydney. I’ll be curious to see if that shows up in the demos to come.)
Looking forward to the future. :)
‘spose the reverse Yoink that caught Sydney should also be mentioned in tube effects…
Also, I totally forgot to mention that this page is boss! Gotta run to the kitchen and get my whisk, ’cause these orbs are way cool indeed!
Gotta admit i was expecting a gold idol or some sort of ancient relic, but this is epic nonetheless
You could just say that it is a “Tube of Holding”
Hey DaveB, Dont change your characters. My boyfriend’s a biker and thinks comics are stupid, and yet yours is the only one he’ll stop and ask me whats going to happen next. The character that caught his eye was Syd. Since he saw it I cant get him to leave me alone about it. He keeps asking whats going to happen next. You know your doing something right when a man that wont even watch the marvel or dc movie, because they were a comic, means you have something special.
Also, this needs to be a cartoon series!
Testing spoiler tag…
no spoilers here
Yay! It works!
Got to say, enjoy the floating balls of questionableness. Finding out the specifics about how they work is going to be fun, I feel, especially when she’s actually gets integrated into the team. I look forward to her using her mad comic skills to school (and horribly confuse) any and all super villains.
… To say nothing of the rest of her team.
It looks like you have a firm hold on 6th place for Top Web Comics,Thats very impressive for such a young web comic.
You should be proud of yourself for doing such an incredible job.
I am a little surprised and a lot pleased.
Awwww…they’re baby Elementals! Lined up around Mama like ducklings!
Now that would be a really cute origin story; she stumbled upon a nest of hyperdimensional beings and the younglings just now formed saw her as their first sight and have been following her around like ducklings; which have tethered themselves to her (like children on a harness, only “momma” can’t take it off LoL)
I am so stoked to see her use them.
Are those elemental crystals? Does that mean she’s an alchemist? That would be an interesting set of powers for a nerdy spaz like her.
Come on guys let’s get this comment thread to five hundred relevant posts… :P
BALLS TO THE WALLS! (had to say that…just did…sowwy?) :>