Grrl Power #472 – Bring a spike to a sword fight

If martians busted in and started ray blasting everyone, they might not wait for Irradon to give permission to retaliate, but sapient animates, i.e. the intelligent swords, the chatty mirrors, even the castle full of servants who got changed into boudoirs and clocks and candlesticks, haven't always been treated as well as they could have. There's definitely an anthropomorphic bias as well as an organic one, at least among organic anthropomorphic beings, which is probably unsurprising.

Still, a bunch of artificial ass holes shooting explosive silver crap around the room are probably going to get their butts rocked with or without Icon's blessing.

I've commented before that people with artificial limbs in comics get a lot of abuse. It's like swords and bullets are attracted to them. If your entire body was expendable you'd probably fight a lot differently that those fragile meat tubes who care about having all of themselves attached to all of the rest of themselves at the end of the day. Not that Dabbler hasn't fought her share of space robots and zombies and what not, but after getting told to knock it off with the lethal attacks since teaming up with Arc-SWAT, she may need a moment to reconfigure her macro bar.

Given the diversity of her abilities, she really needs a macro bar macro bar. She's definitely not one of those lame FPS heroes who can only carry 2 guns and a sidearm. Actually I've thought about how to put Dabbler in a video game since she seems like she'd be well suited for a 1st or 3rd person shooter. I think the best option would be the weapon wheel. You know, hold down the reload button to see a list of weapons, use the thumbstick to select one (or your mouse, if you're civilized) then release. It's a good way to compress a menu of things when you have a limited number of buttons. I figure Dabbler could have one for her guns, one for her attack spells, one for her defense and healing stuff, etc. Of course the real challenge in making a video game with her would be resisting the temptation to load her down with a ton of abilities that don't offer distinct function. If she has a rocket launcher, does she need a fireball spell? Well, maybe if the fireball can be charged by holding down the button for a longer DoT or bigger AoE and the rockets can home on on where you're pointing the cursor, otherwise you've just made a rocket launcher with two different particle effects and more crap for the player to keep track of.

So if you missed it on the previous page, I co-wrote a chapter of Marion G. Harmon's new volume of Wearing the Cape, subtitled "Team-Ups & Crossovers." Guess who Astra (the WtC protagonist) crosses over with? :D It's just one section of the book, but this is a canon story for Sydney and co. Here's a like to the kindle version. The paperback will be available in the coming weeks.

I've made a dedicated blog post for the book, in case anyone would like to comment on it in one place instead of across multiple comic posts, cause I imagine I'll mention it a few more times. :)

This page colored by Keith.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon, as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

Here's the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.