Grrl Power

Obviously I skipped over Sydney’s immediate reaction, which could have gone down any number of ways. She didn’t flail and knock an alien in the nose with her elbow or anything. She probably just did the slow turn, then Cora gave her the short version of who she is… and then Sydney sheepishly mentioned that […]

My favorite thing about this page is that we break into this conversation midstream, so you need to realize it took Sydney that much longer to realize the other girl was speaking English. I don’t know what she is. Demoness? Tiefling-adjacent? Whatever. Obviously Gray-gal there suggested Sydney have some more of that supposedly dangerous-to-human spicy […]

“Nursing Sacks” is probably the least flattering thing to call breasts, but they would be pretty weird to an alien species that came from a planet where nothing evolved mammary glands or fed its offspring from its own body. Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who are into that sort of thing. For everyone else, […]

If Sydney interpreted the symbol and chef correctly, “dangerously spicy” could mean most humans fall off the stool and start licking the ground to get the burning to stop, or it could actually mean they almost immediately need medical attention after ingestion. It’s probably not fatal, or it would have the downward red triangle next […]

Actually, Sydney’s wrong. The next stall over is an aromatherapy booth that sells scented candles for races with similar miasmic preferences to races like Neo-Otyugh. Scents include “Stinking Cloud,” “Boiled Durain,” “August Whale Corpse,” “Pickled Skunk Anus,” “Twelve Year Old Boy That Hasn’t Figured Out Deodorant is an Absolute Necessity – Times 1,000,” “Corpse in […]

This is sort of an odd page admittedly, as Sydney sort of “Raiders” it, as in she has no impact on what’s happening. Just wanders by and observes. I wanted to have at least one reverse shot from Sydney’s POV showing Alari soldiers directing people or showing something slightly structured going on, but I wrote […]

Not a ton to say about this page, other than it’s a little weird that it looks like Sydney could just be walking through an alley in New York and not on a pulsar Dyson warpgate station. I mean, you can’t see the sky all the time. Admittedly I’m a little disappointed with my alien […]

This is one of my favorite pages in a while, as if features Sydney at peak Sydney. You have to forgive her for forgetting to lead with English, but she got excited about breaking out her vast repertoire of fictional alien greetings. As a first contact protocol, shotgunning a bunch of different languages probably isn’t […]

Not a whole lot to talk about on this page. Mostly it’s to show Deus and Vale missing Sydney by less than a block. Contrary to popular theories, Deus actually has no idea she’s there. So I spent most of the page throwing in some cameos and practicing backgrounds. I know they don’t look like […]

I’ve been trying to figure out what someone from a relatively low tech civilization could offer as currency to a higher tech one. I’m sure whole papers (or at least blog posts) have been written about this topic, but there’s only a few things I can think of, and some are dependent on the tech […]

This thing looks a lot more like a Stargate than I’d intended. I mean, it’s a circle with some crap attached to it, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Still, I hadn’t finalized the dialog for this page until after I had all the pencils done, so I thought I would preempt the comparisons […]

Sydney has a long road to travel before she starts acting like a wealthy person. Not that any amount of paper money from a world without an intergalactic trade agreement would be worth anything there, but with what Archon pays her, she should probably keep at least a grand on her in cash. I imagine […]

I’ve had the idea of this station in my head for a long time. Now that I’ve drawn it I realize it looks more than a little bit like Apokolips, but the portals on Fracture Station aren’t… well, I’m not sure what the big fire pits are for on Apokolips, but on Fracture Station, they’re […]

When I started to draw the screen with the planet and the diagram of the orbiting probes, I was trying to decide the minimal number of probes that would let you get a clean scan. A tetrahedron (a D4) might work, but you’d need the probes to be really far away from the planet in […]

Psyche! I bet you thought that would be Sydney coming outta that wormhole, didn’t you? Ag. So many double sized pages. Hand. Clawlike… So this is Cora, a character I haven’t drawn for a very long time, probably since before I started the comic. She wasn’t a blue alien the last time. Actually a fair […]

I’m not sure Sydney would be quite thoughtful enough to notice that the first icon in the travel log is glitchy and weird. Well, she’d notice, but ascribing potential life and death significance to the press of a button is probably a step further than her mind might take her on a regular day. That’s […]

On the plus side, Sydney does have her phone on her and it probably has a graphing calculator app. Not a 4 Dimensional Space Calculus one though. If I was Sydney, I would have put that second point into either the shield and topped that out, or immediately put a second point into the warp […]

Hopefully that blue shit from the downed orbital defense platforms isn’t wildly radioactive cause it’s scattered all over that… mountainous plain? I don’t know what I drew there. Someone mentioned it in the comments, but the orbs won’t go into upgrade mode if they’re in use, so she doesn’t have to worry about them flipping […]

Sydney’s speed upgrade was significant. She didn’t go from mach 4 to 5. I’ll leave the actual number for a fun reveal later when she challenges Maxima to a race or something. Okay, it’s mach 16. I didn’t want to wait to tell you. She went from 4 to 16. It’s really fucking fast. Honestly […]

That was a terrible pun, but Sydney would feel worse if she left a potential one-liner hanging. At some point, Sydney’s going to realize how narrowly she’s escaped death and have a real freak out. Right now she’s at peak adrenaline. Not quite ‘I almost just got shot in a bank’ adrenaline, but ‘I narrowly […]

Weirdly, Sydney’s flight orb doesn’t have nearly as much torque as you’d expect considering how fast she can go. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have a ton of juice, but Cyclops’s eyebeam there is used for paralyzing massive starships and stuff like that. Cyclops actually has 5 eyes, but the one big one kind […]

Yeah, I know, it’s only a 3 panel comic, but I hadn’t planned on doing two doubles in a row. I will say page 666 was one of my favorite in a while, but that’s the sort of stuff I always wanted the comic to focus on. But you know, fights happen in superhero comics. […]

I hadn’t planned on cutting away from the battle again, but someone pointed out that page 666 was coming up, and I knew I had to do something featuring Dabbler. (Even though the actual number of the beast is 616 but someone translating something one day decided 666 was punchier and just changed it. It’s […]

Sydney hasn’t really ever stopped to think about it, but her shield probably has some sort of “remain calm and ___ on” feature, because she’s gone from a pretty typical if more aggravating than usual nerd girl who was in no way an adrenaline junkie to having stuff try and kill her a whole bunch […]

I don’t know what Sydney is hoping to accomplish with suggesting that thing is under arrest. I mean it’s obviously just a suggestion. There’s no indication the thing even understand English, and even if it decided to surrender or whatever the next step would be, her whole goal is to beat the hit dice out […]

I wasn’t sure what to have Vale watching there on the screen for a while, I went back and forth between something metal like the club scene from Blade 2 or Hellraiser, but that felt a little predictable. Of course, having her watching a cutesy cartoon is nearly as predictable as it’s a straight reversal […]

These things, whatever Sydney is fighting, apparently don’t fight a lot of enemies that can teleport. Or at least they’ve decided their shield technology is really good against everything but teleportation, and making it work against teleporters would compromise it in other ways that are unacceptable for 98% of their other conflicts. If you follow […]

Yes, in case you were going to ask, somehow, Sydney managed to get her phone out of her pocket one handed and find a recording app without realizing she hadn’t been stabbed. Even subconsciously she commits to her bits. I think “Supervillainique” would be successful as a fashion trend just because women could put on […]

To be fair to whoever made the orbs, this is a pretty unusual situation to account for. I’m not… too sure what else to say about this page. I didn’t plan on having her glasses break, admittedly a detail that’s easy to miss on this page, but now I get to draw broken glasses on […]

A game’s death penalty is a big factor in how people play it. If there’s a significant one, people tend to care more about healing and defense, whether that is damage mitigation with armor, or dodging attacks or blocking and parrying them. Of course some games are set up so that if you can lay […]

Sydney should have known better. There’s no way that dude has just the one attack. If nothing else he could swat at her. She just doesn’t appreciate what she’s up against yet, even though it’s the only thing she’s ever encountered (in the week she’s been a superhero, lol) that’s strained her shield. Yes when […]

Sydney doesn’t actually know that those ships are drones. They might be manned, but even if all the pilots are Super Hitler, she hasn’t made up her mind if she’s okay with being the sort of hero who kills. Okay, if it’s Super Hitler, or even regular Hitler, she’d probably sleep soundly at night after […]

When The Baxter Building gets knocked over, or a SHIELD Helicarrier crashes into a mountain side, or some DC equivalent… uh, the Justice League watchtower crashes to Earth, that would be an insane security risk. Sure, whatever agency deals with that kind of thing will put some guards around it and start salvaging what they […]

Given how powerful those orbs are, the screw ship aliens might actually have good cause to attack Sydney. Imagine them in the hands of someone who was out to actually cause a bunch of mayhem. And presumably had 4 or more hands. For those of you unaware of Sydney’s reference, there was an amazing show […]

It’s easy to take for granted that smart people in comics (and books, tv, etc) are smart because we see them standing in front of a big board of math – usually a clear board, which looks fancy and futuristic but would probably give you a headache trying to not focus through it. >cough< But […]

You know all those diagrams of the Earth and the moon where the moon is about 6 Earth diameters from the Earth? Yeah, those are wrong. As adults we all basically understand this, but the image is hard to get out of our heads. The distance is more like 30 Earth diameters. Mach 4 is […]

My favorite thing about this page is that when confronted with… whatever that is there in the back shooting at Sydney, let’s call it a world eater apocalypse demon god, her reaction is, “Meh, seeya.” That thing is probably used to people either attacking it or fleeing from it, but the no look sayonara is […]

Maxima probably needs to issue a standing order about not being cryptic in the field. She’s intelligent, but in a world of super powers and aliens and all that good stuff, your’re gonna get situations that even the most on-top-of-it commander will need help making sense of. That’s why you have specialists in the first […]

This is the situation good commanders fear the most. Leaving one of your people behind in a different arm of the galaxy. With nearly no training. I mean, Sydney doesn’t even have the number to Archon HQ memorized. She does have her phone charger in her utility belt though, along with a sheet of gold […]

Whoops. That reflexive grab of the shield orb is 99% of the time going to be a good thing, but this time, not so much probably. Now if Sydney had completed her Apex Superheroine in Training training, she’d know exactly what to do. Okay, no, Arc-SWAT doesn’t take into account exo-planetary shenanigans. At least not […]

It seems that despite Sciona’s intelligence and planning, she has to keep pushing off her goals. Well, she’s adaptable and patient. Well, she’s not really patient, but she does what she needs to. Determined. That’s the word she puts on her dating profile. Right after “psychotic…ally goal oriented.” Her hobbies include long walks on the […]

Imagine that red section of Sydney’s shield is actually blinking red, if you will. It would be more visually interesting in the animated version of this story, but I didn’t want to spend page real estate with a bunch of panels trying to illustrate that. Maxima looked at the crater and was like “Okay, that […]

“Hey guys, I have an idea. Instead of building escape pods that can only hold a few people at a time, what about a container that could hold dozens?” “Sounds great. What’s the catch?” “Well, it wouldn’t hold our bodies you understand. Just our spirits. Essence. Whatever you want to call it.” “Uh huh. And […]

Ok, first off, apologies for letting the last one linger for three months. I’ve had this picture ready for a bit, but I felt a little guilty about posting it because it’s not Grrl Power related. It’s another cover mockup where I can practice both my painting and layout skills. But it’s the only other […]

Peggy is mostly kidding about that being a flare. She does work with Supers, and they tend to overdo certain things. Still, blowing up a mountain in lieu of a flare is a little over the top, even for Maxima. Well. Unless she’s positive no one’s living on the mountain. Not even squirrels. She’s only […]

Introducing yourself via giant explosion is just how powerful beings let each other know they’re in the club. It’s like a secret handshake, only everyone within thirty miles can see it. The point is the inhabitants of Sciona’s world were probably more impressed with this sort of thing than Maxima. Could they have made it […]

Considering some of the world bosses she’s taken on, it takes a lot for Dabbler to consider something “legitimately terrifying.” Most of that is due to a lack of information about it – also, the overall presentation of “terrifying alien megabeast” is probably intentional. You know, first impressions and all that. Looking at this page just as […]

I’ve never been good at drawing inorganic stuff. Cars, guns, spaceships – so when I came to this page, I just drew the first thing that came to me. Why the design is best described as a giant, fucked up screw is unclear. (Also if the actual layout of the ship changes slightly from panel […]

Hey that guy seems to know something about the orbs. Let’s hang around and ask him. Or run. Probably run. Whatever that thing is, it’s developed the very opposite of passive scanning. Not just active scanning, oh no, it’s developed “incredibly conspicuous scanning.” And it’s a fair bet those beams make that “vwoo woo woo woo […]

Maxima seems to be channeling Margaret Cho there a bit in that first panel. Just… visually. She’s not making some joke about being overweight and/or Asian. Is there a non-ominous way for something buried in the ashes of your people to start glowing after being trod on? Cause I don’t think there is. I’m not […]